'Victor Gregg is the most remarkable spokesman for the war generation'
Dan Snow
In Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut fictionalised his time as a
prisoner of war in Dresden in 1945. Vonnegut was imprisoned in a cellar
while the firestorm raged through the city, wiping out generations of
innocent lives. Victor Gregg remained above ground throughout the
firebombing. This is his true eyewitness account of that week in
February 1945.
Already a seasoned soldier with the Rifle Brigade, Gregg joined the 10th
Parachute Regiment in 1944. He was captured at Arnhem where he
volunteered to be sent to a work camp rather than become another
faceless number in the huge POW camps. With two failed escape attempts
under his belt, Gregg was eventually caught sabotaging a factory and
sent to Dresden for execution.
Before Gregg could be executed, the British Royal Air Force and the
United States Army Air Forces dropped more than 3,900 tons of
high-explosive bombs and incendiary devices on Dresden in four air raids
over two days in February 1945. The resulting firestorm destroyed six
square miles of the city centre. 25,000 people, mostly civilians, were
estimated to have been killed. Post-war discussion of whether or not the
attacks were justified has led to the bombing becoming one of the moral
questions of the Second World War.
In Gregg's first-hand narrative, personal and punchy, he describes the
trauma and carnage of the Dresden bombing. After the raid, he spent five
days helping to recover a city of innocent civilians, thousands of whom
had died in the fire storm, trapped underground in human ovens. As order
was restored, his life was once more in danger and he escaped to the
east, spending the last weeks of the war with the Russians.