The remaining lorry and my old Morris were now well overloaded. 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. It took us about four days to get back to the Alamein defensive line. ‘Take it back with you Gregg and then give it a four second grenade as a going away present’. The quartermaster at Siwa had said that the last thing he wanted to be lumbered with was this old Morris truck. 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. 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. 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. 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 often entailed a long and lonely drive back over the countless Bedouin desert tracks in the hinterland of the North African desert. My job was to transport injured personnel back to the medical facilities at our Siwa base. At the time I was serving as the Doctors’ assistant to the Long Range Desert Group (LRDG). It was sometime around the beginning of October, 1942.

Victor Gregg, veteran of the Rifle Brigade and 10th Parachute Regiment The Second Battle of El Alamein 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. I hope that what I have written will help you feel their pain, bewilderment, frustrations and exultations. The people I have written about were real men, my comrades. 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.

I am a Rifleman, and the series of stories that I am calling ‘Snapshots’ are all true.

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