Download or read book Retreat to the Reich written by Samuel W. Mitcham Jr. and published by Stackpole Books. This book was released on 2007-01-23 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of the Normandy campaign from a German perspective Covers every point of view, from soldiers in the field to generals at high command The Allied landings in France on June 6, 1944, marked the beginning of the German defeat in the West. Military historian Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr., vividly recaptures the desperation of the Wehrmacht as its thin gray line finally snapped amidst brutal hedgerow-to-hedgerow fighting in Normandy and as the survivors fled the Allied steamroller in a mad dash back to the Reich. With colorful descriptions and informative details, Mitcham recounts the German military retreat and the erosion of Germany's stronghold in Europe--as viewed through the eyes of a defiant, but ultimately defeated, Wehrmacht.
Download or read book R ckzug written by Joachim Ludewig and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2012-10-05 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A German historian’s account of the Nazi retreat from France in the summer of 1944: “An important book [about] a surprisingly under-examined phase of WWII” (Anthony Beevor, Wall Street Journal). The Allied invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944, marked a critical turning point in the European theater of World War II. The massive landing on France's coast had been meticulously planned for three years, and the Allies anticipated a quick and decisive defeat of the German forces. Many of the planners were surprised, however, by the length of time it ultimately took to defeat the Germans. While much has been written about D-Day, very little has been written about the crucial period from August to September, immediately after the invasion. In Rückzug, Joachim Ludewig draws on military records from both sides to show that a quick defeat of the Germans was hindered by excessive caution and a lack of strategic boldness on the part of the Allies, as well as by the Germans' tactical skill and energy. This intriguing study, translated from German, not only examines a significant and often overlooked phase of the war, but also offers a valuable account of the conflict from the perspective of the German forces.
Download or read book R ckzug written by Joachim Ludewig and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2012-10-05 with total page 504 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Allied invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944, marked a critical turning point in the European theater of World War II. The massive landing on France's coast had been meticulously planned for three years, and the Allies anticipated a quick and decisive defeat of the German forces. Many of the planners were surprised, however, by the length of time it ultimately took to defeat the Germans. While much has been written about D-day, very little has been written about the crucial period from August to September, immediately after the invasion. In Rückzug, Joachim Ludewig draws on military records from both sides to show that a quick defeat of the Germans was hindered by excessive caution and a lack of strategic boldness on the part of the Allies, as well as by the Germans' tactical skill and energy. This intriguing study, translated from German, not only examines a significant and often overlooked phase of the war, but also offers a valuable account of the conflict from the perspective of the German forces.
Download or read book With Our Backs to Berlin written by Tony le Tissier and published by The History Press. This book was released on 2005-03-24 with total page 173 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based upon interviews with a wide-range of former German Army and SS soldiers, these unique personal episodes vividly depict the extraordinary circumstances of the Third Reich's final days as armies closed in from all sides. Le Tissier's interviews link the brutality of combat with the humanity of the desperate battles.
Download or read book Retreat to the Reich written by Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr. and published by Stackpole Books. This book was released on 2007-01-23 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of Western Front from a German perspective ranges from the collapse of the Normandy line in the summer of 1944 until the Germans were able to bring the Allied juggernaut to a halt on the borders of the Reich itself.
Download or read book The Retreat written by Michael Jones and published by John Murray. This book was released on 2009-11-12 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the moment of crisis in 1941 on the Eastern front, with the forces of Hitler massing on the outskirts of Moscow, the miraculous occurred: Moscow was saved. Yet this turning point was followed by a long retreat, in which Russian forces, inspired by old beliefs in the sacred motherland, pushed back German forces steeled by the vision of the ubermensch, the iron-willed fighter. Many of Russia's 27 million military and civilian deaths occurred in this desperate struggle. In THE RETREAT, Michael Jones, acclaimed author of LENINGRAD, draws upon a mass of new eye-witness testimony from both sides of the conflict to tell, with matchless vividness and comprehensiveness, of the crucial turning point of the Second World War - the moment when the armies of Hitler could go no further - and of the titanic and cruel struggle of two mighty empires.
