Tank Men is a turret-eye perspective of what it was like to fight from tanks from their sudden appearance in 1916 to the end of the Second World War. The book describes what it was like for British, German, Russian, French, American and Italian tank crews to be inside a tank at war, a tight metal box, from which little can be seen to obviate an all-pervasive claustrophobia heightened by the fear of burning. This is the human, brutal and often moving story of tank men at war.
On 25 June 1876 the US army lost one percent of its authorised strength in a single battle against Plains Indians at the Little Bighorn. Red Sabbath authoritatively blends contemporary Indian and soldier accounts with the most recent archaeological and forensic facts. Robert Kershaw has recreated the ‘feel’ of the battle, a series of dispersed and chaotic company actions, which the Indians overcame piece-meal. The book is a fresh approach to a battle that has long defied definitive conclusions.
This book covers Hitler’s pitiless invasion of Russia in 1941 viewed almost entirely through the eyes of ordinary soldiers and junior officers, from both sides. Extensive use is made of diaries, letters and oral accounts previously unpublished in English, including secret SS Files that monitored rumours and reactions from the German Home Front to these events. The Russian soldier’s refusal to surrender and fight to the death, despite being out maneuvered or surrounded was to break the tempo of the German Blitzkrieg in Europe for the first time.
This is the story of the ten-day battle for the Normandy foreshore as seen through the eyes of German and Allied soldiers who fought and died in June 1944. Village fighting in the hinterland developed into stalemate as the Germans began to match the Allied build up after seven days. Bocage hedgerow terrain proved two-edged, favouring defence but stymieing the mobility sought by both sides and unsuitable for armoured sweeps. D-Day vividly describes the battle to get ashore and then for the next hedgerow and hill, a fight for survival and comrades.
Arnhem was a resounding defeat for the British, but in human endurance terms, the stuff of legend. Press glamorization at the time laid the basis for a ‘legend’ upheld by Allied historians for years. Exhaustive research of the few remaining German post-operational reports corroborated by numerous contemporary eye-witness accounts revealed a new perspective. This was how the battle appeared to the ordinary German soldier, from private to battalion commander level. Kershaw interviewed many veteran participants throughout Germany.