What is everyone reading on WW2?

[Phil Nix]

I have just finished "We Shall Never Surrender" Wartime Diaries 1939-45 Edited by Penelope Middelboe Donald Fry and Christopher Grace
Phil Nix

[Phil Nix]

I have just finished "We Shall Never Surrender" Wartime Diaries 1939-45 Edited by Penelope Middelboe Donald Fry and Christopher Grace
Phil Nix

[Phil Nix]

I have just finished "We Shall Never Surrender" Wartime Diaries 1939-45 Edited by Penelope Middelboe Donald Fry and Christopher Grace
Phil Nix

[Orwell1984]

Interesting accounts not often available in English.

[wmcdowell1]

Finished The Marines War by Fletcher Pratt.Written in 1948 , nothing very new or eye opening.

[kamehouse]

Just finished "Normandiefront" by Milano and Conner.Interesting read but not as good as I thought it would be.Still,it is a good addition to the litterature regarding D-day and the battle of Normandy.
I have now started "Hitler's empire ,nazi rule in occupied Europe" by Mark Mazower.
Over 600 pages so it should keep me busy for a while.

[ohrdruf]

I understand that PEN & SWORD, Barnsley, is bringing out in English translation next year Armin Böttger's "Im Panzer ich habe überlebt" (German publisher Flachsig).

Böttger was a radio operator in a Mark IV and saw action in Russia and Poland in 1943/1944. He was wounded and badly burned in a skirmish on 4 August 1944 and spent the rest of the war attempting to avoid being classified "fit for the front" with the infantry. His unit was 12.Squardon/Panzer Regt.24/24.Panzer Div.

A native of Freiburg/Breisgau, a tennis player and good skier, his story begins in 1940 when he volunteered for the Wehrmacht to get his school-leaving certificate without sitting the examination. In 1941 he volunteered for the panzers "because it was better fighting in one than being in a trench". Because of his health he avoided being at the front from 1941-1943, and his main work in those years was on panzer-transporter duties to France, Italy and Russia.

Böttger was an unpolitical soldier who turned down the chance to go into the SS-panzers because the SS "seemed to be just the next stage of the Jungvolk/Hitler Jugend". The book gives a good general impression of what it was like to drive and fight in a panzer, and what panzer operations looked like from the point of view of the serving soldier. Böttger finished the war in the rank of Unteroffizer: he wore the EKII, Panzer Combat badge and Wound Badge. His passion was photography, as is evidenced by the more than 250 contemporary photographs, many in colour, taken during the war. After the war he was a Professor at Düsseldorf in Odontology.

I have the German version of the book which I recommend highly.

[panzerhan]

First, I finished Jean Paul Pallud's "Battle of the Bulge: Then and Now". What an achievement; I advice that book to all the visitors to the Ardennes' battlefields. Only downside is it's weight (It is 3 kilos) and dimensions. I was in the Ardennes last month and -sadly- without a car. Sometimes I had to hitchike and with this book, sometimes it was really unbearable. I wish I would bring another book I read before "The Devil's Adjutant: Jochen Peiper, Panzer Leader"
by Major General Michael Reynolds. That would be perfect.

Just after that, now, I started "Das Reich: March of the 2. SS Panzer Division Through France" by Max Hastings.

[Attrition]

Just been browsing Stahel's Operation Barbarossa which arrived today.

[Attrition]

Stahel's Operation Barbarossa has arrived. Having flicked through it it looks interesting. Footnote 16, p. 444 caught my eye, dismissing K J Arnold's 'Die Wehrmacht und die Besatzungspolitik....' with 'Such an argument has no factual credibility and should remain sidelined.'

[Richard Hargreaves]

Very interesting book. Looking forward to his volume on Kiev which is out in a couple of months.

[Attrition]

Me too. I hope that it answers the sceptics. If it does it will be interesting reading.

[mars]

First, I finished Jean Paul Pallud's "Battle of the Bulge: Then and Now". What an achievement; I advice that book to all the visitors to the Ardennes' battlefields. Only downside is it's weight (It is 3 kilos) and dimensions. I was in the Ardennes last month and -sadly- without a car. Sometimes I had to hitchike and with this book, sometimes it was really unbearable. I wish I would bring another book I read before "The Devil's Adjutant: Jochen Peiper, Panzer Leader"
by Major General Michael Reynolds. That would be perfect.

Just after that, now, I started "Das Reich: March of the 2. SS Panzer Division Through France" by Max Hastings.

I agree, anyone wants to learn about the battle of bulge in English, he should read two books, "Battle of the Bulge: Then and Now" which mainly from German point of view and "The battle of the bulge" by Hugh Cole which is mainly from American point of view.

[nebelwerferXXX]

Just after that, now, I started "Das Reich: March of the 2. SS Panzer Division Through France" by Max Hastings.

I have this book. It's only a pocketbook-size. The book have an appendix showing the table of organization of Das Reich in June 1944 with ToE and troop strengths.

[JeroenPollentier]

I just finished the second volume of Kershaw's Hitler biography. It was an interesting read, although you don't really get to know what kind of person Hitler really was, as someone pointed out in another thread. But of course it remains questionable whether that would be possible with the available sources.

Anyway, I was suprised to read in the epilogue that, in Kershaw's view, German chauvinism and racism caused a world war no less than two times. I thought that the view that WW1 was to blame on Germay alone was no longer tenable.