Kampfgeschwader 'Edelweiss' - The History of A German Bomber Unit 1939-45

The Luftwaffe was officially unveiled on March 1st, 1935. Airmen from the First World War, and from the state airline Lufthansa, formed the nucleus of the force; they were soon joined by men from the army, the police, and from flying and gliding groups affiliated to the German league for Air Sport. The embryo for Kampfgeschwader 51 was the Kampfregiment Merseburg (first mentioned on October 1st, 1935), comprising the Merseburg and Finsterwalde Geschwadern equipped with the Junkers 52 bomber. At that time a Geschwader had the same status as an army battalion, and with an establishment of 39 aircraft corresponded in strength to a Kampfgruppe after the unveiling of the Luftwaffe in the spring of 1935, For security reasons the early Geschwadern were not numbered, and instead were referred to by the name of their base. In the history of the Luftwaffe, 1936 was the year of the cadres. 'Mother' Staff eln were simply split into two, to form two 'daughter' Staffeln. To prevent Staffel commanders retaining their best men and using this system to rid themselves of 'duds', the local air district headquarters decided which Staffel would move out, and which one would remain.

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US Rangers 'Leading the Way'

The origin of the modern US Rangers lay with the Commando forces raised in Britain from 1940. President Roosevelt's enthusiasm for this type of force was communicated to the Chief of Staff of the US Army, General George Marshall, and he sent Colonel Lucian K.Truscott Jr. to England in early 1942 to evaluate the potential of Britain's Commando force and investigate the raising of similar US units. Not all the branches of the US armed forces were enthused by the idea. The Navy in general, and the Marine Corps in particular, felt that they had little to learn from the British and argued that they already had the training and capabilities to conduct the types of operation undertaken by the Commandos. This to some extent was true, as the Marine Corps was somewhat reluctantly raising specialist raider-type units to conduct such missions, but these Marine Raider battalions were largely needed in the Pacific, where the Japanese were posing a more immediate and ongoing threat. Truscott, who was attached to the British Combined Operations staff under Lord Louis Mountbatten while in England, reported back to Marshall in late May and recommended the formation of a US Commando-type unit.The chief of staff concurred and the relevant orders to raise an 'American Commando' were issued on June 1. However, the chief of the general staff's Operations Division, Major General Dwight D. Eisenhower, pointed out that the name Commando was very much associated with the British and requested that a more American name be used for the new unit. Truscott remembered the exploits of Rogers and his men and suggested that Ranger would be a fitting alternative. With a name settled on, it was now necessary to find and train the officers and men for the reborn Rangers.The most immediate and accessible source of recruits were the US forces already stationed in Britain.

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Patton - Operation Cobra and Beyond

George Smith Patton, Jr., was born into an affluent California family on Wednesday, November 11,1885. From a very early age, the voting Patton expressed a strong interest in a military career, He received his appointment to the U.S. Army Military Academy at West Point in 1904. In 1909, the newly commissioned Patton began his military career as a Second Lieutenant in the Army's 15th Cavalry Regiment. By 1912, Patton was working for the Army's Chief of Staff. Patton traveled co France in 1917 as part of the American Expeditionary Force (AEF) and a member of General John J, Pershing's staff. The ambitious young officer did not want to remain a staff officer. Convincing Pershing to transfer him into a combat outfit, Patton had the choice of commanding either an infantry unit or becoming involved with the Army's new Tank Corps. Never one to pass up a challenge, Patton selected the Tank Corps and never looked back. He came away from the war convinced that the tank offered great potential for future development.

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Channel Islands at War - A German Perspective

There have been many books written about the German occupation of the Channel Islands. Some, such as Charles Cruickshank's The German Occupation of the Channel Islands and Peter Kings The Channel Islands War 1940-1945, have been definitive histories; others have been written by sensation-seekers who have tried to ferret out all that went wrong during the Occupation, to quote from lurid tales of collaboration or of thousands of bodies buried in the foundations of the fortresses, despite the lack of hard evidence. This does no one any good; neither the poor, unfortunate slave workers who were beaten to death by the SS in their Sylt Camp on Alderney, nor the run-of-the-mill German serviceman, who did his job ro rhe best of his ability, and also did his best to get on with the local, mainly hostile, population. What all these books have in common is that they deal with the Islanders' experiences and have been written from their point of view. Few have chosen to tell the story from the other side of the fence, to explain what it was like to be a German sailor, soldier or airman, serving in rhe Channel Islands.

