The Germans in Normandy (Stackpole Military History Series)
Richard Hargreaves
Language: English
Pages: 320
ISBN: 0811735133
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Drawing on letters, diaries, firsthand accounts, and official documents, The Germans in Normandy paints a vivid and frequently horrific picture of life for the men who held Hitler's vaunted Atlantic Wall when the Allies invaded France in June 1944 and who put up a bitter but ultimately hopeless defense throughout that summer. These are the German soldiers who manned the pillboxes on Omaha Beach, fired the machine guns across farmfields, and commanded the Tiger tanks. To read about the war from their point of view is sobering and informative.
Dambusters - Operation Chastise 1943
History: The Ancient Civilizations that Defined World History
Landing beaches at Caen. The surface of the sea was saturated with hundred of boats of all sizes, while the sky was filled with bomber formations going to attack our front, accompanied by countless fighters. Lost in the middle of all that, a handful of Messerschmitts: ours!15 The Focke-Wulfs of Schlachtgeschwader 4, the specialist ground-attack squadron which had arrived in Normandy on the afternoon of D-Day, began taking off at 6 a.m. on 7 June to attack the beachhead. Just twenty-four Fw190s.
Outskirts of Villers-Bocage, thirty year old Michael Wittmann had passed a brief, but uneventful night. Most of the Tigers of his SS panzer company were resting in a sunken road, a mile or so north-east of the town. It was 8 a.m. when the Obersturmführer stepped out of his command post to see the might of 22 Armoured Brigade rolling past, barely 500 feet away. ‘Never before had I been so impressed by the strength of the enemy as I was by those tanks rolling by,’ the Tiger commander wrote. The.
The fact that our press made too much of the news of our new secret weapon being used, but also from the fact that with one blow tension welled up for so long has exploded.20 The Nazi Party newspaper celebrated the enemy’s dance of death. On 19 June, war correspondent Wolfgang Küchler flew over London. ‘All hell broke loose below,’ Küchler wrote the following day for the Nazi Party organ: Slowly the skies over London began to turn yellow and red. Just a few minutes after the first German.
Ears.10 After a three-week march from southern France, the lead units of the 2nd SS Panzer Division Das Reich were reaching the front in dribs and drabs. A combination of uprisings by the French resistance and disruption to France’s road and rail network meant that the SS division’s move from southern France took at least twice, if not three times longer than expected. By the time it reached Normandy, it was no longer a coherent division. ‘Unserviceability among tanks is 60 per cent,’ Das.
Allied vice. Montgomery would batter and bash his way forward with three divisions, more than 100,000 men in ‘a big show’.27 The Allied steamroller would roll into Caen. Montgomery’s ‘big show’ was earmarked for first light on Saturday, 8 July. The show began early, at 9.50 p.m. the previous evening. For the first time in Normandy, the British general called in the support of the ‘heavies’ – the four-engined bomber fleet – to soften up the defenders by pummelling the German lines north of Caen.