Dan Snow's History Hit - Living Through the Dresden Firebombing with Victor Gregg

Episode Date: February 13, 2021

Victor Gregg is a veteran of World War Two and the Dresden Bombings, and travelled with Dan to visit Dresden a couple of years ago for a documentary. In this episode, taken from our archive, Victor talks about what it was like to be in Dresden during the bombings, and the Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) he suffered as a result of his wartime experiences.

Douglas Adams, the genius behind The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, was a master satirist who cloaked a sharp political edge beneath his absurdist wit. Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth explores the ideas of the man who foresaw the dangers of the digital age and our failing politics with astounding clarity. Hear the recordings that inspired a generation of futurists, entrepreneurs, and politicians. Get Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth now at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or wherever audiobooks are sold. Hi everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History. Once a week we go back into our archives and dig out an episode that those of you who've

recently joined us might not have heard. And this week, it's my great pleasure to bring you the one and only Victor Gregg. He comes on this podcast a fair bit. He's now into his third century on planet Earth. We had a special podcast a year and a half ago to celebrate his 100th birthday. I'm pleased to say that he's still in good health. He has survived COVID in his current sheltered accommodation and I'm looking forward to going and checking out with him when we're allowed to do so. This is the second of a two-part podcast that I recorded with Victor Gregg,

just about his life and career in the army. He's sort of a little bit of the Forrest Gump of the Second World War. He was in North Africa, Italy, Arnhem, and then he was taken prisoner of war and ended up in a prisoner of war camp in Dresden in East Germany. He was there on the 13th of February this week in 1945 when British and American heavy bombers incinerated the city of Dresden. He has some pretty painful memories

and he has some very forthright views about that particular raid. I took him to Dresden, a history hit project, when he was 98, a couple of years ago now. We returned to Dresden and you can watch that documentary on History Hit TV, very emotionally met up with other survivors of the Dresden raid, a German lady in particular who had a huge impact on him, who was a child at the time of the bombing. You can go and watch that

on historyhit.tv. It's the new history channel that we've launched, hundreds of hours of history documentaries and all of the back episodes of this podcast there to be listened to. For a small subscription, you get to join and help us create a completely new history channel for proper history fans. We've also got a live tour this autumn. Please come and check it out. Go to historyhit.com slash tour to get your tickets. It'd be great to have you along in the flesh, share a beer and a laugh and some talks about history. In the meantime, everyone, enjoy this episode. It picks up kind of halfway through his wartime experience with the one and only Victor Gregg.

Izzy saw two of his friends killed and went mad. Yeah. Yeah, but the same thing happened to me. When? When Frankie got killed. Frankie Baird was another one of the lads, was one of the lads who joined up with me Frankie Baird was one of the six who had taken the train down to Winchester with and he lived in Balsbourne Road we were all Londoners and Frankie come up he's in his 1500 way

full of mortar bombs and stuff like that. And what he's got is company, B company, he was in B company, and they're right up the front. And we're sitting back in the carriers, because we've got nothing to do at the time. But mind you, we're only about 200 yards away from them, but we was out of immediate danger as far as small arms are concerned. So if you can imagine that.

And up comes this truck with a pile of dust and out comes Frankie's. Ah Vic, by the way, ah Frank, you know that sort of thing. And we're talking about things. I've got to get going, I've got to get going. So he jumps in the truck and off he goes. And he went about 100 yards, 150 yards. Bang! The old truck blew up, see? And I don't know to this day whether it was a shell or a mine or whether it was one of these mortar bombs which were already primed. He might have gone over a bump and the old bloody lot blew up. I don't know.

But I know that the sergeant... Oh, God, I can't remember. I haven't brought his mind, I think I've got his name in the book. I jumped in the carrie and he jumped in with me and we make our way over to this truck and I jumped out and Frank is still sitting in the seat, still sitting in the, the truck's all alight and what's left of it and he's sitting in the seat so i thought i better pull him out pull him out so i get hold of the top i'll get hold of him and i'll drag him out from this because you've got no doors he's 15 hundred ways it's all open and i drag him out and as i drag him out the bottom half of me can win all over my feet that was it so i what i want to do then is to get at the geezers who've done it because he's my mate.

