Victor Gregg - Soldier, Spy: A Survivors Tale

SOLDIER, SPY

SOLDIER, SPY

A Survivors Tale

Victor Gregg

with

Rick Stroud

This book is dedicated to the readers who have thanked me for writing about the world as it really is.

CONTENTS

I met Vic Gregg nearly six years ago, just before his ninetieth birthday. Vic spent eight years of his life as a soldier and one of the many battlefields that he fought on was Alamein in North Africa. The purpose of that first visit was to ask him about the details of a soldiers life in the desert. I stayed far longer than intended and we talked for most of the day. Vics wife, Bett, kindly made us endless cups of tea and plates of sandwiches. When we had finished I got ready to leave and, as an afterthought, Vic gave me a manuscript he had written for his grandchildren twenty years or so before it was the story of his life. I showed it to my editor at Bloomsbury, Bill Swainson, who, after he had read it, agreed to take it on, and suggested that Vic and I collaborate to get the book ready for press.

A year later it was published as Rifleman: A Front Line Life. The book is mainly about Vics time in the army, first in the Rifle Brigade and then as a member of the Parachute Regiment. One of the most vivid and harrowing parts of the story is Vics description of the horrors he saw as a prisoner of war trapped in Dresden during the infamous bombing raid. Vic survived and when the planes flew home he spent the next five days helping to clear the thousands of burnt corpses of people who had been trapped in cellars and air raid shelters. Some of the bodies were unrecognisable as human beings. On the sixth day Vic escaped and eventually found his way back to England. Victor Greggs time in Dresden was to resonate through his life and later his writing.

Rifleman was a success and with Bloomsburys encouragement Vic went on to write in detail about his early life: a childhood spent growing up in the slums around Kings Cross, London, and teenage years knocking about Soho. This next volume appeared as Kings Cross Kid.

Bill then suggested that Vic write about his post-war life, which included undercover work for the Russians and working as a spy for British Intelligence, adventures that took him behind the Iron Curtain where he played a part in the fall of the Berlin Wall. Vic set to with gusto and the result is this book, Soldier, Spy. What started off as a story for Vics grandchildren has ended up as a trilogy documenting some of the most momentous events of the twentieth century written from the point of view of a working man who played an important part in them.

Writing the three volumes has not been an easy ride for Vic and has sometimes been very painful. In the war he lost many close friends to the fighting. The Dresden experience left him with deep psychological scars, the mental damage that today we call Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome. Vic does not flinch from describing the man he became and the suffering he inflicted on his family. In a letter to me he wrote:

There were times during the writing that I had to face up to the fact of my inexplicable lack of conscience, my sudden spasms of inexcusable brutality to others and on the other hand my yearningfor the love and understanding of my family... During the last six years I have attempted to analyse the two lives I have lived. I cant accept that I could have been so cruel to those I loved and yet I have been... I have arrived at the conclusion that I must somehow have lived the life of two people, each totally different from the other and for some reason unable to recognise each other... What concerns me is why the better side of me failed to call a halt to the darker side.

The last five years have taken Vic on an intellectual and creative adventure that would have astonished his fourteen-year-old self, just out of school and starting to earn a living doing odd jobs on the criminal fringes of Soho society. That young boy met people that his older self described as:

The arty-crafties, the weirdy-beardies, the folksy-wolksies and every political creed under the sun... all earnestly discussing ways and means of putting the world to rights. [Soho, Bloomsbury, Kings Cross and Fitzrovia were the places] where I learned the art of growing up.

Now, seventy-five years later, Vic has become a writer and mixes with the arty-crafties and the weirdy-beardies of the publishing and media worlds. It has been my great privilege to accompany Vic on this part of his journey and as we came to the end of our work together he wrote to me saying:

Thanks to yourself and the people who have been involved at Bloomsbury I have been able to unburden myself from the ghosts that have haunted me for the last sixty years and for that I thank you all.

As Vics collaborator I know I speak for everyone who has worked with him when I say that this episode in the odyssey of Vics life, and our work to bring his trilogy into the world, has been a fascinating experience, a very great pleasure and a real honour.

Rick Stroud

The London Library, June 2015

A Memory of Alamein

I remember one day during the Battle of Alamein when my friend Frankie Batt, a man I had enlisted with way back in 1937, was blown to pieces. I recall trying in vain to put the bits together, to somehow bring Frankie back to life. As I picked up what was left of him I could feel the hate burning inside me. Accounts would have to be settled. For the next three or four weeks our section of three carriers never brought a single prisoner back to the lines, despite the fact that the battle was nearly over and the enemy were coming forward in their hundreds with their arms raised in surrender. So long as no officer or senior non-comm. was witness we shot as many as we could until our anger died its own death.

Friends and well-wishers have told me over the years that I have nothing to feel guilty about and that me and my mates were only doing our duty. Even now, all these years later, Im not so sure.

I fought in the Second World War from its start in 1939 to its fiery ending in May 1945 when I emerged from the ruins of the beautiful city of Dresden with my mind and body scarred. I witnessed things that I had not thought possible and my brain was filled with images of suffering that were to haunt me for the next forty years.

But for now the fighting was all over and the final gift from a grateful country was a civilian suit, a train ticket home and, if I remember correctly, about 100 of back-service pay.

Today we are called heroes but back then we got the impression that we returning servicemen were a necessary evil. For six years I had lived in a world where killing was both taught and encouraged. In this new post-war world it seemed to me that even a frown could get me in front of a magistrate on a charge of disturbing the peace.

I had started out like all my comrades, soldiers, sailors and airmen, with a laugh and a song and finished up a prisoner of war in the ashes and rubble of Dresden, surrounded by pyres of burnt bodies. The events of the night of 13 February 1945 and the days that followed changed me more than anything that I had seen in all of the rest of the war. I thought that the people who were in charge, the masterminds behind the fire-bombing of the city, were tarred with the same evil brush as the enemy.

From that time onwards I felt I had to oppose authority whenever and wherever it raised its head. It was only after many years that I realised my anger had caused heartache and misery to those I loved while the forces that I struggled against carried on unrepentant and uncaring of the consequences. At least that is what I have come to think.