DEATH OF THE WEHRMACHT: THE GERMAN CAMPAIGNS OF 1942 PDF, EPUB, EBOOK Robert M. Citino | 432 pages | 08 Mar 2011 | University Press of Kansas | 9780700617913 | English | Kansas, United States Death of the Wehrmacht: The German Campaigns of 1942 PDF Book Bock couldn't know it, but a single pound bomb delivered from a Stuka had just struck a Soviet ammunition convoy. It is a school exercise, in other words, utterly divorced. From the perspective of the battle of annihilation the only perspective most German officers had Kiev was a master stroke, another in a long se- ries of brilliant concentric operations, and one should be very careful in using the word blunder to describe any battle that takes an entire enemy army group prisoner. He shows that technical superiority is no guarantee of victory and that understanding past campaigns is essential to anyone who wishes to grasp, and survive, modern warfare. How they dealt with those problems should not surprise anyone even passably acquainted with the long-term pattern of German military operations. Hadn't the king given him a new title after that one? Stalin was emboldened by the signs of Ger- man collapse to extend the offensive to Northwest Front. After their promising starts, the German offensives of would give birth to twins: Stalingrad and El Alamein. Even the Panzer divisions were straight leg infantry by this time. An army that habitually moved fast was a half about to kick the tempo up one more notch. Equally impressive was the invasion of Denmark and Norway 1. On its face, the Prussian command system might seem to be a recipe for chaos, a free-for-all in which each division, corps, and army com- mander fought his own private war. Not only had the Germans been thwarted in front of Moscow, they'd nearly been destroyed. The next year continued the pattern. A dull explosion sounded, and the hatch lid flew open. By the end of June, over 5 million Soviet reservists had received the call-up, and a few weeks after famously declaring the campaign ended, General Haider was writing an equally famous lament in his war diary entry for August What dis- tinguished the activity of the interwar German army the Reichswehr until , then renamed the Wehrmacht was that it was not trying to discover anything new. As German ground forces advanced, they would, as always up to this point in the war, have the advantage of operating under an irresistible umbrella of air power. By January , Soviet momentum had worn down. When fully mobilized, it numbered nearly 10,, men. In fact, it should have been a time for an agonizing reappraisal. Death of the Wehrmacht: The German Campaigns of 1942 Writer Yugoslav soldiers German troops smashing their way into the Soviet Union, Bewegnngskrieg The Germans would crown the successful fighting in the Crimea with the storming of Sevastopol German assault troops on the north shore of Severnaya Bay, June Wehrmacht infantry enjoying some badly needed down-time in the Belbek valley, Sevastopol The two adversaries at Kharkov, May A well-drilled German machine gun team in position at Kharkov General Erwin Rommel in the field in June Figures 14 and British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data is available. A large portion of Soviet industry had relocated beyond the Urals, safely out of German reach. Jumping off at a. Equally impressive was the invasion of Denmark and Norway 1. Two-hundred meters away, by one or the collective farm's buildings, they leave the street and turn north. June 6, the Allies launch the largest combined aerial and amphibious assault in modern Their commanders, too, were not the hapless incompetents of the summer, but a cadre of younger, active men G. De- spite their ex post facto protests, there was a great deal of support from the staff and command echelons for the turn into the Ukraine. As always, the Wehrmacht's maneu- ver scheme had been a thing of beauty, completely baffling Soviet at- tempts to counter it. Motorized Di- vision, the Grossdeutschland Motorized Infantry Regiment, and the Hermann Goring Panzer Regiment, had the shortest hop to Belgrade, a straight shot heading almost due south. Motorized Infan- try Regiment, and the 73rd Infantry Division. It is no exaggeration to say that Operation Punishment had won the Yugoslav campaign in the first twenty minutes. It had been designed overnight, the. It is an understatement to say that the Germans had "underestimated" the size of the Soviet army. Overview For Hitler and the German military, was a key turning point of World War II, as an overstretched but still lethal Wehrmacht replaced brilliant victories and huge territorial gains with stalemates and strategic retreats. These approaches, which praise