Panzerwrecks 13: Italy 2 will be published in June. It is our second visit to the wrecks in Italy and has more wrecks than you can shake a strand of spaghetti at. Pre-order yours for £13.99/$29.95 (US pre-orders start 10 May). We think that this one is a cracker. Don’t believe us? Read Modelarmour.com’s review here
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The blog has received a makeover to bring its appearance more in line with that of the website. It should load faster and be more compatible with mobile devices. I have broken down the categories as follows:
Panzerwrecks Publishing – Books by other authors, published by Panzerwrecks
Panzerwrecks Series – The original 96 page books (plus Panzertruppen)
Non Panzerwrecks Books – Books from other publishers
Forget “Bulge,” “Patton,” and words like “Nuts!” and remember “Duel in the Mist 2.’ It is an important telling of important events and will not disappoint. That’s “Duel in the Mist 2,” the second volume in the saga of the Leibstandarte and Kampfgruppe Peiper in the Ardennes Offensive.
If pitched by Hollywood agents, they would say it’s “24″ meets “300″ meets “Saving Private Ryan,” or “Das Boot,” but with tanks. No matter, it is where the sharp ends of two opposing armies met in winter hills and hamlets and clashed by day and night in the most unhospitable tank country imaginable. Fact: There are 23 continuous pages of photos of Panthers knocked out in and around LaGleize in this book. But more on photos later. Important as they are, they are just part of this package.
“DitM2″ picks up where DitM left off. It is the night of December 19th-20th 1944. On December 20th, Combat Command B of U.S. 3rd Armored, split into two task forces, will clash with German forces in Stoumont. As with all encounters described in this book, the authors (Haasler, MacDougall, Vosters and Weber) set the stage with detailed orders of battle. Fact: By page 14, the end of the first chapter, they have already amassed 67 footnotes; not the anemic, distracting nonsense we filled our term papers with, but the meaty, satisfying notes that add a wealth of fascinating information to every statement. These notes are drawn from, among other sources, Unit Reports, map overlays, POW accounts, trial affidavits, G-2 Journals, and personal interviews, all interwoven into the main text. Like an 8.8cm gun platform on a suspension of interleaved road wheels, the text literally floats upon a layer of footnotes, smoothly and easily, allowing an unobstructed view of the story unfolding around you.
On page 33, the third outstanding element of his book is introduced: the maps. There are large, clear, concise, well-captioned maps in full color. Opposing forces, terrain features, routes of advance, road blocks, important buildings, etc. are all clearly deliniated. Fact: I love these maps.
The narrative has a tension all its own, from the clipped couplets of U.S. telephone logs (“I don’t want any excuses about getting in there tomorrow. Get going.”) to vivid accounts from tank interiors to lengthier passages of failed attacks. The story moves along with drama and verve and at times deadpan delivery: “Major McCown captured with a map board with all regimental installations on it.” And “May have to withdraw from chateau; enemy tank has drawn up and is firing point blank.” Germans, Americans and Belgian civilians all have their say in this accouting, and the authors achieve a nice interplay between the, by turns, aggressive and foolhardy Americans, the terrified and trapped civilians and the stoic and dangerous Germans: “The area started to receive fire by the U.S. tanks and two of Jaekel’s comrades disappear after a direct hit on their position.” “Ostubaf. Peiper saw to it that (Ostuf.) Sievers understood the importance of retaking the lost Sanatorium.” This is not a monolithic “Battle of the Bulge;” It is a constellation of probing attacks answered with wave after wave of vicious counterattacks; paratroopers vs. Flakwagons, Drilling vs. planes, planes vs. tanks, Panzerfausts vs. carbines. Fact: Anyone who bought Squadron/Signal’s “Panzergrenadier in Action” in the ’70s will finally get to read about the Sd.Kfz.251/2, /9, /17 and /21 actually “in action.” Deployed intelligently, they could be devastating. Turned against their original owners, they could be decisive. (Color profiles of the Sd.Kfz.251/7 and 251/9 as well as the SWPanther ’211′ are also included.)
The authors have done a tremendous amount of work on the readers’ behalf and it shows on every page. You can reliably open the book at any point and be immersed in one action or plan of action after another: the harrowing attacks on the Sanatorium, the barbed wire of Cheneux, the slug fest in LaGleize. It’s all there: The chaos and ‘fog of war’ rendered in clarity and detail by those who’ve studied it longest. As embodied by the fictional Indiana Jones in “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” deep scholarship and high adventure need not be mutually exclusive.
Which brings us back to the photos. Just as German armored units were built up to full strength and then unleashed in the Ardennes, the authors have built up a formidable concentration of photos for this book, and they are presented here in unprecedented size and fidelity. David Thomson and Stefan DeMeyer of the Archive of Modern Conflict (AMC) provided an extensive selection of photographs painstakingly collected over a lifetime of research. Many more photos were acquired by the DitM team in the dozen years they have worked together on this project. Fact: there is more photo coverage here than you are likely to find anywhere else in the world – including the Ardennes itself.
“Duel in the Mist 2″ is by turns somber, gritty, edge of the seat and exhaustive. It’s murder and mayhem and matter of fact: heroics wither in the face of high explosives whereas determination of the grimest kind gains the objective, if only for a few hours.
Spend a few hours with ‘DitM2′ and you’ll be entertained and enlightened as never before. The best part? The DitM team are just hitting their stride and there’s more to come.
“Duel in the Mist 2″ is getting its finishing touches now and has a planned release date of January, 2012, which gives you time to pick up the original “Duel in the Mist.”
