Product Description

Within days of the D-Day lanings, the 'Das Reich' 2nd SS Panzer Division marched north through France to reinforce the front-line defenders of Hitler's Fortress Europe. This title presents an account of their progress.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #65889 in Books
• Published on: 2009-08-21
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

Features

• New
• Mint Condition
• Dispatch same day for order received before 12 noon
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• No quibbles returns

About the Author

Max Hastings, author of twenty books, was editor of the Daily Telegraph for almost a decade, and then for six years edited the Evening Standard in London. In his youth he was foreign correspondent for newspapers and BBC television. He has won many awards for his journalism, particularly his work in the South Atlantic in 1982. He was knighted in 2002.

Customer Reviews

Outstanding.
Extremely detailed and well researched, the book provides a fascinating insight into the events of the period, overturning many 'cherished' beliefs. Balanced, with input from both sides of the conflict, it provides a thorough understanding of all of the issues involved, including the 'bigger' picture often overlooked. Particularly interesting for me as someone living in this area, surrounded still by evidence and residual feelings of the campaign.

Grim and gripping
This is a superb book by one of Britain's foremost military historians. The author expressly states that he assumes the reader has a certain level of knowledge of Vichy, the Nazi empire and the SS and this enables him to concentrate on the events he describes rather than rehashing material available elsewhere. The title does scant justice to the scope of the book. While Das Reich itself is, of course, central to the narrative, the author deals in depth with the maquis and the other factions of the French Resistance, their politics, their bravery and their stupidity. His descriptions are not always flattering although he is always scrupulously objective. The SOE, the SAS and the OSS are similarly treated. The two seminal events, the massacres at Tulle and Oradour-sur-Glane, are described and discussed at some length. The former may have had some slight justification; the latter - much the better known outside France - had none whatever. My blood ran cold when the the author quoted without comment a father's description of finding the partially charred body of one of his children in the smoking, burnt out church, and searching unsuccessfully for his other son among bullet-riddled prams and the bodies of at least twenty small children who had unsuccessfully sought safety behind the altar.

The paperback edition which I read suffers from sloppy proof-reading and irritating typographical errors: the surname of Major Kampfe (whose abduction was the catalyst for the events at Oradour) is rendered as "Kampie" in a couple of places, "farmers" is given as "fanners" and so on. It is this alone which stops me giving the book five stars.

Great read
A great book outlining the horrific implications of the Das Reich move from southern France to Normandy. The book details the journey including the massacre and Oradour and puts into context the privations and terror experienced by French citizens during that time.