I've lost all sense of reason. I've lost all sense of reason. I can't remember his bloody name for the life of me at the moment. Anyway, he gave me a right hander, knocked me right out. Like that. And took me back.

Because you just wanted to charge at the Germans? Yeah. I was trying to do a repeat of what is he done. I didn't realise what I was doing. Now, you'll be all right, Vic, when you wake up. It's only a bit of a bruise, that's all right. There's nothing unusual in that sort of behaviour. That's the sort of thing that goes on.

It doesn't get put down in books and journals, nobody writes out about things like that. It may be the people who are closely involved remember it and might jot it down later on in life. But it's one of the things, it's not like the First World War where they was all in trenches. The Second World War was a mobile war. And you was always on the move. And you was always with the same blokes. So if anything happened to any of them,

you felt it. And yeah, yeah. Five years I heard of that. And then I went in the power troops, didn't I? I could look on anybody being dead and look at their body and say, well, good luck,. You say in the book you can never cleanse your mind of the horror. How do you live with it? It's not with you all the time, not in horror, because it's taken another form. The form it took, it wasn't there, but I don't think that affected me all that much.

What sent me the way it eventually sent me was Dresden. In six years of war, I'd never been in a situation where there was all men killing each other. There were no women and children and old people. Because at Dresden, of course, I'm suddenly made aware of what total war really is. Not soldiers who are getting killed and murdered. It's innocent women and children.

All they want to do is have a quiet life. And they're being put in an oven. They're burning to death in an oven. Roasting alive. That's what sent me. That's what sent me, more than that, that's what done me, because up to Dresden, even when we, when I was, you know, when they sent us,

me and Harry to death, said you're gonna be shot in the morning. Even that didn't send quivers down there. I thought we'll get out of here some way, you know, you're still alive. So he says they're gonna shoot us in the morning. So it ain't morning yet, mate. And Harry, and Harry he was a real nutcase he come from Yorkshire they want to go to Fiji they love the bullshit you know I said they ain't mate that's what they're gonna do

they're gonna shoot us because Hitler had told them anybody committing sabotage gets shot and we'd burnt the bloody soap factory down. Not just a little bit of sabotage, we'd incinerated an old factory, stopped their supply of soap for a couple of weeks. But no, it was, everything changed me in the next five days I was at Dresden. The first 24 hours was in the bombing and then in the aftermath when I was on this clearing up business with this nutcase of a German who was in charge of a local fire brigade or whatever it was. He was a real nutcase but he was alright.

He was a decent bloke even if he did kill two people for refusing to do what he told them. But I didn't put that against him. Sort of mind your own then. Sort of mind your own. This farming, we're all standing in a line wondering what to do now because i'm i'm talking about something now which a lot of people won't know what i'm talking about because all this happened and we're not on dressing yet are we what was those last few days of arnhem like well the last few days of course we never had any grub we'd run out of everything there was water to be had in some of the cottages and houses but if you wasn't near a house you had no water you'd run out of puddles.

It was a bit naughty and we all realised that we wasn't going to get relieved now and that was it. So then we heard that it came through because I was right on the perimeter. I was still number one, although I had a different crew than what I started with. In fact, I had three different crews. They all got their lot, one by one. And I'm still alive. And I'm number one. And I'm the one who's sitting up. And the other two blokes, number two and three, whose job it is to manage a belt,

they're lying down, lying on a snake's belly. And they were the ones who got killed. And there's me sitting up behind there and I'm still alive I can't make it out but anyway so I was one of the few Vickers what were left so anyway we were on this perimeter and now we run out of ammo got no more ammo left at all so we had this young officer who I'd never seen before. And he said, I'm going to go back and see if I can find some ammunition. So, OK. And then he came back after about 20 minutes.

He said, there's nobody there. He said, they've all gone out of the house. It's all empty. They've all gone. And he thinks that the Germans are in the hotel. And the hotel's about 150 yards away from us, 200 yards. And we're further to the east. So what do they do then?

