By the end of World War Two, Rifleman Victor Gregg had become accustomed to bloodletting and death.

Yet nothing – not the massacre of friends on the frontline, nor countless killings by his own hand in the name of Queen and country – could have prepared him for the sheer horror he witnessed during the Bombings of Dresden between 13 and 15 February 1945.

Victor told UNILAD, 73 years later, why he still sees the Dresden bombings as genocide:

Victor Gregg isn’t like a lot of war veterans; the straight-talking 91-year-old has little time for the pomp, ceremony and glory of war, memorialised by later generations through rose-tinted spectacles.

Gregg was 18 and searching for employment in 1937, when an army representative offered him a cup of tea and shelter from the streets he walked in his hometown.

As he wrote in Rifleman: A Front-Line Life from Alamein and Dresden to the Fall of the Berlin Wall, next thing he knew he’d fallen for the ‘con trick’, with the warrant paper in hand and a sinking feeling he’d just signed his life away, never having tasted the warm brew he was promised.

By the time he reached his twenties, Rifleman Gregg had fought his way across Africa, in bloody battles like Beda Fomm, where Vic – as he prefers to be called – along with his cohorts, ‘learnt how to kill with our bare hands’.

They began to accept the daily dose of death and ‘killing another human being while looking into the man’s eyes’ as part of war; the tragic but necessary collateral damage of their job.

By his own admission, Dresden was different.