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    Second Battle of El Alamein: Snapshots of War
    Second Battle of El Alamein: Snapshots of War
    Second Battle of El Alamein: Snapshots of War
    Ebook58 pages1 hour

    Second Battle of El Alamein: Snapshots of War

    By Victor Gregg and Rick Stroud

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    About this ebook

    An eye witness account of the second battle of El Alamein by World War II veteran rifleman Victor Gregg.

    The Second Battle of El Alamein, Egypt (23 October–11 November 1942) was a decisive battle in the Second World War. With the Allies victorious, it marked the watershed of the Western Desert Campaign, prompting Winston Churchill to proclaim 'Before Alamein we never had a victory. After Alamein we never had a defeat.'

    The British victory turned the tide in the North African Campaign and ended the Axis threat to Egypt, the Suez Canal and the Middle Eastern and Persian oil fields via North Africa. Victor Gregg, after an absence of eight months of service, is offered a promotion which he promptly turns down, saying, 'I just wish to fight out this war in the company of the lads who I call my mates, and they are all in the carriers.'

    In this first-hand account, Gregg bravely unpicks not only the action of war, but the reaction of the normal men in extraordinary circumstances, trying to cling to sanity amongst the debris of corpses - many of which were friends and comrades.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBloomsbury Publishing
    Release dateJan 24, 2017
    ISBN9781448216802
    Second Battle of El Alamein: Snapshots of War
    Author

    Victor Gregg

    Victor Gregg was born in London in 1919 and joined the army in 1937, serving first in the Rifle Brigade in Palestine and North Africa, notably at the Battle of Alamein, and then with the Parachute Regiment, at the Battle of Arnhem. As a prisoner of war he survived the bombing of Dresden to be repatriated in 1946. The story of his adult years, Rifleman, was published by Bloomsbury in 2011, the prequel, King's Cross Kid, in 2013 and the final part of his trilogy, Soldier, Spy: A Survivor's Tale, in 2016; all were co-written with Rick Stroud. Victor Gregg died in 2021, aged 102.

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      Book preview

      Second Battle of El Alamein - Victor Gregg

      Second Battle of El Alamein

      Snapshots of War

      Victor Gregg with Rick Stroud

      Contents

      Author’s Note

      The Second Battle of El Alamein

      Afterword

      A Note on the Authors

      Author’s Note

      I am a Rifleman, and the series of stories that I am calling ‘Snapshots’ are all true. I have tried to describe what it is like to fight a war, living and not knowing from one day to the next when your last breath will be drawn.

      The people I have written about were real men, my comrades. I hope that what I have written will help you feel their pain, bewilderment, frustrations and exultations.

      I want you to travel the road alongside these men, some of whom were destined to be buried in a foreign field, while others survived to live a life of mental torture after the storms of battles have receded into the history books. This is a soldier’s tale.

      Victor Gregg, veteran of the Rifle Brigade and 10th Parachute Regiment

      The Second Battle of El Alamein

      The Affair at Snipe

      Egypt, 1942

      It was sometime around the beginning of October, 1942. At the time I was serving as the Doctors’ assistant to the Long Range Desert Group (LRDG). My job was to transport injured personnel back to the medical facilities at our Siwa base. This often entailed a long and lonely drive back over the countless Bedouin desert tracks in the hinterland of the North African desert.

      I usually travelled at night to avoid the danger of attack from enemy aircraft, although sometimes I was forced to travel at dawn or in the fading light of the evening.

      This time I was returning to base in convoy with two trucks of New Zealanders coming back from their attack on the airfield at Sirte where the group had damaged a whole raft of enemy planes that were parked there. When we arrived our governor, Captain Eason-Smith, told us that the unit was about to be reorganised and that about thirty of us were going back to our regular units, which in my case was the 2nd Battalion, the Rifle Brigade.

      Two days later we set off, two ten ton Chevy’s carrying about fifteen Kiwis, and me driving a clapped out fifteen hundred weight Morris in which I used to cart the luckless injured warriors of the LRDG back to Siwa and salvation. The quartermaster at Siwa had said that the last thing he wanted to be lumbered with was this old Morris truck. ‘Take it back with you Gregg and then give it a four second grenade as a going away present’.

      It took us about four days to get back to the Alamein defensive line. We used an old Bedouin track to cross the Quatara Depression and had to abandon one of the vehicles which got stuck in the sand. The remaining lorry and my old Morris were now well overloaded. I led the way on the grounds that the Morris was easier to manhandle if I made a mistake and got stuck.

      Driving over terrain such as we were needed a certain amount of experience – once on the move it was necessary to keep going, there was no room for error. We drove at a constant ten miles an hour and you picked your gear and kept it.

      The air temperature in this evil environment was usually above forty degrees during the day and plummeted to zero during the night. At dawn frost covered everything. And of course there was always the curse of desert life, the hordes of flies that encircled any moving creature.

      We finally made it up the steep track out of the depression at three o’clock in the afternoon of the fourth day. We were so overloaded that some of the lads had to walk that last bit or the vehicles would never have made it. I reached the summit and looked down in amazement at the main coast road, teeming with vehicles of all types making their

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