Blood and Steel: The Wehrmacht Archive, Normandy 1944Ordered by Hitler 'to hold, or to die' and to fight 'to the last grenade and round', the German army was a formidable opponent during the 1944 Normandy campaign. This book depicts the experience of that army in Normandy through its own records and documentation.
Blood and Steel, The Wehrmacht Archive : Normandy 1944 is an informative and colourful collection of translated original orders, diaries, letters, after action reports, and even jokes, as well as Allied technical evaluations of German weapons, vehicles and equipment and transcripts of prisoner of war interrogations. The translations also feature comments from wartime Allied intelligence officers which provide an insight into how the German army was regarded by its opponents at the time.
As you read the landser''s letters to wives and families in Germany, his forbidden diaries, his gripes about food, officers, and shortages of just about everything, the daily life of the German soldier in the long and bloody summer of 1944 will come to life. You will also learn from official documents about his superiors' efforts to cope with Allied air and artillery superiority, create new tactical methods for all arms and maintain discipline in the face of overwhelming odds with both exaggerated claims of miraculous new 'Vengeance Weapons' and threats of the ultimate sanction for desertion or surrender. |
Contents
| 1 | |
Defending Normandy Extracts from the Telephone Log of Seventh Army and Fifth Panzer Army June July and August 1944 | 44 |
The German Experience of Battle Soldiers Diaries and Memories | 86 |
The Individual Soldiers Experience Letters to and from Home | 105 |
Tactics General Directions | 117 |
Infantry Weapons and Tactics | 121 |
AntiTank and Artillery Weapons and Tactics | 129 |
Armoured Vehicles and Tactics | 137 |
The Training of Senior Officers | 166 |
Shortages of Medical Supplies Weapons and Equipment | 178 |
Discipline Morale Propaganda and Tensions Between the Army and the SS | 187 |
Casualties and Casualty Replacement | 205 |
The Effects of Allied Artillery and Air Bombardment | 214 |
Miscellaneous and Humour Such as it Was | 222 |
The Wehrmacht Retreats from Dieppe August 1944 A French View | 226 |
Back Cover | 228 |
Common terms and phrases
12th SS Panzer 1st SS 21st Panzer Division 331st Infantry Division 3rd Parachute Division 89th Infantry Division Air Force aircraft Allied ammunition anti-tank guns Armoured Division Army Group Army Intelligence Summary artillery fire assault guns August Battalion bombing British Canadian casualties Chief of Staff Colonel combat Company counter-attack crew defence divisional commander Document Eberbach enemy tanks equipment Field Marshal fighter fighter-bombers fighting formation forward front Generalfeldmarschall Generalleutnant heavy Infantry Division Intelligence Officer’s Comments ISUM Jagdpanthers July Lieutenant-Colonel Luftwaffe LXXXIV Corps Marshal von Kluge mortar NCOs night Normandy Obergruppenführer officers ofthe operation Panther Panzer Grenadier Regiment Panzer Group West Panzerfaust Panzerschreck Parachute Corps Parachute Regiment penetrated personnel platoon positions rear reconnaissance road sector September 1944 Seventh Army situation soldiers SS Panzer Corps SS Panzer Division SS Panzer Grenadier supply Tactics Tiger troops units vehicles Waffen SS Wartime Intelligence Officer’s Wehrmacht withdraw