Well, take the bolt out of the gun and dismantle it and sling it all over the place and we'll try and make our way out somehow if we can. Did you feel that you'd been abandoned? Eh? Did you feel you'd been abandoned? Eh? Did you feel you'd been abandoned? No, no, I was a regular soldier. I knew jolly well that if you're on the perimeter, you're there to enable the other blokes to get away.

I might have only been about 25, but I was educated in that sense. I knew exactly what was happening. about 25 but I was educated in that sense. I knew exactly what was happening. But at the same time I also knew that having a Vickers machine gun you're not going to go charging, they're not going to send you charging over to capture some point because you can't do it carrying 50 pounds with a Vickers machine gun with another 10 feet of belt dangling, you just can't run. So now your job is to stop there, keep that gun on its tripod and if anything comes near, let them have it.

But there you are, we run out of ammo. Completely. There was nothing there, the lads had none left in their rifles. I think there was only four of us actually. Four of us. I wouldn't know, four or five anyway. So, right, what we're going to do, we're trying to get to Amsterdam. Which direction is that? Oh, that's north. Okay, we go north. Which is north? Well, it ain't near the river and it ain't that way, so it's got to be that way. So, in ones and twos, So it's got to be that way. So in ones and twos, we disappear.

And they found us. Two days later, they found us. Absolutely starving, lying in a ditch. Come, Tommy. Come. Krieg is 30. Come. So that was it.

We were captured and stuck on a train. We go to this transit camp where they keep order. They had hoses which were fixed into the cesspots see and if you got a bit unruly they'd switch the houses on and you'd be you know plastered with your own shit so that is as good as good as method of any of keeping keeping the unruly crowds in order so from there we went to 4b and it was in 4b that I realized I was never going to get out of 4b it's too big so I volunteered for the work camp and that's where I ended up at

neither said lits we haven't reached there yet we haven't even been to Italy yet that's alright we can we can we can talk about Dresden go on well as you know I mean I tried to escape twice from this prisoner of war camp where I got captured after Arnhem

and as a and Luke was in charge of this little work camp he was an old old German Matlow sailor in the German Navy and

he had a little goatee beard he was alright it wasn't bad he was alright so he says that he had to punish me fore beard. He was alright, it wasn't bad, he was alright. So he says that he had to punish me for trying to escape. So what he done, he got one of his blokes to go down there, he went down to the village

at Needlesedlets and got me a pair of wooden clogs. They were just so about that thick, about two inches thick. I said what's these for? They'll be alright for you because you're going to get a job at a soap factory. And it's six kilometres away and you've got to walk it. And this is in February when the snow's that deep. And it's coming down, the flakes come down like big soup plates, not like this little stuff we have over here.

This is real snow coming down, you know, in Bavaria. So you work at the soap factory until they decide they don't want you anymore. Then you come back. So off I go. I've got a margin. There was nobody over me. He just told me which way to go. And that's when I went. Because they used to send us out on little jobs, two or three of us. Sometimes there'd be nobody in charge of us. We'd just have this big sign on the back, Kreeska Fangana, KG, and that would be it. Because they'd say, no, you couldn't get away.

You just couldn't get away. You never had any grub. It was the middle of winter. And then you burnt the factory down. Well, our job, the job they put us on, because it was a soap factory, they never had any fat, no oil, and all they had was pummi powder.

Which as you know, lots of pummi powder, that's what they scraped the deck with in the Navy, to get the deck white. And that's what these old washer women used to use on their washing boards. So yeah, it's pummi powder, see? And it looks the same as cement, same colour. And our job was to shovel this pummi powder into these washing

rate wheelbarrows, push it along up the slope into the mouth of this big revolving mixer. That was our job. So a couple of days doing that and then he said to me Harry and we noticed these Italians who were over the other side of the building which wasn't very wide about 20 feet and they've got this big pile of cement what they're using to build this wall with so Harry says I'll tell you what we put two barrows of cement in instead of the pommy powder. So I didn't think, I thought, you know, it's a bit of a laugh, we'd do that. Yeah, of course, yeah, let's have a go.