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Beneath Flanders Fields - The Tunneller's War 1914-1918

Flanders is a region of Europe that has been fought over for centuries. Predominantly a low-lying plain, it stretches from the chalk uplands of Artois and Picardy in northern France to the coastal strip of sand dunes between Dunkirk and Ostend. French Flanders incorporates the coalfields of Loos and Lens, also to be bludgeoned by the Great War, whilst Belgian Flanders, running from the French border to the North Sea, is a centre of hop production giving the country its fame for beer, its coastal estuaries their fame for mussels. Squeezed between the rugged Ardennes mountains and the North Sea, Flanders has throughout history been the main route for countless invading and retreating armies intent on east-west movement, and vice versa. The region is divisible into belts of simple geology. From a military viewpoint these are critical. For millennia, the extensive dune belt has protected the flat and very low lying terrain inland of the dunes- the Polders- from flooding, a fact that military engineers have taken full advantage of in the past. From the twelfth century the town of Nieupon situated on the edge of the Polders, had been successfully defended by inundation - deliberate flooding -five times between 1488 and 1677, on one occasion holding out against Louis XIV for no less than five years.

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82nd Airborne - 'All American'

Whilst the 82nd was slumbering, events in the rest of the world were moving inexorably towards another global conflict. In Germany the emergent military machine was of necessity starting from scratch. This meant that many new doctrines and ideas were embraced. The Germans were not alone in fielding airborne forces; both the Russians and the Italians had developed parachute infantry (the former specialising in what the 82nd now do best, the airfield takedown) but it was the Germans who refined the airborne concept and fully integrated it into their force structure. What the Russians regarded an aerial club hammer, the Germans developed into a rapier. The Germans saw air power per se as an adjunct to the army, almost as long range artillery in fact, but they also recognised the inherent mobility that transport by air could impart. More to the point, they were determined not to get bogged down in the static warfare of WWI.The term Blitzkrieg (lightning war) was coined to describe the new strategy, a word the world was to come to know only too well. The idea was simple: instead of costly frontal assaults on heavily fortified positions, attrition warfare, they would simply go around them. In the case of line fortifications specialist shock troops would go over them, attack from the rear and open breaches for the heavy units to pour through. All this was made possible by the aeroplane.

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2nd Tactical Air Force Vol.3

There is little doubt that the Luftwaffe's dawn attack had caught the Allied tactical air forces more than somewhat unawares. Regrettable as this may have been, how much did it actually matter in the circumstances then pertaining? In practice the German offensive in the Ardennes was already at an end, the vital need for air support for the hard-pressed US armies having been considerably reduced by the turn of the year. The unexpectedly severe losses suffered by the Jagdwaffe, particularly in regard to the numbers of leaders and experienced pilots so involved, had been a considerable setback which would reduce substantially the effective presence of the German fighters in the immediate future. On the ground the front lines were in the grip of winter, and it would be some time before supplies and reinforcements could be brought forward in sufficient quantities to allow a renewal of the offensive following the losses so recently suffered, particularly by the US Army. As has already been mentioned (see Volume Two of this work), the supply of well-trained Allied fighter and fighter-bomber pilots had been running at such a level that there was no shortage of candidates eager to join an operational squadron. Indeed, training of new pilots was now being cut back due to the surplus that had arisen. Production of new aircraft was now also flowing at an unprecedented level, particularly for the established types such as the Spitfire IX/XVI range and the US P-47 and P-51.

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2nd Tactical Air Force Vol.1

When Christopher Shores asked me to write a foreword to his book on the 2nd Tactical Air Force I was somewhat surprised to realise how little had been written about the brilliant achievements of its squadrons in operations leading up to the landings in Normandy and thereafter to the German surrender. I suppose the reason is that 'Overlord' with its vast Allied sea, land and air forces was so gigantic, that the activities of the units in a particular Command tended to be submerged in the drama of the total operation. Although the 2nd Tactical Air Force was a new Command, many of its airmen were brought back from the Middle East to help in its formation and to feed in their experience of combined operations in the Western Desert, North Africa, and the invasions of Sicily and Italy. It was therefore well set up to support 'Overlord' and the subsequent campaign, and this is well brought out in the book. Nevertheless, the lessons learned in these campaigns were sometimes forgotten and the tragedy of Arnhem was a supreme example of what can happen if the basic principles of combined operations are neglected.

