Third Reich Victorious
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*23. Fritz Bayerlein, Panzer Sieg (Allstein Verlag, Frankfurt-am-Main, 1954), 244. A brilliant Bavarian, Bayerlein, served as Chief of the German Army General Staff 1950-56, personally selected by Rommel.
*24. II SS Panzer Corps’ two divisions had been the 1st SS Panzer Division “Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler” and 2nd SS Panzer Division “Das Reich.” The former had originated, as its name indicated, as Hitler’s bodyguard detail. Hitler’s assassination made the honorific somewhat indelicate. It was renamed 1st SS Panzer Division “Deutschland,” and as such accompanied the 2nd SS Panzer Division “Das Reich” into the meeting engagement at Szrensk. However, its men still wore their old AH armbands into battle. After the war, Rommel demobilized the SS fighting arm and incorporated its most distinguished units into the army in 1947. With that act the last element of the SS and its infamous twin runes passed into history. Nigel Bromfield, History of the Waffen SS (Caulfield and Michaels Ltd, London, 1969), 290-95.
*25. Hasso von Manteuffel, “Meeting Engagement at Szrensk,” Armor, March 1963, 34. Although von Manteuffel characterized the engagement as a tactical victory, Soviet accounts were more correct in depicting it as a drawn fight. It was an operational and strategic victory of the first order, however, in that it stopped Zhukov’s last chance to rescue his tank armies in what history has called the great “Rommel Pocket,” to the intense annoyance of von Manstein whose brainchild it was. Rommel could not help dominating the public’s impression of the war in the East as he had in North Africa and France, and the name “Rommel Pocket,” coined by a soldier at the front, stuck. Although heaped with honors by Rommel after the war, von Manstein retired immediately.
*26. Oskar von Blutfeld, Casualties of the Second World War (Greenhill Books, London, 1989), 737. Citing German and Soviet sources, this German military historian asserts that the Soviets lost over 4,000 tanks, 3,000 aircraft, and 536,000 men in the fighting west of the Vistula alone, including 253,000 prisoners. German losses amounted to 102,000. For all of Operation Suvorov, Soviet losses exceeded 1.4 million, and German losses were 339,000, including 47,000 prisoners.
*27. Zhukov was Stalin’s scapegoat for the disaster of Operation Suvorov. He spent the next eight years in a concentration camp near Magadan until Stalin’s death. He was rehabilitated in 1956 under the De-Stalinization Campaign and has taken his proper place in Soviet military history, his defeat in Poland balanced against his numerous earlier victories, which drove the Germans out of the Soviet Union. He died quietly in retirement in 1960, his health broken by his treatment in the camps.
September 12, 1939: Force H sorties against Lütjens’s Carrier Group III. Note the antiquated Swordfish torpedo bomber circling over the fleet—Lütjens called them “death traps.”
Author’s collection
Before the battle of Scapa Flow, 1830 hours, August 31, 1939: Little did the crews of these British warships suspect that within twelve hours thick smoke would hide the horror of dying ships and dead men from watching eyes—the first of many harsh blows for the British Home Fleet.
Author’s collection
Kriegsmarine torpedo-boats, such as these of the 7th Flotilla, escorted the SS invasion forces across the Channel in 1940.
U.S. Army Art Collection
General Erich von Manstein, whose plans led to the defeat of both France and Britain.Author’s collection
Major General Bernard Montgomery, wearing his famous black beret with the two cap badges.Author’s collection
German troops and captured British equipment at Dunkirk.
Author’s collection
British garrison troops captured at Dover by the first wave of invading German troops.
Author’s collection
RAF air crew on the eve of the Battle of Britain. Their confidence was quickly shattered by the Luftwaffe onslaught.
Author’s collection
Results of the Luftwaffe’s devastating attack on London on July 5, 1940.
Author’s collection
Adolf Hitler’s victory in the east made him Germany’s greatest warlord.
U.S. Army Center for Military History
Sketch of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel made shortly after he received his baton.
U.S. Army Center for Military History
Troops of the (technically independent) Egyptian Army bring up a howitzer to help prop up 8th Army HQ’s position for the Alamein battle, around El Imayid.
Part of Brigadier Godfrey’s “motley force” hastily deployed to cover the sprawling camps around Amiriya on July 6.
Benito Mussolini driving triumphantly eastward down the Halfaya Pass in early July, on his way to yet another blazing row with his German allies.
Horse-drawn wagon delivering supplies to the 101st Jäger Division in the Caucasus. Difficult terrain and weak logisitcal services limited operations by all the combatants in the Caucasus campaign.
U.S. National Archives
Machine-gunners of the Soviet 47th Mountain Division who died defending Batumi against the Turkish 8th Division on September 5, 1942.
U.S. Army Art Collection
Commander of the Soviet 53rd Army visiting the 8th Indian Division during Operation Pluto. Cooperation between the Russians and their allies was hampered by language difficulties and pervasive mistrust.
U.S. National Archives
Axis air attack on Allied ships off Gela, Sicily, July 1943.
Author’s collection
Right to left, Lt. Gen. George S. Patton (7th Army), Maj. Gen. Omar Bradley (II Corps), and Maj. Gen. Troy Middleton (45th Infantry Division) confer during the fighting in Sicily.
Author’s collection
German night fighters catch and destroy a British bomber in a raid over Berlin.
U.S. Army Art Collection
Thousands of 88mm antiaircraft guns played a vital role in the defense of the skies over the Reich.
U.S. Army Art Collection
B-17 being attacked by a Luftwaffe Fw 190 fighter. Even in the best of conditions in 1943, it required ten sorties by German pistonengined fighters such as this to defeat a single B-17.
Author’s collection
An Me 262. Turbojet technology gave Germany an opportunity to achieve a qualitative lead over the Allies’ quantitative superiority.
Author’s collection
Professor Werner Heisenberg, Germany’s top atom-bomb physicist.Author’s collection
Neils Bohr, world-renowned Danish physicist and early mentor for Heisenberg. Author’s collection
Burning buildings in London, believed to be located 1.5 miles from the center of the atom bomb blast.
Author’s collection
German Heinkel 177 bomber of the type used for atomic attacks on London and Moscow.
Author’s collection
Marshal G. K. Zhukov at the time of his assumption as Secretary General of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
Author’s collection
German infantry on the defensive—one of the most formidable obstacles in the world. Rebuilt and equipped with large numbers of antitank guns under Rommel’s guidance, the German infantry divisions in their in-depth defenses bled the Red Army to death in that awful winter of 1945.
U.S. Army Art Collection
German 88mm gun in action in central Poland. The suspension of the bomber campaign against Germany by the armistice in Normandy allowed thousands of guns to be moved from the Reich to the Eastern Front.
U.S. Army Art Collection
Burnt-out Soviet T-34 tanks littered the flat farmlands of central Poland after the destruction of four tank armies in Field Marshal von Manstein’s classic replay of the Battle of Tannenberg on a vast scale in February 1945.
U.S. Army Art Collection
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