Teeths are bastards, you know. That's what we did. And there was nothing technical about this soap factory. It was all done, the bloke who was in charge used to rub the stuff together with his hands and when he thought it was all right consistency the machine would stop out and he would unload it onto these big trays which is like a lot of indents in it and then another bloke would go with a broom and sweep it all level and that's how it was they were caked you see and then they go in the oven and that's how it was, they were caked you see and then they go in the oven. But it was all watery, you couldn't understand it.

Why it was watery and it wasn't like whatever, why it wasn't thickening. So he said, we've put too much water in, we'll leave it till the morning and the water will drain away, it'll be alright. Halfway through that night I realised what was going to happen. It occurred to me. Sure enough, we get up there the next morning, start work. I'm there at six o'clock on time.

And he's got this whacking great big wood lever, the governor. And till I turn into it, there's a bit of rope, which at the top in the roof is fixed to another sort of a starter motor. See? He pulls down the thing and the starter, and nothing happens. We hear the starter motor go off, but nothing's happening.

The machinery, the lights haven't come on, nothing. And then somebody's aware that all the wiring's caught alight. So you and your mate managed to burn down a factory? Yeah. yeah.

Because the factory was saturated in oil because it had been a soap factory for donkey's years. I don't know how long, but that's what they used to do, make soap. Presumably these fancy soap things were. They used to sell them days in peacetime. So although they had no oil or fat, hope things were they used to sell in them days I in peacetime so although they had no oil or fat there was plenty of it embedded in the roof and stuff like that so the wires caught a light they never had any spares I mean they

never had any fuses they used to put a six inch now in between the watch names as a fuse as how bad they were off they had nothing the Germans at that time of the war. At any rate, of course, I mean, they're pretty quick. They ain't stupid. They suss it out, wheel us away in this van. And as we wheeled away, down come the roof. Everything went down in sparks and flame.

And we could hear the lads cheering, you know. But we was inside the van then. So they took us up to this geezer in dresden took us to inside dresden and uh he comes in and we're sitting at this posh table in his big posh hall it was like a like a big hall in a council chamber you know and he comes in he's got black coat silver buttons he's got his insignia he's got red hair he's got red hair swastikas here he's got the lot and he's rattling through what we've done and saying telling us that we've committed sabotage and he's gonna send us to another place so Harry said sort of thing well where's that there mate so he says you go there and you'll be shot tomorrow morning for sabotage.

Oh, so, and Harry's taken a mickey out of him, telling him he can't understand him. And he's talking like Rick, like he's trained at Oxford, where he'd been, either Oxford or Cambridge, because there's quite a lot of Germans, educated Germans who had been to Britain and Harry's telling me he can't understand him and I'm kicking Harry under the table because I can feel the floor moving but apparently Harry is quite immune to all this.

And how did you escape from that? Well he goes in this big place which was full of people of different nationalities, Well, we goes in this big place which was full of people of different nationalities, all unwashed, stinking like hell. Absolutely jam-packed with them, about 300 or 400 of them in this place, and it had a sort of a roof which come like a Coppola. Gross. So it's crazy.

So anyway, we, you know, a couple of big blokes like me and Harry, we were big in them days, you know. We were full of it, you know, fully trained. So we're kicking and shoving our way through get placed by the wall sit down see and Harry said I'm gonna have a walk around Vic he says and uh well they didn't call me Vic called me Mac because everybody called me Mac because my name is Greg McGregor the army that is the army see so he comes back with a couple of Americans. They're waiting to be shot for looting and they said there's no need to worry because they take out 30 every morning and that's the last you see of them but

there's about 400 of us in here and if they do it properly and we're at the back of the queue the war will be over by then. That was the general idea see see, so that cheered us up, although I didn't think much of it, I thought we saw they're going to shoot us, they're going to shoot us. But anyway, you don't let it get you down to that extent, you're not worried about it all that much. So we refused the first lot of grub were coming because it was horrible and we wasn't all that hungry, not at that point. And then about half past it was horrible and we wasn't all that hungry not at that point and then about half past nine it start and we had the the fluger alarm go off see air raid along so nobody's worried because they think we hear it every night and so they think it's either going to be say chemnitz leipzig see, all about 60 or 70 miles away. But it wasn't because we saw those

streamers coming down through the glass roof. So that was it. So that after a quarter of an hour, and when the mosquitoes had left and the bombers come over and a load of these incendiaries come down through the cupola and killed everybody underneath, caught them all alight and you couldn't put it out because you just couldn't put them out. They were all burnt alive. And then after about another quarter of an hour this bloody great bomb landed outside the building and blew the building to bits. So there's only half the building standing and the roof was dangling like that.

