In this riveting book, Steven Zaloga describes how American foot soldiers faced down Hitler’s elite armored spearhead—the Hitler Youth Panzer Division—in the snowy Ardennes forest during one of World War II’s biggest battles, the Battle of the Bulge. The Hitler Youth division was assigned one of the most important missions of Hitler’s Ardennes offensive: the capture of the main highway to the primary objective of Antwerp, the seizure of which Hitler believed would end the war. Had the Germans taken the Belgian port, it would have cut off the Americans from the British and perhaps led to a second, more devastating Dunkirk. In Zaloga’s careful reconstruction, a succession of American infantry units—the 99th Division, the 2nd Division, and the 1st Division (the famous Big Red One)—fought a series of battles that denied Hitler the best roads to Antwerp and doomed his offensive. American GIs—some of them seeing combat for the very first time—had stymied Hitler’s panzers and grand plans.

A highly illustrated and essential reference guide organized by campaigns within each theatre.

How close did Germany come to winning World War II? Did Hitler throw away victory in Europe after his troops had crushed the Soviet field armies defending Moscow by August 1941? R.H.S. Stolfi offers a dramatic new picture of Hitler’s conduct in World War II and a fundamental reinterpretation of the course of the war. Adolf Hitler generally is thought to have been driven by a blitzkrieg mentality in the years 1939 to 1941. In fact, Stolfi argues, he had no such outlook on the war. From the day Britain and France declared war, Hitler reacted with a profoundly conservative cast of mind and pursued a circumscribed strategy, pushing out siege lines set around Germany by the Allies. Interpreting Hitler as a siege Führer explain his apparent aberrations in connection with Dunkirk, his fixation on the seizure of Leningrad, and his fateful decision in the summer of 1941 to deflect Army Group Center into the Ukraine when both Moscow and victory in World War II were within its reach. Unaware of Hitler’s siege orientation, the German Army planned blitz campaigns. Through daring operational concepts and bold tactics, the army won victories over several Allied powers in World War II, and these led to the great campaign against the Soviet Union in summer of 1941. Stolfi postulates that in August 1941, German Army Group Center had the strength both to destroy the Red field armies defending the Soviet capital and to advance to Moscow and beyond. The defeat of the Soviet Union would have assured victory in World War II. Nevertheless, Hitler ordered the army group south to secure the resources of the Ukraine against a potential siege. And a virtually assured German victory slipped away. This radical reinterpretation of Hitler and the capabilities of the German Army leads to a reevaluation of World War II, in which the lesson to be learned is not how the Allies won the war, but how close the Germans came to a quick and decisive victory?long before the United States was drawn into the battle.

Hundreds of photos of German tanks in battle action, many in color, most never before seen in print, show how the Nazis breached the Maginot Line, marched across Eastern Europe and Russia, and forced the Allies back to Dunkirk. Full coverage of every major tank battle and campaign in the First and Second World Wars, unfolds the strategy, tactics and technical details of every attack, including how the likes of Rommel and Guderian met defeat. Hundreds of photos of German tanks in battle action, many in color, most never before seen in print, show how the Nazis breached the Maginot Line, marched across Eastern Europe and Russia, and forced the Allies back to Dunkirk. Full coverage of every major tank battle and campaign in the First and Second World Wars, unfolds the strategy, tactics and technical details of every attack, including how the likes of Rommel and Guderian met defeat.

In the narrative of D-Day the Canadians figure chiefly—if at all—as an ineffective force bungling their part in the early phase of Operation Overlord. The reality is quite another story. As both the Allies and the Germans knew, only Germany’s Panzers could crush Overlord in its tracks. The Canadians’ job was to stop the Panzers—which, as this book finally makes clear, is precisely what they did. Rescuing from obscurity one of the least understood and most important chapters in the history of D-Day, Stopping the Panzers is the first full account of how the Allies planned for and met the Panzer threat to Operation Overlord. As such, this book marks nothing less than a paradigm shift in our understanding of the Normandy campaign. Beginning with the Allied planning for Operation Overlord in 1943, historian Marc Milner tracks changing and expanding assessments of the Panzer threat, and the preparations of the men and units tasked with handling that threat. Featured in this was the 3rd Canadian Division, which, treated so dismissively by history, was actually the most powerful Allied formation to land on D-Day, with a full armored brigade and nearly 300 artillery and antitank guns under command. Milner describes how, over four days of intense and often brutal battle, the Canadians fought to a literal standstill the 1st SS Panzer Corps—which included the Wehrmacht’s 21st Panzer Division; its vaunted elite Panzer Lehr Division; and the rabidly zealous 12th SS Hitler Youth Panzer Division, whose murder of 157 Canadian POWs accounted for nearly a quarter of Canadian fatalities during the fighting. Stopping the Panzers sets this murderous battle within the wider context of the Overlord assault, offering a perspective that challenges the conventional wisdom about Allied and German combat efficiency, and leads to one of the freshest assessments of the D-Day landings and their pre-attack planning in more than a decade.

The Panzers that rolled over Europe were Germany's most famous fighting force, and are some of the most enduring symbols of World War II. However, at the start of the war, Germany's tanks were nothing extraordinary and it was operational encounters such as facing the Soviet T-34 during Operation Barbarossa which prompted their intensive development. Tactical innovation gave them an edge where technological development had not, making Hitler's tanks a formidable enemy. Hitler's Tanks details the development and operational history of the light Panzer I and II, developed in the 1930s, the medium tanks that were the backbone of the Panzer Divisions, the Tiger, and the formidable King Tiger, the heaviest tank to see combat in World War II. Drawing on Osprey's unique and extensive armour archive, Chris McNab skilfully weaves together the story of the fearsome tanks that transformed armoured warfare and revolutionised land warfare forever.

First time in English. Unit history of a tank regiment on the Eastern Front. Relies on firsthand accounts, after-action reports, letters, diaries, and newspapers.

This 392-page book is lavishly illustrated with 360 mostly unpublished photographs that take the reader from the retreat at Seelow to collecting wrecks from central Berlin. Years of painstaking research and a network of like-minded researchers from across the globe have enabled the authors to piece together the who, where and why, including lists o

Death Ride of the Panzers is a unique guide to the Nazi tanks, vehicles, and crews of World War II. It features never-before-seen photographs from the US National Archives and the author's personal collection, annotated artist renderings, and detailed explanations and historical context for each collection of images. Readers will also be able to trace the combat histories of these subjects through orders of battle, maps and organizational diagrams, vehicle allocation charts, and unit biographies. The forensic approach for which Dennis Oliver is known creates a broad, comprehensive record of German soldiers and hardware from early 1944 to the end of the conflict in 1945. Death Ride of the Panzers provides the context and chronology necessary for the general reader and the primary sources and hardware specifics that appeal to the expert, making this book perfect for the readers with historical interest, modelers, and WWII buffs alike.