Born into a working-class family in London in 1919, Victor Gregg enlisted in the Rifle Brigade at nineteen, was sent to the Middle East and saw action in Palestine. Following service in the western desert and at the battle of Alamein, he joined the Parachute Regiment and in September 1944 found himself at the battle of Arnhem. When the paratroopers were forced to withdraw, Gregg was captured. He attempted to escape, but was caught and became a prisoner of war; sentenced to death in Dresden for attempting to escape and burning down a factory, only the allies' infamous raid on the city the night before his execution saved his life.
Gregg's fascinating story, told in a voice that is good-natured and completely original, continues after the end of the war. In the fifties he became chauffeur to the Chairman of the Moscow Norodny bank in London, involved in shady dealings and strange meetings with MI5, MI6 and the KGB. His adventures, though, were not over - in 1989, on one of his many motorbike expeditions into Eastern Europe, he found himself at a rally of 700 people in a field in Sopron at a fence that formed part of the barrier between the Soviet Union and the West. Vic cut the wire, and a few weeks later the Berlin Wall itself was destroyed - a truly unexpected coda to an incredible life lived to the full.
This is the story of a true survivor.

Rifleman: A Front-Line Life

Biographies & Memoirs

Gregg, Victor

Leaders & Notable People

Bloomsbury Paperbacks

Victor Gregg (b.1919) joined the army in 1937 and in Rifleman (2011), he told the story of his service in the Rifle Brigade in Palestine, Alamein and Arnhem. Here, he goes back to his childhood and teenage years on the 'mean streets' of King's Cross, Soho and Bloomsbury. Victor's memoir evokes how, abandoned by his father and living in poverty, the family struggled and survived in the familiar, yet strange world of London between the wars. Slightly off-mint.

King's Cross Kid: A London Childhood between the Wars

Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.

Soldier, Spy: A Survivor's Tale

Beginning in 1946, when Victor Gregg was demobbed after the end of the Second World War and deposited in London Paddington, Soldier, Spy is the story of a soldier returning to civilian life and all the challenges it entails. 
Facing a new and ever-changing London a shifting political landscape and plenty of opportunities to make a few bob, repairing the bomb damage and doing construction work on the Festival of Britain site, Vic moves from one job and pastime to the next, becoming by turns cyclist, builder, decorator, trade union official, Communist Party member and long distance lorry driver. Finally he is offered 'a nice clean job' as chauffeur to the chairman of the Moscow Narodny Bank where he will be able to come home to his wife and children every night. However, there is more to his new employers than meets the eye, and it is not long before his wartime work with the Long Range Desert group catches up with him in the form of an approach from the security services. Lured by the excitement his postwar life has lacked, Vic adds spy to his roster of employment, risking everything in the process.

Stroud, Rick

Bloomsbury Publishing

'Victor Gregg is the most remarkable spokesman for the war generation' Dan SnowIn 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.

Dresden: A Survivor's Story, February 1945

Historical

Bloomsbury Reader

King's Cross Kid: A London Childhood Between Wars

Windsor

'Victor Gregg is the most remarkable spokesman for the war generation' Dan Snow\n'A classic' Mail on Sunday 
'Astonishing' James Holland 
Born in 1919, Victor Gregg enlisted in the Rifle Brigade aged just eighteen and began a life of adventure. A soldier throughout the Second World War, he saw action across North Africa, was a driver for the Long Range Desert group and fought at the battle of Alamein. Taken into captivity at the Battle of Arnhem in 1944, he was sentenced to death for sabotaging a Dresden factory; he escaped only when the Allies' infamous air raid blew apart his prison and very soon encountered the advancing Red Army. Revised and expanded with exclusive new material in time for Gregg's 100th birthday, Rifleman is the extraordinary story of an independent-minded and quick-witted survivor.

Rifleman - New edition: A Frontline Life from the Battles of Alamein and Arnhem to the Bombing of Dresden

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