And I got blown right over the other side of the room. It covered in masonry and dirt and dust. And then I suppose I've always thought it must have been seconds, under a minute when I came to. That's what I've always thought. And then I managed to open the eyes and then I made me way back as far as I could to where Harry was what you couldn't recognize anything and he was still against his little bit of wall there was a door now it blast and there nothing left inside him all

the blood had come out of every aperture in his body. So I covered him up with his... He had a coat and I covered that over him. And then I hear all this creaking going on. And I get outside. You're listening to Dan Snow's History. I'm talking to a World War II veteran, Victor Gregg. More after this.

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or wherever audiobooks are sold. And what was it like outside in the firestorm? There wasn't many blokes who'd got outside, there was only about 30 of us. in the firestorm? There wasn't many blokes who got outside, there was only about 30 of us and so we're standing outside but it was like a bonfire. We'd come out of this building and everything's a light outside. There's still a lot of these incendiaries are still coming down and they're a light as they're coming down. You know in a forest of fire and it's beginning to get warm not really unbearably hot yet the moment but it's getting warm and everything's a

light all around you see the impression you get first of all is that there's nowhere to go you can't get what's going to happen see but in these circumstances there's always somebody who will lead off always without fail so we some geezer whoever it was had managed to walk in some particular direction and we all followed him and eventually and i was lucky because i had these wooden clogs on And eventually, and I was lucky because I had these wooden clogs on, which enabled me to walk over all the fire stuff, what was on the ground. And a lot of the blokes didn't have that.

They couldn't make it. They were just hopping from one part of the land to another. Anyway, we get out eventually, and we land in this place where there must have been a sort of a of a park or a little something there's grass there anyway which was still grass and burn out yeah so we take his shell was not so good show there's no fire around you see and the bombs have stopped by then the raid was over and then after a time we see this group of Germans coming up and they was pushing this big cart and they all had helmets on

except one bloke and he had a cap on and I thought he's in charge and he was and he's raking up he's trying to find people who are still able to walk about serviceable sort of thing, you know.

And he comes up to us, lines us all up, picks out the ones he wants and more or less tells us in German, you know, follow me. He issues us with shovels off the car and there's three blokes, they wouldn't go. So he pulled out a revolver and shot two of them straight away and the other bloke he couldn't wait to join

us. So I thought, funny you know I thought I thought to myself well you've got to have discipline in a situation like this even if it comes to what he's just done. It didn't occur to me that he'd done anything wrong. That's the sort of mind I had at that time. The fact that he'd butchered these people, these two, without any thought, any hesitation whatsoever, he just pulled out his gun and shot them.

And I went along with it mentally. What was the scene like in Dresden? Everything was alight. So his idea was to get back and he wanted to find air raid shelters where people were in and he wanted to get them out, see. But we didn't get very far because then the second air raid went so he had to withdraw out again and we and we got out a little bit further away from like sort of a but near a railway line i don't think it was a main railway line but it was a railway line and there was a little sort of a depression what you run through so we're all down there and then of course the bombs come down again and then this time we realized that the first raid was nothing there was 600 planes also 500 planes drop in say incendiaries and five hundred and two

thousand pound bombs there was nothing this like this other lot come over with these four thousand pound blockbusters and whacking great drums full up with whatever was used to catch fire. Enormous great things. When they land on the ground, it's the sort of big spread of flame goes out. It goes out 100 yards either side. Everything's incinerated in them. either side. Everything's incinerated in them. So that raid went on for about another hour before the last stragglers had gone. So everything's alight now and the wind's coming in to feed the fire. So we couldn't do much. All you could do was to lay on the ground because

