Tigers In Normandy

I've ben watching this for a little while : -

Tigers in Normandy: Amazon.co.uk: Wolfgang Schneider: Books

It's due out at the end of next month. Anyone know anything about it ?

It's a well-trodden subject but I have to confess it never ceases to interest me - this is a book which may well find a place in my collection.

 

Never heard of, seems promissing

 

We'll see...I have Schneider's classic 'Tigers In Combat' volumes......the 'Normandy Tigers' seem to be developing into a cult of their own ; we've had numerous books about Wittmann, Villers-Bocage etc and the last two issues of the French 'Batailles' magazine have run a Schwere SS-Panzerabteilung.101 pictorial article.

 

I'll have to see it first before I make a judgment. Too many stories include events that did not happen in Normandy . For instance the 5 tigers that were abandonned in the Dreux Chateaudun area in August 1944.

 

Originaly published as a large format German book in 2004. This is one JJF decided to pass over. Some of the illustrations are very low quality highly pixalated and a couple have a very noticable 'gutter' leftover from the original book they were scanned from. One very well know Photo Library pic from Villers has the portion with the watermarked neatly cropped off!.
The Stackpoles's usualy drop a notch or two in reproduction so I hope it works out for them. At this price though it can't be faulted.
It seems to include a lot of stuff lifted directly from ML and AHF and I recognise one or two pics I introduced.
As it is 7 years old there is nothing 'new' and you are beguiled with tales of Allied tankers 'fleeing in panic' at the mere mention of the word 'TIGER!'. Still it is a handy collection of known ( but some not widely distributed) photos.
There are a few errors where non-Normandy Tigers have crept in but overall 97% accurate.
Schneider has also pinched a feature from the Battlezone Normandy books. There are modern day views of the locations marked as 'stand A, Stand B etc.

 

Many thanks, mk. As you say ( and as usual with Stackpole ) it's cheap....I may get it for the pics if the reproduction isn't too bad........

 

Martin and others are you familiar with Schneiders Das Reich volume covering the Tiger 1's of that Panzer unit and going on into SS Schw Pz Abt 102/502 ? been looking at this as well for a time . . . . . would fit keenly into the deal of Normandie engagements with the British foes.

 

You will learn nothing new about the Normandy 'battles'.
It is a fact that 90% of the books dealing with SS 102 in France depend almost entirely on 1 surviving document, a detailed 14 page daily record of 2nd kp July 1st to and August 19th.
Teike's book 'In The Firestorm Of The Last Year Of The War' uses it very well and is as close to a complete copy of it as you will get.

 

was wondering about that Michael, thank you very much, if anything I suppose if one is after photo documentation then the larger album would be worthy on the shelves, as you say with sadness all there is the KTB of the 2nd Kompanie only where the 1st is hardly mentioned nor the third, though one wonders where and if it survived the war.

 

Thanks again, mk. Tieke's book is an absolute cornerstone of my Normandy collection - a remarkable book IMPO.

 

that would be Renoult's two Vexin/Mantes titles presumably and possibly even Lodieu's ? I know they both made a fuss when the original book appeared..

 

If this is a topic you are interested in then another great book is Tank Tactics - It's been out about 10 years and I think there is a stackpole version now floating around. I thoroughly enjoyed it, posted a review about it here and at my book review page on my website.

 

Finally got this ( what took me so long...? ). m kenny's summing-up is pretty accurate.......it's nice to have all the photos collected together, but reproduction quality is disappointingly poor. Also a fair bit of 'armchair generalship' with Wittmann-shouldn't-have-done-this and should-have-done-that which seems to me to omit the factor of extreme combat stress.

Still, nice enough at the price and I'm just a sucker for Tiger books................. :i_surrender:

 

Stackpole reprints were never known for the quality of their photographs. I only buy the Stackpole reprints for the information contained therein, not for their photographs. As cheap as TIC I & II are and as much as I would love to have "beater" copies of bot books, I just can't bring myself to part with the cash.

 

I got it from Kindle books, either free or a couple of bucks, I forget , but near free. Of course illustrations on Kindles leave something to be desired. It was certainly worthwhile reading , good to me to see something from the German point of view. It does deal with the considerable maintenance and repair aspects of Tigers and their travel difficulties. The tanks not in Normandy were those moved across the Rhine with great difficulty. It tries to account for every Tiger 1 &11 in Normandy, whether knocked out or abandoned and while some accounts are cursory while others given great detail which seems reasonable in the circumstances. A few tanks mentioned that were not in Normandy were there and moved across the Rhine with great difficulty. Several may have never crossed into Normandy to begin with.
A rather interesting part to me with the description of Whitmann's demise at the hands of a Firefly and it's supporting M 4 75's . I was impressed that so few were lost to fighter-bombers. I always wondered how accurate their rockets were.

 

Good point, and in fact it's one we've debated here on several past occasions. Certainly, the rocket-firing Typhoons were highly inaccurate ( pretty much any first-hand account of their Normandy actions will confirm that ). However, the effect of blast from the projectiles was considerable as was the broadside of 20mm cannon. Hence they were very effective indeed against soft-skinned vehicles and densely-packed columns in the Normandy lanes, not to mention the psychological effect of the Sabre engines.