With Recce at Arnhem
Determined to do his bit Des Evans absconded from a reserved occupation and joined the newly formed Reconnaissance Corps. He saw action in North Africa and Italy before being evacuated back to England with pneumonia in early 1944. Fully recovered he volunteered as a wireless operator with 1st Airborne Reconnaissance Squadron and after parachute training joined C Troop before the ill-fated but glorious attempt to seize the Rhine Bridge at Arnhem. Des vividly describes the intense action that followed the drop. Ambushed twice and badly wounded he was made a POW and eventually succeeded in escaping. Fresh first-hand accounts of [...]
Weapons of the Battle of the Bulge
The Battle of the Bulge, also known as the Ardennes Offensive, was the last major German offensive campaign on the Western Front during World War II. The offensive was carried out from 16 December 1944 to 25 January 1945. It was launched through the densely forested Ardennes region between Belgium and Luxembourg spearheaded by the feared Tiger tank. Although the Germans managed to begin their offensive with complete surprise and enjoyed some initial successes, they were not able to seize the initiative on the Western Front and would be pushed back to their starting lines as the weather cleared. Like [...]
Walking D-Day
Paul Reed's latest battlefield walking guide covers the site of the largest amphibious invasion of all time, the first step in the Allied liberation of France and the rest of northwest Europe. The places associated with the landings on the Normandy coast on 6 June 1944 are among the most memorable that a battlefield visitor can explore. They give a fascinating insight into the scale and complexity of the Allied undertaking and the extent of the German defences – and into the critical episodes in the fighting that determined whether the Allies would gain a foothold or be thrown back into the sea. All the most important sites are featured, from Pegasus Bridge, Merville Battery, Ouistrehem and Longues Battery to Juno, Gold, Omaha and Utah Beaches, Pointe du Hoc and Sainte-Mère-Église. There are twelve walks, and each one is prefaced by a historical section describing in vivid detail what happened in each location and what remains to be seen. Information on the many battlefield monuments and the military cemeteries is included, and there are over 120 illustrations. Walking D-Day introduces the visitor not only to the places where the Allies landed and first clashed with the Germans defenders but to the Normandy landscape over which the critical battles that decided the course of the war were fought.
Waffen-SS in Normandy, 1944
In June 1944, Operation OVERLORD, the greatest ever amphibious invasion, initially overwhelmed German Normandy defences. To attempt to stabilise the situation, Hitler deployed his elite Waffen-SS divisions to avert the crisis. This classic Images of War book describes how the formidable Leibstandarte, Das Reich, Hitlerjugend, Hohenstaufen, and the Frundsberg SS divisions with supporting Wehrmacht divisions fought fanatically despite facing overwhelming enemy airpower and determined well-led Allied armies. Mounting losses and supply and fuel problems culminated in the Falaise Pocket defeat, when twenty-five out of the thirty-eight German division were completely destroyed. As a result, the remaining Waffen-SS units had to [...]
Walcheren – Operation Infatuate
Describes the fierce campaign, codenamed INFATUATE, mounted in November 1944 to clear the way through to the port of Antwerp. The book describes the extraordinary courage of the Germans who fought to the bitter end.
Voices from the Battle of the Bulge
After the Allies broke out from Normandy in July 1944, they drove quickly through the rest of France and were threatening the German border by the autumn. To halt the Allies, Hitler’s last throw of the dice was the massive gamble of a counter-attack in the Ardennes. Sensing the Allies were fatigued, with stretched supply lines after their rapid advance, Hitler presented to his commanders an ambitious plan to force two Panzer armies through the Allied forces, to take the vital port of Antwerp. He intended to exploit the differences between the British and American commands and separate their forces, [...]
Villers-Bocage
Operation Perch, the complete account Villers-Bocage remains lodged in the imagination of many readers as a costly and controversial defeat for the British Army in Normandy. This point of view is entirely reliant on just ten minutes of fighting plucked from a two-day battle. This account sets out to rectify that view. Based on prolific first-hand information, including extensive interviews with veterans of the battle, this book explores every facet of the available information, subjecting it to in-depth analysis. Far from being the crushing defeat popularised in many histories, which tend to rely on German propaganda, Villers-Bocage can, in fact, [...]
Utah Beach
The battle of Omaha occupies a prevalent place in our collective memory due to the tragic events that took place there on June 6, 1944. The beach code-named Utah, located at the base of the Cotentin Peninsula, has attracted less attention. Wrongly. According to General Eisenhower, the U-Force mission was the most complex and risky because of its distance from the beach and the presence of many German divisions. The 4th Infantry division and the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions had to fight hard to secure the Utah area. The scale of the losses alone - 3,500 men in total [...]
The Waffen-SS in Normandy
For many, the Waffen-SS soldier represents the archetype of the combatant, if not the warrior: well-armed, well-trained, possessing intelligence in combat, imbued with political and ideological fanaticism, he is an elite soldier par excellence, even if a lack of scruples casts a long shadow. However, is this picture true? In the case of the Battle of Normandy, opinions diverged, not only among today's historians, but also amongst the German generals at the time. In all, the Waffen-SS fielded six divisions during the Battle of Normandy, as well as two heavy battalions of Tiger tanks. But they were by no means [...]