Download or read book Hitler s Alpine Retreat written by James Wilson and published by Casemate Publishers and Book Distributors. This book was released on 2005 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In this unique book James Wilson demonstrates, using 270 original German postcards from his personal collection, how Hitler's obsession with the beautiful and normally peaceful region of Berchtesgardener Land, and in particular the area known as the Obersalzberg, was used to project a powerful but totally misleading image of this most evil regime. This book offers an extraordinary atmospheric opportunity to view the landscape, buildings (most now long disappeared) and close associates of the Fuhrer. Each of the contemporary images records a unique moment of history which would otherwise have been lost forever."--BOOK JACKET.
Download or read book The German Defeat in the East 1944 45 written by Samuel W. Mitcham and published by Stackpole Books. This book was released on 2007 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The last place a German soldier wanted to be in 1944 was the eastern front. That summer, Stalin hurled millions of men and thousands of tanks and planes against German forces across a broad front. In a series of massive, devastating battles, the Red Army decimated Hitler's Army Group Center in Belorussua, annihilated Army Group South in the Ukraine, and inflicted crushing casualties while taking Rumania and Hungary. By the time Budapest fell to the Soviets in Febuary 1945, the German Army had been slaughtered--and the Third Reich was in its death throes.
Download or read book Fire and Ice written by Vincent Hunt and published by The History Press. This book was released on 2014-10-06 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Hitler ordered the north of Nazi-occupied Norway to be destroyed in a scorched earth retreat in 1944, everything of potential use to the Soviet enemy was destroyed. Harbours, bridges and towns were dynamited and every building torched. Fifty thousand people were forcibly evacuated – thousands more fled to hide in caves in sub-zero temperatures. High above the Arctic Circle, the author crosses the region gathering scorched earth stories: of refugees starving on remote islands, fathers shot dead just days before the war ended, grandparents driven mad by relentless bombing, towns burned to the ground. He explores what remains of the Lyngen Line mountain bunkers in the Norwegian Alps, where the Allies feared a last stand by fanatical Nazis – and where starved Soviet prisoners of war too weak to work were dumped in death camps, some driven to cannibalism. With extracts from the Nuremberg trials of the generals who devastated northern Norway and modern reflections on the mental scars that have passed down generations, this is a journey into the heart of a brutal conflict set in a landscape of intense natural beauty.
Download or read book The Wehrmacht Retreats written by Robert M. Citino and published by University Press of Kansas. This book was released on 2016-09-16 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout 1943, the German army, heirs to a military tradition that demanded and perfected relentless offensive operations, succumbed to the realities of its own overreach and the demands of twentieth-century industrialized warfare. In his new study, prizewinning author Robert Citino chronicles this weakening Wehrmacht, now fighting desperately on the defensive but still remarkably dangerous and lethal. Drawing on his impeccable command of German-language sources, Citino offers fresh, vivid, and detailed treatments of key campaigns during this fateful year: the Allied landings in North Africa, General von Manstein's great counterstroke in front of Kharkov, the German attack at Kasserine Pass, the titanic engagement of tanks and men at Kursk, the Soviet counteroffensives at Orel and Belgorod, and the Allied landings in Sicily and Italy. Through these events, he reveals how a military establishment historically configured for violent aggression reacted when the tables were turned; how German commanders viewed their newest enemy, the U.S. Army, after brutal fighting against the British and Soviets; and why, despite their superiority in materiel and manpower, the Allies were unable to turn 1943 into a much more decisive year. Applying the keen operational analysis for which he is so highly regarded, Citino contends that virtually every flawed German decision-to defend Tunis, to attack at Kursk and then call off the offensive, to abandon Sicily, to defend Italy high up the boot and then down much closer to the toe-had strong supporters among the army's officer corps. He looks at all of these engagements from the perspective of each combatant nation and also establishes beyond a shadow of a doubt the synergistic interplay between the fronts. Ultimately, Citino produces a grim portrait of the German officer corps, dispelling the longstanding tendency to blame every bad decision on Hitler. Filled with telling vignettes and sharp portraits and copiously documented, The Wehrmacht Retreats is a dramatic and fast-paced narrative that will engage military historians and general readers alike.
