German Infantryman at War 1939-1945

Ian Allan Publishing. Very Good/Very Good. 2002. Hard Cover. 4to. Dimensions: 21.7 x 1.6 x 30.8 Cm 0711029296 Dust jacket complete, unclipped. Original cloth boards with bright gilt titling on spine. No ownership marks. 128 pages clean and tight. Illustrated in colour and b/w photographs. In 1939, the German Army was probably the best-trained and best-equipped army in the world, with high morale, excellent discipline and an entirely new way of tactical thinking enshrined in Blitzkrieg - Lightning War - which quickly had the armies of Poland, The Netherlands, Belgium, France and England reeling. The backbone of the army was the infantry, still virtually unmechanized, having to march into battle with its supply trains and supporting artillery drawn by horses. By the time of the long Russian winter of 1941/2, the cream of the German infantry, veterans of the successes in the West, had perished just as Napoleon's army had done before them, heralding the inexorable slide to ultimate defeat - a slide that would take three years, massive casualties and all the horrors of total war. German Infantryman at War 1939-1945 tells this story using many unpublished photographs taken by Gerhard Sandmann, a typical infantryman. Born at Vlotho on the River Weser on 25 June, 1918, he joined the German Army at Northeim in September 1939 and served as an infantry soldier until he was captured in 1944. The major difference between him and so many thousands of his compatriots was that he survived and so did his photographic record of the places he went. Backing up the photographs are reminiscences and battle accounts from individual soldiers and official wartime reports. These examine every aspect of the daily life of a soldier - the bad times and the more fleeting good ones - the moments of sheer terror and those of comradeship. This book is not a tribute to war, but an honest attempt to explain what it was like to be a German infantry soldier during World War II. .