there was nothing, no shelter, to lay on the ground and hope for the best. And you could feel the heat that was building up. Although we were about 150 yards away from the nearest buildings, it wasn't outside of Dresden, but it was sort of a place which was open. And everything was alight, and then you got all this wind starts coming in to feed the fire about it was about three o'clock in the morning I think when he decides that he's going to have another try to get

inside this place so he lines us all up again and then we go and we're still going in and it's daybreak and he's still at it and we ain't found anywhere we can get in but we got to a point where we couldn't go no further no you you can't breathe and then this wind is you've got to hold on to something because if you didn't hold on to anything it would have anything to hold on to mainly we hold on to each other but if you if you lost contacts and you didn't have the strength to fight it, then you'd just get whisked away. And that's what happened to all these,

the women and kids who were caught out in the open because when the first raid finished, after about a quarter of an hour, they start coming out. See, from wherever they are, below the ground. And they think it's all over. Then all of a sudden they're caught in the next lot and they can't get back in time and they're all the light and and there's women and women with their clothes of light and they got their little kids i saw this woman with this little kid

she's holding this little kid and she's drawn right up in here into this sort of big funnel of fire which was going up in the sky and then presumably when they get the top they drop down again i don't know but and you can't explain it you just cannot explain what it was like that's as i said before i had five years of fighting and men. A man shoots a man, kills a man, so what? But if you ever come into contact with that sort of total war aspect where innocent people, innocent women and children, and when I come home of course, and I really made me feel his fault about who I thought was responsible because I always thought that we was the good guys and we was going to save Europe from all the horrible things that Hitler and his mates were doing and then we finished up being

worse than they were committing genocide. There was no other word for it. It was unnecessary. I just felt ashamed of being British. And of course the amount of stick I took for that, if I'd been any weaker of mind, I'd have probably been a bit unbearable. But I've got enough strength in my own feelings to say, well, I was there and I saw it and I know what I'm talking about. And they can make all the excuses under the sun and I'll never forgive them, never, for what happened. And it wasn't only Dresden. They still carried on doing it after that.

And they was doing it before the carpet bombing. They started it off at Hamburg and it was successful and they built doing it before the carpet bombing they they started it off at hamburg and uh it was successful and they built on it in the book you say it's very disturbing when you say what you witnessed after dresden you escaped you saw the red army and then what the red army were doing to the germans it was terrible well there again i was i'd got away i'd got away, I'd got away, I couldn't go west, impossible to get through. So you could hear all the firing going on, so I thought, well that's alright, I'll go east. And I managed to get over the Elbe without any trouble, and I thought that was a bit of luck. Nobody stopped me.

And I'm scrounging food off all these refugees who were coming from the East. Crushed the bread here and stuff like that. And then I took shelter in this house for the first night. And I still had some crust on me, bread, you know. And I got this German coat on, and I got a pair of German boots on like these clogs. So I thought if I'm caught, I've had it. So they'd think I'm a German. But I was so tired and I was so bloody hungry and I saw these blokes coming through the bushes so I went up forward with my hands up sort of thing and I thought it was either this way or the other.

I was so tired I didn't worry I really didn't worry and anyway they took me in first of all they put me with a load of other with some Germans and some other nationalities who they'd captured and then there was an officer come round he was a German but he could speak a little bit of English. And that was a Frenchman I think who'd come round first. But then a German come round who could speak English. So he said, well, he said, you don't need to stop with this lot, he said, you can sit up in the lorry with the other lads, not with the other Germans who were going forwards. Well the next morning they couldn't start the bloody thing up. It was a Chevrolet, it was, something they got off the Americans.