this decision as "correct" and that one as "wrong" with all the assurance of 19 a sixteenth-century reformer parsing Scripture, are essentially ahis- torical as important as they may be to the training of soldiers and officers. It, too, was a coalition force: a pair of German Panzer Divisions grouped together into the Afrika Korps ; the German 90th Light Division, a motorized formation especially equipped and trained for desert conditions; and a mass of Italian divisions, a few of them mo- torized Ariete armored division, for example , but most straight leg infantry. Garry Clifford Jacob W. A war-winning strategy? What it all added up to was that the Wehrmacht's losses in men and materiel, even in victory, were far heavier than they had been in previ- 72 ous campaigns. It ex-. Subscriber Account active since. The Austrians were resurgent, the Russians advancing, if ponderously, from the east, and the French moving on him from the west. In clear and compelling prose, and bringing extensive reading of the German-language literature to bear, Citino focuses on the German view of these campaigns. Clan Fraser. Prussia paid the price at the twin battles of Jena and Auerstadt. Now we have already counted Its conflicts had to unleash a storm against the enemy, pounding it fast and hard. World War, Campaigns 3. Death of the Wehrmacht: The German Campaigns of 1942 Reviews The payoff in front of Kiev had been stunning. With Kleist 1st Panzer Group attacking out of his bridgehead across the Dnieper at Kremenchug on September 12, and with Guderian hurtling down from Roslavl in the north, the two great armored forces met at Lovitsa, forming what we can only call an Uber-Kessel around Kiev. Now we have already counted There were simply too many factors in play: huge forces, complex weaponry, and massive supply requirements, not to mention the friction and fog that were simply part of war in any era. Of course, it did not dissolve, and for this Hitler deserves some share of the credit. The scope and complexity of the war itself mirror the longstanding and deep-seated tensions — both in Europe and Asia — from which the war arose. Directed at a sharp bulge jutting into the German lines between German-held Kharkov and Soviet-held Izyum the "Izyum salient" , it was on the launching pad and ready to go when something unusual happened. He focused his field glasses here, then there, flitting back and forth. As in Operation 25, there was a signal moment at the start of Marita. There was a second major thrust to the south, against Guderian's Panzer Group in front of Tula. Logistics, intelligence, production, manpower: the Germans were having their difficulties in any number of areas by August. On the right wing, Guderian was hammering at the gates of Tula. Army Group Center stood on the brink of dissolution. Prussian troops crossed the French border on August 4 and fought the climactic battle of St. The other was the increasingly chaotic nature of the operation itself. Frederick the Great was the exemplar, perhaps the most aggressive commander of the entire eighteenth cen- tury, and certainly one of the top ten of all time. Here the Soviet force commitment was much stronger, their prepa- rations carried out with at least some degree of foresight. It destroyed hundreds of planes on the ground and made short work of the few disorganized patrols that managed to get into the air. Although most. If means anything to the informed student of World War II, it means the turning point of the war, the year of El Alamein and Stalingrad and, in the Pacific, the 1. Nevertheless, there is something incomplete about a way of war that relies on the shock value of small, highly mobile forces and airpower, that stresses rapidity of victory over all, and that then has a difficult time putting the country it has conquered back together again. The fire doesn't bother the tanks in the least. World War II, as an overstretched but still lethal Wehrmacht replaced brilliant. The Luftwaffe's losses amounted to just two aircraft. Taking it was out of the question, and advancing beyond it was a fantasy. Germany, alreadywar with Great Britain, a conflict at that it tried half-heartedly to end in the summer and fall of , had done nothing but add enemies since then. Here the Prussian army deployed aggressively, far out on a limb to the west and south. The July 3 entry in his war diary contains some of the most famous last words in military history:. Despite the low manpower and poor supply situation, the high command Adolf Hitler, the staffs of the army command and armed forces command, and the chief of the General Staff, General Franz Haider immediately began planning for another offensive round in the Soviet Union.