Free Tiger Tracks - The Classic Panzer Memoir Ebooks To Download
Wolfgang Faust was the driver of a Tiger I tank with the Wehrmacht Heavy Panzer Battalions, seeing extensive combat action on the Eastern Front in 1943-45. This memoir was his brutal and deeply personal account of the Russian Front's appalling carnage. Depicting a running tank engagement lasting 72 hours, Faust describes how his Tiger unit fought pitched battles in the snows of western Russia against the full might of the Red Army: the T34s, Stalin tanks, Sturmovik bombers and the feared Katyusha rocket brigades. His astonishing testimony reveals the merciless decisions that panzer crews made in action, the devastating power of their weaponry, and the many ways that men met their deaths in the snow and ice of the Ostfront.First published in the late 1940s, this memoir's savage realism shocked the post-war German public. Some readers were outraged at the book's final scenes, while others wrote that, ‘Now, at last, I know what our men did in the East.’ Today it stands as one of the great semi-autobiographical accounts of warfare in World War 2: a crescendo of horror, grim survival and a fatalistic acceptance of the panzer man’s destiny.“Among the most impressive narratives of the Eastern Front that I have read. The pages are alive with characters - their machines, their struggles, their decisions and their pain. Readers will finish the book haunted and truly moved, the mark of a great story." - Chris Ziedler, the English translator of ‘SS Panzer SS Voices.’ Originally published in the German Federal Republic as ‘Panzerdammerung’ (‘Panzer Twilight.’)The only other surviving memoir by this author is 'The Last Panther' - an astonishing account of panzer warfare in the final hours of the Third Reich - available now on .
File Size: 1275 KB
Print Length: 132 pages
Publisher: Bayern Classic Publications (March 4, 2015)
Publication Date: March 4, 2015
Sold by: Digital Services LLC
Language: English
ASIN: B00UASW4GK
Text-to-Speech: Enabled
X-Ray: Enabled
Word Wise: Enabled
Lending: Not Enabled
Enhanced Typesetting: Enabled
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I started reading this book with high hopes. Tiger Tracks purports to be a memoir written by a veteran of the Panzer force, but it became quickly apparent that it's really a very gory and lurid piece of fiction being fobbed off as fact on those who don't know any better."Wolfgang Faust" is conveniently a pseudonym, so the true author's military service records could never be checked. He is the lone survivor of the Kampfgruppe he starts the book with, so the veracity (or it's lack) cannot be cross-checked. The author has a basic understanding of tanks and their mechanics, but an understanding that could have been gleaned from such sources as the Panzerfibel without requiring any hands-on experience.There is a great deal of writhing in flames in this book. Everyone hit in the head is decapitated, hollow-point bullets literally blow men apart (they don't). All the violence is very Hollywood, and over-the-top. There are a number of historically inaccuracies or outright impossibilities. There are an even greater number of decisions and actions undertaken by persons depicted in the book, which from a military point of view are ludicrous and suicidal (I should mention here for the sake of credibility, that I am a former member of a mechanized infantry unit). Examples:- an experienced Tiger tank commander takes custody of a female Soviet prisoner and chains her up inside the tank. NO. There's absolutely no room inside an armored fighting vehicle for extra personnel. Even those who belong there are cramped and crowded. The danger this prisoner would interfere during a battle makes this action tactically absurd.- Panzergrenadiers remain inside their halftracks during a stationary defensive battle while under assault by aircraft and enemy armor.
. . . and not a very good one. Obviously this is not really a memoir, or anything of the sort. The clincher as to its entirely fictional nature is that "Wolfgang Faust" describes two major tank battles between Tiger tanks and the Joseph Stalin tanks, but the Joseph Stalin tank he describes--an inverted soup-dish turret and a wedge-shaped cast iron front block on the hull, is the IS-3 and it was not manufactured until May, 1945 when the war was over. So both of these battles were entirely confabulated, probably based upon the author having seen IS-3s in Germany between 1945 and 1948 when this novel was written.But the problem isn't so much that this is a novel, but that it is a bad novel. The whole plot is strategically absurd. The opening scenes are of a coordinated assault by Stukas, Tigers and armored infantry. The attack is successful, but within the same day, the Germans are forced to retreat not only to their jump off point, a couple of miles to the rear, but all the way back to a river that is 60 miles to the rear. All along their two-day retreat to the river, they are attacked by Russians who have gotten behind them. All I can say is, if the Germans were still attacking when their rear was threatened and insecure for a distance of 60 miles, it's little wonder they lost the war. But that's how they lost Von Paulus' Sixth Army at Stalingrad, so maybe it was, in fact, normal German strategy on the Eastern Front to insanely expose themselves and invite encirclement.What rings even more false than the strategic situation is the author's penchant for claiming to have seen things he couldn't possibly have seen from any plausible location on the battlefield, much less buttoned up in the driver's seat of a Tiger tank, looking through a narrow slit.
Tiger Tracks - The Classic Panzer Memoir Panzer Operations: Germany's Panzer Group 3 During the Invasion of Russia, 1941 Der Tiger: Vol. 1: Schwere Panzer Abteilung 501 (English and German Edition) Big Book of Backing Tracks: 200 High-Quality Play-Along Tracks in All Styles Goodnight, Daniel Tiger (Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood) Happy Halloween, Daniel Tiger!: A Lift-the-Flap Book (Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood) Merry Christmas, Daniel Tiger!: A Lift-the-Flap Book (Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood) Tiger's Curse (Book 1 in the Tiger's Curse Series) Tiger-Tiger, Is It True?: Four Questions to Make You Smile Again What Time Is It, Daniel Tiger? (Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood) Tiger Coloring Book for Adults: Stress Relieving Coloring Book for Grown-ups Featuring 40 Paisley and Henna Tiger Designs (Animals) (Volume 5) Tiger, Tiger Panzer IV on the Battlefield (World War Two Photobook Series) Panzer Aces II Order in Chaos: The Memoirs of General of Panzer Troops Hermann Balck Panzer IV at War 1939 - 1945 (Images of War) Tigers in the Mud: The Combat Career of German Panzer Commander Otto Carius (Stackpole Military History Series) Panzer Leader Obedient Unto Death: A Panzer-Grenadier of the Leibstandarte-SS Adolf Hitler Reports In Session with Korn: Play Along with Six Classic Korn Tracks, Book & CD