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Top Gun - The Ultimate in Airborne Action

The late 1980s are seeing dramatic develop ment right across the board of aircraft design. Many of the premises that have been taken for granted for half a century are now being questioned, and a new generation ot aircraft is offering completely unforeseen capabilities. Military aircraft are benefiting not in outright performance, which has reached a plateau of what is technically realistic, but rather from features that enhance their tactical capabilities. At the same time, civil aircraft are becoming safer and more economical both to operate and to maintain. The requirements of military and civil aircraft may appear incompatible, but in fact many of the technologies are shared, though in different ways and to different degrees. The driving force behind the current spate of developments is the military's desire to introduce new generations of combat aircraft. Until the mid-1960s the chief concern of the world's more advanced air arms had been the development and deployment ot combat aircraft characterized by extremely high outright performance figures, particularly tor speed, rate of climb, service ceiling and range. The first three depended on a clean aerodynamic design combined with a high power-to-weight ratio, and the last on clean aerodynamic design combined with fuel-economical engines and large fuel capacity.

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Air Pictorial 1958 03

THE story of the S-R.177 began when Saunders-Roe started a serious study of aircraft for combat at extremely high altitudes. The company had put forward proposals for a water-based transonic fighter aircraft which was a natural development of the S-R/A.I. jet-propelled fighter flying-boat. Whilst these proposals did not receive interest and support the work which had been done did enable the company to break new ground and turn to the design of mixed rocket and jet-powered aircraft. Its design team had already investigated the requirements of aircraft designed to fly at 100,000 ft. and had irrefutable proof of the advantages of a mixed unit configuration. In particular, the two most important characteristics of performance—climb to height and duration at altitude—were improved by the addition of a jet engine to the all-important rocket engine. These advantages were borne in mind when the Ministry of Supply invited tenders for a pure rocket-propelled, high-altitude interceptor, Saunders-Roe was one of the companies awarded the contract, and when the specification was later amended to include provision of a jet engine, the way was clear for the mixed unit interceptor, although at that stage the turbojet was intended only to allow the rocket aircraft to cruise back to its base after a sortie.

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Panzertruppen - The Complete Guide to the Creation & Combat Deployment of The German Tank Forces 1933-45

In September of 1939, the world was astounded by Germany's ability to defeat Poland in less than a month. With the world still puzzled by the suddenness of this event, Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium, and France fell in rapid succession to the German onslaught, leaving Britain in shock. Greece and Yugoslavia were rapidly overrun during April of 1941, while German-Italian forces advanced rapidly in North Africa. Russia's turn was next, when German forces began pulverizing their forces in June of 1941. How had Germany achieved victory after victory, often against numerically superior enemy forces? The answer came in two words. Panzer and Blitzkrieg. When and how had Germany built its Panzer forces and trained them for the Blitzkrieg? When was each Panzer unit formed? What was their organization9 Why were Panzer units distributed among the Panzer-Divisions leichte Divisions. and Armee-Korps? When were the vanous types of Panzers developed? What were their armament, armor protection, and capability? How many of each type were produced? What tactics did they use? How successful were they in combat? The answers to these and other related questions are contained in this book.

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Waffen-Arsenal Band 88 - Kleines Kettenkraftrad

Bei den ersten Prototypen verwandten die NSU-Werke vorhandene Motorradteile wie Laufräder. Motorradgabel, Scheinwerfer. Lenker und Armaturen. Sehr schnell stellte sich jedoch die herkömmliche Gabel der NSU-600 ccm-Maschine als zu schwach heraus. Bei Querdurchfahrten von Gräben und Bodenwellen knickte die für ein normales Motorrad kontruierte Gabel einfach durch. Eine mit Blechen verstärkte Version erwies sich aber auch noch als zu anfällig. Bereits 1940 wurden 70 Kettenkräder an die Truppe ausgeliefert. Es handelte sich um eine Versuchsreihe, die auf Truppentauglichkeit überprüft werden sollte. Besondere Merkmale dieser Vorserie waren neben der kleinen Gabel die fehlenden Schutzbleche im hinteren Fahrgastraum, obenliegende Abschlepphaken, achtspeichige Leit- und Laufräder, Schaltgetriebe- und Lüftergehäuse aus Aluminiumguß und die eckige, hohe Form des hinteres Luftaustrittsstutzens. Bis Ende 1942 wurde das Kettenkrad noch mit der relativ schwachen Gabel an die Truppe ausgeliefert. Unvermeidliche Folge waren Reparaturen. Spater wechselte man die komplette Einheit gegen eine mit hydrau-lischen Stoßdampfern versehene Gabel aus.

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