Download or read book Retreat from Moscow written by David Stahel and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2019-11-19 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A gripping and authoritative revisionist account of the German Winter Campaign of 1941–1942 Germany’s winter campaign of 1941–1942 is commonly seen as its first defeat. In Retreat from Moscow, a bold, gripping account of one of the seminal moments of World War II, David Stahel argues that instead it was its first strategic success in the East. The Soviet counteroffensive was in fact a Pyrrhic victory. Despite being pushed back from Moscow, the Wehrmacht lost far fewer men, frustrated its enemy’s strategy, and emerged in the spring unbroken and poised to recapture the initiative. Hitler’s strategic plan called for holding important Russian industrial cities, and the German army succeeded. The Soviets as of January 1942 aimed for nothing less than the destruction of Army Group Center, yet not a single German unit was ever destroyed. Lacking the professionalism, training, and experience of the Wehrmacht, the Red Army’s offensive attempting to break German lines in countless head-on assaults led to far more tactical defeats than victories. Using accounts from journals, memoirs, and wartime correspondence, Stahel takes us directly into the Wolf’s Lair to reveal a German command at war with itself as generals on the ground fought to maintain order and save their troops in the face of Hitler’s capricious, increasingly irrational directives. Excerpts from soldiers’ diaries and letters home paint a rich portrait of life and death on the front, where the men of the Ostheer battled frostbite nearly as deadly as Soviet artillery. With this latest installment of his pathbreaking series on the Eastern Front, David Stahel completes a military history of the highest order.
Download or read book Europe in Retreat written by Vera Micheles Dean and published by . This book was released on 1941 with total page 512 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Battle for the Ruhr written by Derek S. Zumbro and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Derek Zumbro chronicles this key military campaign from a unique and fresh perspective - that of the defeated German soldiers and civilians caught in the final maelstrom of the war's western front." "Zumbro chronicles the relentless assault on the Ruhr Pocket through German eyes, as the Allied juggernaut battered the region's cities, villages, and homes into submission. He tells of children pressed into service by a desperate Nazi regime - and of even more desperate parents trying to save their sons from sacrifice at the eleventh hour. He also tells of unspeakable conditions suffered by foreign laborers, POWs, and political opponents in the Ruhr Valley and of the mass graves that gave Allied soldiers a grisly new understanding of their enemy." "Zumbro also recounts the story of Field Marshal Walter Model's final hours. His eventual suicide effectively ended the existence of the Wehrmacht's once-formidable Army Group B after being pursued, methodically encircled, and finally destroyed by U.S. and British forces. Through interviews with surviving members of Model's former staff, Zumbro has uncovered the attitudes of beleaguered officers that official records could never convey." "Other interviews with former soldiers reveal the extent to which Allied bombing contributed to the rapid deterioration of German combat effectiveness and tell of civilians begging soldiers to abandon the war. Zumbro's research reveals the identities of specific characters discussed in previous works but never identified, describes the final hours of German officers executed for the loss of the bridge at Remagen, and offers new insight into Model's acquiescence to Hitler in military affairs."--BOOK JACKET.
Download or read book Retreat to Berlin written by Ian Baxter and published by Casemate Publishers. This book was released on 2011-06-02 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A pictorial history of the Nazi retreat from the Western and Eastern Fronts, back to Germany, as World War II came to an end. Drawing on a superb collection of rare and unpublished photographs, this book in the popular Images of War Series provides insight into the last desperate year of the German Army. It analyzes, in dramatic detail, the German retreat from the wastelands of the Eastern and Western Fronts into a bombed and devastated Third Reich to the very gates of Berlin. Accompanied by detailed captions and text, the book shows how Wehrmacht, Waffen-SS, Luftwaffe, Hitlerjugend and Volksturm personnel attempted to defend every yard of ground against the overwhelming Allied forces. As the final months of the war are played out, the reader learns how the Germans fought to the death in a desperate attempt to prevent what Hitler called the “two-fold devastation of the Reich.” Despite the adverse situation in which the German Army was placed, soldiers continued right to the very end, holding their lines under the constant hammer blows of ground and air bombardments. Those German forces that were fortunate enough to survive the overwhelming ferocity of the enemy onslaught, gradually streamed back to fight on home soil until they were either destroyed or were driven around a devastated Berlin.