And I knew all about Chevrolets because I'd had them in the LRTG. And they were just about to put a horse on the front, to put it slightly up. So I lifted up the bonnet, I got a bit of paper, a bit of rag and I pulled out all the leads, I wiped them all dry, I unclipped the distributor cap, dried that off because it was all covered in mist. Put it back and they give it a little shove, they never had any battery, long gone. They give it a little shove and off it went. So after that I was like sliced bread, you know

Anything went wrong with the car, with the lorry, fiktor, fiktor, come! So sort of thing in Russian, you know So I was all right. What were the Russians like to the German civilians? Well, it's all according, if they put up resistance, they'd shoot them. But if they didn't put up any resistance, they just passed them. They didn't stop. There's thousands of them, these Russians. Thousands of them. All the people, the Russians behind, apparently,

what I learned, didn't have any weapons at all. They picked up their weapons off the lads who got killed in the front. You couldn't stop them. There was too many of them. And they just went on and on and on. Because they were the lower lot who were going to capture Birdling from the south. But they were a terrible lot. The bloke in charge apparently had a very bad reputation.

Were they brutal? Brutal? Well, no, not to me they weren't. But they were very primitive, put it that way. Personally, I mean, the way they treated me, once they found out that I could start their cars and I wasn't any menace, one of them gave me a balalaika, which didn't last very long, it's true. But no, no, they fed me, I was with them all the time. Luckily enough they didn't get engaged in any battles, because all the Germans were on the run by then.

If they wasn't they were bloody nutcases. Until we got to this river, I was with them about six weeks, and we got to this river. Just before we got to the river, we were in Leipzig. We got to Leipzig. And it was in Leipzig that we had this little radio. Somebody had a radio. Because by that time I'd discovered some other blokes, like English blokes. And that's when Churchill gave his talk about the war being over at last. You saw so many terrible things during the war.

at last you you saw so many terrible things during the war how have you managed to to go through the rest of your life without letting that just drag you down well i haven't have i i haven't let it drag me down it is what he's done is ruin the life of a lot of other people is that uh what he turned me into was some sort of a monster. I've calmed down now. But it turned me into a person who could quite easily go in and start fighting with people and things like that. And then the next day I'm wondering what I've done. sort of a Jekyll and Hyde sort of person I had no respect for any authority whatsoever I've gone I've gone through life and

like a like a bomb waiting to ignite I I had a row with the first wife, Frida, we'd had a row, we'd had words over something I'd done and I went out, it was about 11 o'clock, raining, I walked down the embankment, I got up on the Waterloo Bridge and I'm looking over the side thinking about something and I feel somebody's hand side thinking about something you know I'll fill somebody's hand on me shoulder and without second thought I would put me over a round and I nearly pushed him in a river over the parapet and then I realized it was a copper it was a policeman and so I pulled him back in quick and so I said to him I'll recovered I said I suppose you're gonna send me

in a nick now now he said that's all right boy he says I've got an idea what's happened to you so I got away with that I never heard any more about that but I nearly threw him in the river I was quite powerful at the time. I could do things like that. I absolutely ruined the life of my first wife. We were married for 22 years. And, uh... Land a Viking longship on island shores.

Scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer whether you're preparing for assassin's creed shadows or fascinated by history and great stories listen to echoes of history a ubisoft podcast brought to you by history hits there are new episodes every week

douglas adams the genius behind theitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, was a master satirist who cloaked a sharp political edge beneath his absurdist wit. Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth explores the ideas of the man who foresaw the dangers of the digital age and our failing politics with astounding clarity. Hear the recordings that inspired a generation of futurists, entrepreneurs and politicians. Get Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth now at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or wherever audiobooks are sold. And in the end we got divorced and that saved my life more or less.

Although I don't think she realised what was the matter with me. I wrote a book and because of the book I met this lady who was the secretary of the Dresden Trust. And through that the lad in charge of the cathedral at Coventry I forget what he's called now that he wanted me to go up there and give a talk on February the 14th when they had the memorial service

for Dresden Coventry Cathedral because they're tagged together see so I goes up there this was about what four years ago three years ago

and I goes up there and I about what four years ago three years ago and it goes up there and I said well go do then he said well wouldn't you go up in the pulpit he says and and just talk to these people about what it was like at Dresden and the cathedral's full up to the brim so I goes up in the pulpit and I'm looking around at all these people I ain't got a clue what I'm going to say, because it's all ad hoc. So I start nattering away, talking about it. And then I thought to myself, I've had enough now, I've been talking for about 20 minutes, I ain't got a clue what I've been talking about. So then all this is definitely quiet. Then all of a sudden somebody at the back started clapping.

