David Mitchelhill-Green - Böcker

Tobruk was one of the greatest Allied victories – and one of the worst Allied defeats – of the Second World War. The 1942 fiasco rocked the very foundation of Winston Churchill’s premiership. It revived the flagging hopes of the German people and fanned the flames of Arab unrest.Furthering Rommel’s ascendency and souring relations within the British Commonwealth, it marked a turning point in Anglo-American relations in the fight against Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich.Utilising a wealth of primary and secondary sources, Tobruk 1942 examines why the fortress fell to Rommel’s Axis forces in just 24 hours when it held out against repeated attacks the previous year.Comparing the 1941 and 1942 battles, this book presents a new perspective on Tobruk – the isolated Libyan fortress, and symbol of Allied freedom, which for a period in the war captured the world’s attention.

June 1940. In just weeks, General Erwin Rommel’s 7th Panzer Division – dubbed the ‘Ghost Division’ — had driven headlong through Allied forces in Belgium and France to reach the English Channel. Pushing south along the Channel coast past Le Harve, Rommel’s spectacular victory at Saint-Valéry-en-Caux was crowned by the capture of Cherbourg. Following the Franco-German Armistice and a victory parade in Bordeaux, cameras rolled as Rommel re-enacted crossing the Somme for the Nazi propaganda documentary Sieg im Westen (Victory in the West).

The outcome of the Second World War was decided on the Eastern Front. Denied a swift victory over Stalin's Red Army, Hitler's Wehrmacht found itself in a bloody, protracted struggle from late 1941 that it was ill-prepared to fight. Although many pictorial books have been published on Germany's hapless invasion of the Soviet Union, they are typically a collection of soldiers' snapshots or 'official' photographs taken by Propagandakompanien (PK) reporters. This book is different. It contains an extraordinary personal record of the war captured by a professional photographer, Walter Grimm, who served in the German Army in a communications unit. David Mitchelhill-Green brings Grimm's previously unpublished photographs together with a carefully researched introduction. The 300 evocative black and white images provide an absorbing insight into the daily life and privations of the ordinary German soldier amid the maelstrom of history's largest conflict. The Ukrainian people, many of whom initially welcomed the Germans as liberators, freeing them from the yoke of Bolshevik oppression, are also chronicled in this fascinating study of the fighting in Ukraine.

Prior to the outbreak of war in September 1939, the German Army had focused exclusively on the operational, organisational and training preparations needed to wage war in continental Europe. The threat of an Italian collapse in North Africa in early 1941, however, prompted Hitler to reinforce his ally by sending an armoured blocking force to Libya. Not content to merely thwart the British from capturing Tripoli, Lieutenant-General Erwin Rommel harried his inexperienced expeditionary force eastward towards the Nile Delta. This book is a pictorial narrative of the unfolding conflict from the arrival of the Deutsches Afrikakorps until Rommels departure from the battlefield in March 1943. We view the desert war, with its shifting fortunes and unique challenges, primarily through the lens of ordinary combatants. This is their personal record of serving with Rommel in the desert.

Erwin Rommel is the arguably the most well-known German general of the Second World War. Revered by his troops and applauded by his enemies, the so-called Desert Fox achieved legendary status for his daring exploits and bold manoeuvres during the North African campaign. In this book, richly illustrated with over 400 images, the author examines the privations and challenges Rommel faced in leading his coalition force. Endeavouring to reach the Nile Delta, we find Rommel's Axis soldiers poorly-prepared to undertake such an audacious operation. Much-admired by his men in the front lines, we discover a demanding and intolerant leader, censured by subordinate officers and mistrusted by his superiors in Berlin. Certainly no diplomat, we observe posed interactions with Italian and junior German officers through an official lens. We note Rommels readiness to take advantage of his enemys weakness and study his extraordinary instinct for waging mobile warfare. We consider his disregard for the decisive factor of supply and view his armys reliance on captured equipment.We learn how this brave and ambitious commander was celebrated by German propaganda when the Wehrmachts fortunes in the East were waning. Conversely, analyse why Winston Churchill honoured him as a daring and skillful opponent. Finally, we picture this energetic, ambitious, at times reckless, commander as he roamed the vast Western Desert battlefield. This is the story of Rommel in North Africa.

Adolf Hitler invaded Western Europe on 10 May 1940. General Erwin Rommel was at the forefront of the 7th Panzer Division as it crossed the River Meuse in Belgium and punched through the Maginot Line into northern France. An audacious drive toward the English Channel followed. With no prior experience in leading an armoured division in combat, Rommel moved with speed and nerve, frequently surprising and overrunning French units in what he termed a 'lightning Tour de France'. His so-called 'Ghost Division' reached the Channel coast on 10 June, a jubilant Rommel signalling : 'Am at sea.'

Adolf Hitler's war in Africa arose from the urgent need to reinforce the Italian dictator, Benito Mussolini, whose 1940 invasion of Egypt had been soundly beaten. Of secondary importance to his ideological dream of conquering the Soviet Union, Germany's Führer rushed a small mechanised force into the unfamiliar North African theatre to stave off defeat and avert any political fallout.This fresh account begins with the arrival of the largely unprepared German formations, soon to be stricken by disease and heavily reliant upon captured materiel, as they fought a bloody series of see-sawing battles across the Western Desert.David Mitchelhill-Green has gathered a wealth of personal narratives from both sides as he follows the brash exploits of General Erwin Rommel, intent on retaking Libya; the Nile firmly in his sights. Against this backdrop is the brutal human experience of war itself.

The Kaiser’s Panzers charts the development of German armoured vehicles during the First World War. Late to adopt the tank as an offensive weapon, in a theatre characterized by bloody trench warfare, the Imperial German Army’s fledgling tank force fielded only twenty A7V tanks by the time of the November 1918 Armistice. To address this shortcoming, the German Army pressed more captured British Mark IV tanks into service through a dedicated workshop facility in Belgium during the final year of the war. A handful of these vehicles later saw service in the Freikorps to suppress left-wing uprisings in Berlin and Leipzig.Although German tanks played an insignificant part in the conflict, two early commanders rose to prominence in the Third Reich: Ernest Volckheim a leading interwar armour theorist and later Panzer commander; Josef ‘Sepp’ Dietrich a SS Panzer general implicated in the 1945 Malmedy massacre.Drawing on contemporary records, newsreels and newspaper accounts, The Kaiser’s Panzers is a heavily illustrated record of Germany’s first tanks, the predecessor force to Adolf Hitler’s vaunted Panzertruppen, and will be enjoyed by all military history enthusiasts.