Second World War veteran, 100, finally beats his demons after surviving RAF firebombing of Dresden that killed 1000s – The Sun

FOR nearly 75 years he felt crushing guilt. But this year, aged 100, World War Two veteran Victor Gregg has finally beaten his demons.

The British soldier was a prisoner of war in Dresden, Germany, when our RAF and the US Air Force firebombed it, killing thousands of civilians.

He survived the war and returned home. Yet all his life he felt tormented by how the British had devastated the historic city in February 1945.

Recently, though, he returned and met a now 79-year-old German woman who had survived the Allies’ raid — and his nightmare ended.

Victor says: “Dresden convinced me I was a murderer and it drove me berserk. I could hear the screams of the people who jumped into tanks of water to get away from the heat and were boiled alive.

“When you hear people screaming and cannot get near them because it is too hot, that turns you into a psychopath.”

It was last year that historian Dan Snow took Victor back to Germany to meet former resident Irene Uhlendorf — whose parents died in the Allies’ onslaught — as part of his online TV channel History Hit.

Irene, who now lives in Dusseldorf, was just four when the Allies unleashed 3,900 tons of bombs and incendiaries on her city. Phosphorous burned one of her legs so badly it had to be amputated.

But Victor says: “When we met, she held my hand and was crying her eyes out.

“She would not let me go, and in that moment I felt I had been forgiven.

“She made me feel it wasn’t my fault and I felt entirely different after that.

“For nearly 75 years I’d carried trauma of guilt by association.

“I never blamed the airmen who dropped the bombs, I blamed the people who ordered it, because the bombing didn’t finish with Dresden. They bombed more cities.

‘Hosed down with human excrement from latrines’

“Many of the rear gunners in Bomber Command suffered mental problems because they were sent on raids, night after night, and their nerves were shredded.”

Victor is one of the few World War Two veterans to talk openly about soldiers’ mental troubles after they were demobbed.

When he turned 80, he put pen to paper and wrote the story of his life as an infantryman on the frontline of the conflict.

His powerful book, Rifleman, has just been republished to mark the 75th anniversary this year of the end of the war in Europe.

To escape from grinding poverty in London, Victor joined the Rifle Brigade at age 18, before war broke out in 1939.

He served in India and Palestine then was sent to Cairo, Egypt, to fight against German general Rommel’s Afrika Corps.

The dad of three says: “However much we fired into them, still they came, climbing over the corpses of comrades. We were blowing their heads off. None of us enjoyed it.

“The Battle of Beda Fomm (in Libya) in 1941 was our first experience of hand-to-hand fighting, killing fellow human beings while looking into their eyes.

“If all of a sudden a bit of shrapnel goes across your mate’s gut and it all spills out and you are trying to push it back, that stays with you the rest of your life.”

Victor, of Swanmore, Hants, fought in Italy with a newly formed airborne unit, 10 Parachute Regiment, which in September 1944 was sent to the ill-fated Battle of Arnhem in Holland.

He says: “From the plane you could see the heath below was alight.

“We landed on the dead bodies of the lads who had jumped before us. Out of the 450 who jumped, a third didn’t make it off the Drop Zone.

“By the end of the second day only 80 of us got away with it. All the rest were dead.”

The Paras held out heroically but, after running out of ammunition and food, Victor and the two other members of his Vickers machine-gun crew were captured by a group of Germans — who he said “amused themselves by prodding us with their bayonets”.

The Germans then kept their prisoners in order by hosing them down with human excrement from the latrines.

With her husband missing in action, presumed dead, Victor’s young wife Freda was so terrified as Hitler’s V2 jet-propelled bombs fell on London, she went into premature labour.

He says: “Our son Alan was born nearly three months early and I was told he was the size of a milk bottle.”

By then Victor had been sent to a prisoner of war camp near Dresden and set to work in a soap factory.

He and Paras pal Harry sabotaged machinery, causing an electrical blast that destroyed the building.

For that they were taken by the Gestapo to a prison in Dresden and sentenced to death.

Victor says: “There was me and Harry in front of this German, in black uniform, and he tells us we are going to be shot the next morning. I thought, ‘How will we get out of this?’.

“But Harry, being a Yorkshireman, was laughing and shouting, ‘You Germany git!’ I was trying to kick Harry and tell him to shut up but he kept telling me, ‘Don’t worry, something will turn up’.”

When Victor met Irene last year, she told him how on Saturday mornings the Gestapo executed prisoners by firing squad in front of crowds in the square outside the prison.

The night before they were due to be shot, Victor and Harry were locked in a circular, glass-roofed building along with 250 men condemned to death for crimes against the Nazi state.

‘Wife suffered as my mind reverted to the frontline’

The next morning, the RAF attack began. Through the glass roof, Victor spotted dozens of planes, and the inmates began wailing.

He says: “I had to shut my ears to the demented noise.

“Then it all kicked off, like the sound of hundreds of Tube trains rushing through a tunnel.

“Two incendiaries burst through the roof and large blobs of burning sulphur were coming down on the prisoners. We were crouched down and the wall opposite flew inwards.

“I had the sensation of being picked up bodily, as if by some giant, invisible hand.

“I was half-buried under masonry and shouted for Harry. No answer. When I found him, he was not of this world any more.”

Victor scrambled over rubble and, for five days in the searing heat of 100ft flames, worked with Germans to find survivors.

In one collapsed tunnel they found four women and two children still alive.

He says: “We cheered ourselves hoarse. There were no enemies, there was no hatred, just fulfilment. But sadly, this was a solitary event. Many of the corpses were so brittle they crumbled into clouds of ash and dried flesh.”

Haunted by the horrors he had seen, Victor escaped, made his way to the British lines and was finally demobbed.

He says: “There was no glory, no thanks. Yes, I had a few medals, but I realised all the human endeavour that had gone into the last six years didn’t mean a thing to the powers that be.”

Unable to escape the horror of war, Victor worked as a painter, took up cycling and rode for hundreds of miles to wear himself out so he could sleep without flashbacks.

But he says: “It made me anti-social. The good side of you wants to live a life of peace, wants your kids around you, the other half just wants to go around wreaking vengeance. One side doesn’t recognise the other.

“My first wife, Freda, had to suffer as my mind reverted to the frontline and I lived as though still dominated by the brutality.

“Our marriage died because of my inability to control my actions, caused by my lack of compassion and responsibility and being incapable of seeing the world from anybody’s side but my own.

"The cup of hate was full and spilled over on the ones I loved, I hurt them all.

“There must have been any number of similar casualties among the men in frontline units — and it is no different for soldiers today.”

After the collapse of his first marriage, he drove London buses then got married again, to Bett, who died recently.

Victor says: “It was due to Bett’s love that I eventually returned to sanity and became a responsible, caring man.”

• Rifleman, by Victor Gregg, with Rick Stroud, is published by Bloomsbury, price £9.99.

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