What Are You Reading?

.. I recall reading that the author wanted to top Paul Carrell's classic ..but I don't think he has ..the two works are very similar....he's also let himself get 'side-tracked' by the events of 20 July in my view....Remer, Goebbels etc ...

 

You're right ! I've just waded through that chapter in a frame of mind - everything was going swimmingly up until then......

It's still a good effort, but doesn't really supplant Carell for the invasion and Florentin for the Falaise Gap.....

 

Iam reading Germans in Normandy as well & it a great read so far
It great to hear the store from the Germans side
From what ive read i think the German talk on board the mistake at D Day & that why the British had a hard time at Arnham

 

New books.... Aahhhh!

Hold the Westwall/Timm Haasler

Hot Motors, Cold Feet/Helmut Günther

 

"Gotterdammerung 1945" by Russ Schneider. On a side note, after struggling for an hour or so with the print I finally broke down and bought some reading glasses. Now I feel old.

 

Fields of Deception; Britain's Wartime Bombing Decoys by Colin Dobinson. Covers the story of Britain's Starfish decoys from start to finish, and includes a gazetteer of ALL sites known to have been built in the UK.

 

..picked this up last week from the Mont Ormel (Hill 262) memorial...relates the story of the 1st Polish Armoured Div in Normandy and especially in the Falaise-Chambois pocket ..260 page softback packed with rare pics and accounts from the German side too.....

 

1.A republished version of The last Ditch by David Lampe on Britain´s secret resistance and the nazi invasion plan ( originally published 1968 )

2.The memoirs of Field-Marshall Kesselring

 

Just bought this and have spent the day reading the small bios of the BoB pilots. Great to see that so many have photos.



And am just finishing "Ocean Bridge - The History of RAF Ferry Command" by Carl Christie. A great read.

 

..rare copy of Hans Schäufler's "Das Buch vom Panzerregiment 35 - So lebten und so starben sie " which I found on abebooks.de.

Chock full of first-hand accounts of fighting in the Panther ...

coinciding happily with my acquisition of the current issue of Heimdal's 39-45 Magazine with a long first-hand account of the activities of I./SS.Pz.Rgt 2 around Kolomak (south-west of Kharkov) during September 1943. The article is 10-pages written by Panther driver Heinrich Warnick of I./SS-Pz.Rgt.2. He describes a Russian attack by more than 80 T-34s on the Regiment. As the Russian tanks closed to within 400m of where the Panthers were semi-dug in, just turrets and upper hulls exposed, Warnick at the controls of Panther '335' , was unable to fire up the engine following two days of heavy rain. Immobilised, '335' took several direct hits, including one which knocked out the loader. Under fire Warnick was forced to clamber from the driver's station to take over the loader's duties and in the course of the next 30 minutes proceeded to knock out 23 T-34's before the crew ran out of munitions and was forced to bail out in the midst of the attacking Russian infantry!

 

Just picked up at Barnes & Noble

Flying Aces
Bomber Missions

If you like aviation art (paintings)(WW 2) of real occurances with "snippets" of history along with them, I would recomend both.

 

Just finished " German security and Police soldier 1939-45 " by Gordon Williamson ( Osprey ) just to tease my appetite and next

Robert Jackson " Air war over France 1939-40 "

Victor Bingham " Blitzed- Battle of France 1939-40 "

Nice price 10€ each...

 

I just finished "Band of Brothers" by Stephen Ambrose.... for the 400th time.

I'm in the middle of D-Day by the same author.

I'd like to get a book on just the 82nd Airborne for once, anyone got a good idea about that?

 

Well, if you like chunky books (800+ pages) then try this:

Amazon.com: All American, All The Way: The Combat History Of The 82nd Airborne Division In World War II: Books: Phil Nordyke

 

Bought this on the ferry back from France yesterday.

UNFREE FRENCH - Richard Vinen - Penguin Books

The Unfree French: Life Under the Occupation Richard Vinen.

 

Also thumbing through this cofee-table type book.
Amazon.com: Undiscovered France: Books: Brigitte Tilleray

 

just started reading Germany's panther tank by Thomas L. Jentz

 

Picked up Anthony Beevor's Stalingrad. Great and great again!

 

"Hitler's Plot to Kill the Big Three" by Laslo Havas

I've just finished reading this book and I wonder if it is real or fiction.

 

I just finished reading: Frankel, Nat and Smith, Larry, Patton's Best: An Informal History of the 4th Armored Division, (Hawthorne Books, Inc.: New York, 1978).

The book is the wartime memoir of Nat Frankel who served as a tank commander in the 8th Armored Bn., 4th Armored Division. The book is heavily laden with irritatingly long philosophical ramblings about war, Patton, and some of Frankel's fellow soldiers. To make matters worse these ramblings frequently devolve into disjointed psycho- babble which detracts greatly from what little of actual interest to a WWII aficionado might be found in the book. In short, the book is heavy on the prose, and very light on the descriptions of actual combat or the campaigns of the 4th Armored Division. But wait, it get worse.

Have you ever been reading a book and found yourself saying "That ain't right!" over and over again? Why would a veteran write his memoir without bothering to get his facts straight? There are so many errors that I cannot enumerate them all. Suffice it to say that according to Frankel the 4th A.D. took part in major actions that occurred not only in the 3rd Army zone of operations, but those that took place clear across the 6th Army Group in the zone of the 1st French Army. Not a single book I consulted, including The Fourth Armored Division: From The Beach to Bavaria, by Capt. Kenneth Koyen, supports this claim. Why embellish the already extraordinary combat record of the division with such outlandish claims?

Many of the technical details suffer at Frankel's hands, as well. In all my years, I've never heard a tanker refer to the tracks of his vehicle as "treadings" or for that matter, seen it written in a book. Frankel doesn't just slipup and do this once or twice, he does it over and over. According to Frankel, the American half-track had much more robust armor than the M5 tank, and as a result, could stand up to anti-tank fire much better. It makes you wonder: Was this guy ever actually in combat? The damn half-track armor worked only about half the time. It would let a heavy machinegun round, fired a close range, or a 20mm round in, but not let it out. So it just bounced around in there for a while. Twang, twang, twang!

OK, the book is a complete waste of time. The only thing new I learned while reading it was that this Frankel guy is a lying, self-absorbed jackass either that or he had early on-set senile dementia, and his co-author Smith just wrote whatever the hell he felt like.

Five-Zero-Nan