Facts: DitM2 has 233 pages, 114 (mostly unpublished) images, 14 maps, 1 drawing, 10 profiles (3 different vehicles: 251/7 (4), 251/9 (4) and Panther 211 (2)) and four authors: Timm Haasler, Roddy MacDougall, Simon Vosters and Hans Weber.
In “Panzerwrecks 12″ we ran a feature entitled, “Sarge Bealko Shoots a Tiger II.” ‘Sarge’ was Ed Bealko, the vet who took the photos in Mons, Belgium, all those years ago. He generously provided the originals to us so that we could present them in our books. Ed was just a teenager when he drove a Sherman tank through the ETO, and we had several long phone conversations with him about his experiences in the war. The most memorable, to me, was his account of having his Sherman tank recovered after having it shot out from underneath him during an advance across a field: A Dragon Wagon was brought up, and the Sherman was loaded aboard. As Ed tried to grab some sleep in the large tractor cab during the night, he could hear the driver applying the air brakes every so often. On a down hill slope, the driver applied them too frequently, used up his air supply, and lost his brakes! The tank transporter hurtled down the hill and into a little French town below. The vehicle hit a fountain in the town square, and it sheared the cab right off the tractor chassis. Ed recalled that the vehicle came to rest after crashing through the wall of the school house and scaring the headmaster half to death. Such are the stories that made his recollections so lively.
When we first contacted Ed, he was a bit skeptical of our intentions, so we sent him a set of PWs to show him what we were up to. They must have impressed him, because he phoned back immediately, and an enjoyable relationship ensued. (The attached photo of Ed and ‘General Patton’ was enclosed in Ed’s most recent Christmas card.) When the advance copies of PW12 came in, we made sure we rushed him a copy.
Ed’s wife, Elizabeth, called soon after to say that Ed had passed away after suffering a fall and hitting his head. He lost consciousness and died a week later. At the hospital, she tried to show him his starring role in PW12 but could not tell if he understood or not. It was with deep sorrow and regret that we received the news, because Ed was not just generous with us, he was generous with everyone he met.
Although he lived on a golf course, and could often be seen driving “Buddy,” his Boston terrier, around in his golf cart, Ed was very active in Habitat for Humanity and Catholic charities; just the day before he fell, he had been awarded the St.Vincent de Paul ‘Top Hat’ award for his volunteer work. Ed’s wife, Elizabeth, said that Ed guarded his “Panzerwrecks” and, although he would show them to people, he wouldn’t lend them out. We’re glad he was more trusting with his personal photos, and we are honored that we had the opportunity to present them here. As a matter of fact, I had called Ed to confirm some small detail before we went to press, and it was then that I realized the importance of people in our lives. I couldn’t read the name scrawled on the back of one of the photos where Ed had identified the G.I. in the photo. Ed spelled it out for me without hesitation, and said, “‘Legs’ was Best Man at my wedding. We called him “Legs” because he was six foot tall.”
Below is the photo that accompanied Ed’s Christmas card to me last December. Ed is shown shaking hands with Art Pope, a ‘General Patton’ lookalike.
No matter how good an original photo is when we first come across it, we always try to make it better during production. You have no idea how much work Lee puts into removing scuffs and stains and tears and tape. (Photos we used in PW8 originally had rusted staples in them, and Lee made them magically disappear!) The wonderful AMC photos in ‘Repairing the Panzers‘ needed to be given plenty of white space and room to breathe to showcase their incredible detail, whereas the photos from manuals were clustered closer together for maximum impact. ‘Panzerwrecks 11,’ presented new challenges: The cover had to be revised to accommodate double digits, and several panoramic photos would suffer if confined to our normal 280 mm page width. As you can see by the sample pages, to deal with these opposing concerns we reduced the typeface and added gatefolds. But at heart it’s still a ‘Panzerwrecks,’ where the images come first. It’s still about bringing together photos from disparate sources and making them into a coherent, well-rounded presentation, and it’s still made possible by a bunch of guys chipping in to hammer out unit identifications, match up vehicle locations and add context and background (aka ‘facts’) to our captions. So, if you haven’t done so already, check out the sample pages, and imagine the rest. More close-ups, more details, more walk-arounds; 128 photos in all to take us into 2011, where our most ambitious publishing schedule to date awaits your purview.
Stay tuned, stay Wrecked.
We are pleased to announce our first hardcover book, “Repairing the Panzers,” by Lukas Friedli. And what a book it is!
All told, it is a massive 256 pages, with close to 300 photos depicting all aspects of maintenance, repair and recovery of German AFVs in exquisite detail. The majority of photos are unpublished, and our landscape format allows us to present them in the best light possible.
Well researched captions accompany each photo and provide the who, what, when and where to hobbyist and historian alike. The comprehensive text, based on wartime diaries, documents and reports, is further enlivened with the necessary maps, tables, drawings and charts needed to bring this fascinating subject immediately into focus. While Lukas’ first German book ‘Die Panzer-Instandsetzung der Wehrmacht‘ was based largely on secondary sources, POW interrogations and veteran memories, Repairing the Panzers (RtP) is based solely on primary source documents found in the Military Archives in Freiburg and the National Archives and Record Administration in Washington D.C.
All the hardware, history and highlights spilled over into a second volume, but there is more than enough here to sustain your interest in the meantime. To Lukas, and to all the others who contributed to this first volume, we wish to say “Thanks for the opportunity, we think we served you well.”
More details including page samples are on the Panzerwrecks website
Panzerwrecks would not be what it is without input from researchers who are willing to give their skill and time to assist with identifying wrecks. The credit in Panzerwrecks 9 reads like Barry Crook supplied just artwork, in fact he contributed to the research & provided an identity to a number of wrecks.
Apologies to Barry for making him out to just be a talented artist, he’s a talented researcher too.