And they all started clapping. So I come down, and then the bloke who was in charge, priest or whatever he called him, they had to have a loving, what they called a loving. Everybody had to get out of their seats, and everybody had to hold each other's hands. Because there were a lot of Germans there. And so we're

never going anything like this again see and there was this old girl she was an old Jewish lady she was for some reason she kept alive I don't know how but she was Jewish and she was about 90 and she comes up she put her arm around me she crying her eyes out and she's holding on to me and all of a sudden I could feel something went through me and I felt this woman and it's something that I've never felt before in my life. What was inside this woman's mind was going inside my own mind, sort of telepathic interchange. And there was a time before when I was working at Inkley Point because I used to put protective

coatings on. I had my own business. And I come home from Bridgewater and there's this place I like, this cottage was I like, with a thatched roof. And I see this woman hanging out, this woman was hanging out the window. And I come home, I drove straight through on my bike to come home and I went to bed and I woke up three days later and there's all sorts of people around me and

That's what it is. I've been swearing and shouting and screaming and things like that. I don't want to talk to you now because it'll upset Beth And then I got over it from then on and then when I went I met this lady at Dresden so I'm completely free of it now so this Jewish lady of course they've got a name for it now post-mortem Dresden's all yeah and nobody knew anything about it then. So I mean that's what Soldier Spy is all about really. Soldier Spy is all about how I behaved after the war and that's why I said to this audience of kids yesterday, I said to them you see an old man And he's acting like nobody else or he's acting mad or something like that I find out what sent sent him in that condition what put him in there before you start criticizing him

Eventually eventually, of course you get out of it, but you never you You're never free of it i don't think so these lads who've been to afghanistan and places like that they're lucky in a way because they're they've their service has been short-lived sort of thing they haven't been had to put up with it year after year and then of course they get injured they're on a helicopter and they're out And then of course they get injured, they're on a helicopter and they're out. And if their mates get killed, then they're not on that battlefield very long. It's still bad. It's still bad for them because they're being flown out there without any knowledge of what they think.

They ride bikes in the battle. They've still got Kalashnikovs. They've still got the power to kill people and they're not so stupid as a lot of people think they are. But for you, you think it's harder from what you saw? I think myself that, I've been a modern Draynach generation and I think it's just as hard for them as it was for us. The British Army in them days, when you was in the Army, you joined the Army for seven and five, seven years with the Colour and five years on the Reserve, and then by the time you got to your seven years,

you were probably stuck out in India somewhere, So you done a year for the king, what they called a year for the king, so that was eight years. So by that time, they was more or less, they'd had it. So they signed on for 12 years. And then if they got a good conduct badge, they signed on for 21. They'd finish up in the blanket store or somewhere like that. Or they'd finish up doing a commissioneer's job on a hotel.

So the army today is different. And then, of course, I think that the structure is something different. I don't know whether it is a meritocracy yet, but I notice that the people in charge have still got Eden written all over them. Somehow or the other, they've hung on to that. You never hear of a major general coming from Billingsgate

Victor that's it thank you so much I think we're going to end it there it's getting dark out so thank you very much wonderful

Hi everyone thanks for reaching the end of this podcast. Most of you are probably asleep, so I'm talking to your snoring forms, but anyone who's awake, it would be great if you could do me a quick favour, head over to wherever you get your podcasts and rate it five stars, and then leave a nice glowing review. It makes a huge difference for some reason to how these podcasts do.

Madness, I know, but them's the rules. Then we go further up the charts, more people listen to us, and everything will be awesome. So thank you so much. Now sleep well. Douglas Adams, the genius behind The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, was a master satirist who cloaked a sharp political edge beneath his absurdist wit.

Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth explores the ideas of the man who foresaw the dangers of the digital age and our failing politics with astounding clarity. Hear the recordings that inspired a generation of futurists, entrepreneurs and politicians. Thank you. you