Download or read book Blood and Steel 2 written by Donald E. Graves and published by . This book was released on 2015-06-30 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Overwhelmed by the strength of the Allied air and ground forces, following the D-Day landings and subsequent bitter fighting in Normandy, the Germans were compelled to abandon their efforts to hold France and much of the Low Countries and retreat to the Rhine.??The Wehrmacht Archive helps reveal the experience of German soldiers and armed forces personnel as they withdrew through a remarkable collection of translated original orders, diaries, letters, after-action reports and other documentation. ??The book also draws upon Allied technical evaluations of weapons, vehicles and equipment, as well as transcripts of prisoner of war interrogations. The reader will learn from official documents about the Germans' efforts to cope with Allied air and artillery superiority, create new tactical methods for all arms and maintain discipline in the face of superior numbers.
Download or read book Death of the Wehrmacht written by Robert M. Citino and published by University Press of Kansas. This book was released on 2007-10-22 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For Hitler and the German military, 1942 was a key turning point of World War II, as an overstretched but still lethal Wehrmacht replaced brilliant victories and huge territorial gains with stalemates and strategic retreats. In this major reevaluation of that crucial year, Robert Citino shows that the German army's emerging woes were rooted as much in its addiction to the "war of movement"-attempts to smash the enemy in "short and lively" campaigns-as they were in Hitler's deeply flawed management of the war. From the overwhelming operational victories at Kerch and Kharkov in May to the catastrophic defeats at El Alamein and Stalingrad, Death of the Wehrmacht offers an eye-opening new view of that decisive year. Building upon his widely respected critique in The German Way of War, Citino shows how the campaigns of 1942 fit within the centuries-old patterns of Prussian/German warmaking and ultimately doomed Hitler's expansionist ambitions. He examines every major campaign and battle in the Russian and North African theaters throughout the year to assess how a military geared to quick and decisive victories coped when the tide turned against it. Citino also reconstructs the German generals' view of the war and illuminates the multiple contingencies that might have produced more favorable results. In addition, he cites the fatal extreme aggressiveness of German commanders like Erwin Rommel and assesses how the German system of command and its commitment to the "independence of subordinate commanders" suffered under the thumb of Hitler and chief of staff General Franz Halder. More than the turning point of a war, 1942 marked the death of a very old and traditional pattern of warmaking, with the classic "German way of war" unable to meet the challenges of the twentieth century. Blending masterly research with a gripping narrative, Citino's remarkable work provides a fresh and revealing look at how one of history's most powerful armies began to founder in its quest for world domination.
Download or read book Daughter of the Reich written by Louise Fox and published by Exisle Publishing. This book was released on 2006-04 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a story of an ordinary girl from Germany who became caught up in the inner workings of the Nazi war machine. Louise Fox had grown up while the Nazis steadily took full control of the country and like so many of her age group Nazism was considered to be just normal. As a teenager she was first involved in the effort to provide anti-aircraft equipment for the Luftwaffe and to kit out Rommel for the North African campaign. She was a hard worker and was promoted to the rank of captain in the Luftwaffe’s supreme command headquarters in Potsdam, near Berlin. She caught Herman Goering’s eye when he awarded her a medal for bravery in the capture of a downed British airman, and was sent to work in the Air Ministry making appointments and assisting Goering. As the war intensified on two fronts Louise was transferred back to Potsdam to manage the huge task of securing appropriate ammunition supplies for the Luftwaffe, a job she held for the rest of the war.She married an airman who three weeks later was killed in action. Louise was posted with her colleagues to the Eastern front and escaped with them all in Hitler’s ‘strategic retreat’ ahead of the Red Army. In the last few months of the war she was captured and imprisoned by the Americans. She escaped and began an event-filled 1,000-kilometre hike to the safety of relatives. Life was difficult after the war and Louise entered the black market and was imprisoned. She eventually found a pen pal in Tasmania and much to the amazement of friends migrated there – selling Volkswagens to make a living. She still lives in Australia.Goering was the Deputy Vice Chancellor of the Third Reich. Louise was his secretary.
