Dresden Survivor: Remembering Victor Gregg

Dan Snow's History Hit

History Hit

History

4.7 • 12.9K Ratings

🗓️ 17 October 2021

⏱️ 24 minutes

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Summary

On 12 October 2021 World War Two veteran Victor Gregg passed away peacefully in his sleep just before his 102 birthday. He was part of a unique generation that with the passing of the years is sadly disappearing all too fast. Victor joined the army in 1937 and served and India and Palestine before the war. During the Second World War, he fought in the Western Desert before joining the Parachute Regiment. He was taken prisoner as the Allies retreated during the Battle of Arnhem, and was taken as a POW to Dresden, where he was alive during the Dresden firebombing. In this episode, we pay tribute to him by replaying the last interview at the time of his 100th birthday. He spoke to Dan about what he learned over his extraordinary life, his wartime experiences, and the profound impact they had upon how he saw the world.

You can also watch Out of the Inferno: Surviving Dresden, where on the 73rd anniversary of the firebombing of Dresden, Dan accompanied Victor, as he returned to the city for a historic meeting with Irene Uhlendorf, who was just 4 years old on the night of the bombing. Together they are able to talk about the horrors of that night and the effect that it has had on the rest of their lives.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi everyone and welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. It is inevitable of course, but every
0:05.8	time we lose a veteran from the Second World War, it feels like a shock. It feels like
0:12.1	a profound loss, a loss of that linked to a very special generation, a generation who
0:19.2	I've been lucky enough to spend so much time with, interview, and yet I'm sure when they're
0:23.0	gone, I will struggle to believe it ever happened. The idea that I'll be able to tell my grandchildren
0:28.2	I could just pick up a phone and talk to men and women who served in so many theatres in
0:33.0	the Second World War who were captured at Singapore, who were at Alamayn, Pearl Harbor,
0:38.3	Starlingrad, who jumped into Normandy on D-Day, who survived extermination camps in Central
0:46.6	Europe during the Holocaust. I'm sure that will be extraordinary to them and I think it should
0:51.0	feel extraordinary to us too. There's been a particular loss this week on the 12th of October,
0:57.3	Victor Greg passed away peacefully in his sleep. He was 101 years old and his 102nd birthday
1:05.3	was just days away. Pizarri and I almost don't expect to believe this because it's so odd. My kids
1:11.4	had made birthday cards for Victor, they've met in my couple of times we go and look in on him,
1:15.9	and I was putting them all into a big A4 envelope and I checked my phone, it was a message from
1:20.3	a family member that Victor had slipped away the night before peacefully. So those birthday cards
1:25.7	remained unsent and now they're sitting downstairs in my house. I'm not really sure what to do with
1:31.7	them now. Victor Greg was a pre-war regular soldier, he served in the Middle East, North Africa,
1:39.8	Italy. He jumped into Alam, it was captured Alam and taken to Dresden as a prison of war where he was
1:47.0	imprisoned, possibly about to be executed for making trouble whilst the prisoner and was freed when
1:53.4	the bomb started falling on Dresden during the terrible fire bombing of early 1945. He may have
2:00.1	been saved from a summary execution by the Nazis, but he was tossed into another imaginable
2:06.1	hellscape in which he witnessed things he talked about 75 years on that profoundly changed him.
	...

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