This book adds to the popular and impressive Images of War Series. This book graphically shows the exhaustion and resignation of the soldiers who realized that they were fighting on past defeat in the most pointless form of combat – Highly Recommended
NAME: Images of War, Hitler's Defeat on the Eastern Front 1944-1945, Rare Photographs From Wartime Archives FILE: R2939 AUTHOR: Hans Seidler PUBLISHER: Pen and Sword BINDING: soft back PAGES: 157 PRICE: £14.99 GENRE: Non Fiction SUBJECT: WWII, World War Two, World War II, Second World War, Blitz Krieg, all-arms, mobile warfare, mechanized infantry, armoured infantry carriers, tracked vehicles, support vehicles, command vehicles, missile carriers, battlefield ambulance, engineering vehicles, retreat, defeat
ISBN: 1-84415-977-9
IMAGE: B2939.jpg BUYNOW: tinyurl.com/y2o6k4p8 LINKS: DESCRIPTION: This book adds to the popular and impressive Images of War Series. This book graphically shows the exhaustion and resignation of the soldiers who realized that they were fighting on past defeat in the most pointless form of combat – Highly Recommended The final months of WWII saw the Germans being forced back into their national boundaries with no sign that the Allies would stop until they occupied all of Germany. What the Germans did not realize was that the Allies had already agreed to accept only unconditional surrender by Germany. In the West the German commanders increasingly saw their task as falling back slowly in the West but fighting for every inch in the East in the happy false belief that the Western Allies would joint them in fighting the Soviets. There is capable text and excellent captioning of the many rare photographs. A picture may equal a thousand words, but this book contains in its images the descent into chaos for the German people. The level of destruction, affect on civilians and the stress on the soldiers leaps from the pages. Where the companion book in the series on the defeat in the West shows this, the Eastern Front carried a whole additional terror of a conflict of animal savagery. In this book the period of conflict goes to the time of surrender, but for these soldiers the war did not end in 1945. Where the Western Allies genuinely tried to send home German POWs as rapidly as possible, Stalin showed no such urgency and had he lived longer it is possible that almost no German POW would have arrived home from Soviet PoW camps. Initially, only German POWs of Socialist or Communist belief were returned, a very tiny number. The last POWs suffered on to 1953 and in total only 8% of German POWs in Soviet hands survived, many in very poor health. The rest died from a mixture of starvation, overwork in labour gangs, sickness, and casual brutality. The German troops realized that this could be their fate and the wild eyed determination to fight on and avoid capture shows in the faces on these photographs.