D-Day to Arnhem: German Forces in Peril and Defeat

This book presents a novel review of battles in Western Europe in 1944. It has absorbed relevant, disseminated information of various Germans experiences, from an extensive range of published works. It takes a different angle and covers military aspects of the Germans’ handling of Normandy invasion, defensive battles, and ends at Arnhem of “Market Garden”. This book adds to decades of wide-ranging works on Allied victories, and provides a more comprehensive picture of how did the Germans really fight there in those fatal months. The focus is on the Germans’ responses, deployment, manoeuvres, resistance, and defeat. It attempts to illustrate this side of stories, of their resilience and vitality, up against overwhelming odds, and to highlight the common disadvantages in contrast to the Allies’ bottomless pits of manpower and firepower. It includes narratives to describe many players involved, such as Rommel, Kluge, Wittmann, Panzer Meyer, von der Heydte, von Luck, Speidel, Eberbach, Model, Meindl, Monty, Bradley, etc. It enables readers to see that battles were not fought as portrayed in blockbuster Hollywood movies, and stalemate and near-runs were common. Both victory and defeat took long, painful processes, with frequent setbacks and heavy losses, and the Germans fought those horrendous battles as best as they could, to the bitter end.