“If you're looking for a tactical WWII battle in a French village, this provides a top-rate resource.” — Historical Minatures Gaming Society Villers-Bocage remains lodged in the imagination of many readers as a costly and controversial defeat for the British Army in Normandy. This point of view is entirely reliant on just ten minutes of fighting plucked from a two-day battle. This account sets out to rectify that view. Based on prolific first-hand information, including extensive interviews with veterans of the battle, this book explores every facet of the available information, subjecting it to in-depth analysis. Far from being the crushing defeat popularized in many histories, which tend to rely on German propaganda, Villers-Bocage can, in fact, be viewed as a remarkable and compelling recovery from an ambush. The shortcoming was that much of the territory gained in the advance was relinquished, so the first telling of the story was given to the Germans who, quite legitimately under wartime conditions, made the most of their advantage. In this book, Daniel Taylor provides a minutely detailed examination of the course of the fighting, exploring both sides of the debate, allowing the reader to evaluate the strength of the argument. Dozens of first-hand accounts are brought together and placed into a comprehensible and accurate time-line. Both German and British official histories and personal accounts have been pieced together providing an astonishing level of corroboration. Accompanying the written history is extensive mapping and an unprecedented quantity of photographs, from multiple sources, which add definition and visual verification. This book lays to rest the myths built up around the battle.

The first comprehensive study of the legendary Panzer commander. Though there have been numerous articles on Wittmann, none have come close to understanding the scope of his life and combat experiences. Wittmann's military exploits stand out from all the rest, as his Sturmgeschutz III and Tiger I crews succeeded in destroying 138 enemy tanks and 132 anti-tank guns and field artillery pieces. Gary Simpson conducted extensive research, travel, and interviews to uncover the tru facts and situations that Michael Wittmann encountered on the battlefields of both the eastern and wetsern fronts.

Hundreds of photos--many of them rare--of Tiger tanks and their crews Color illustrations by Jean Restayn focus on markings, camouflage, and insignia Inventories and timelines for each unit In this follow-up to "Tigers in Combat I" (0-8117-3171-5), Wolfgang Schneider turns his attention to the Tiger tanks of the Waffen-SS and the Wehrmacht's "named" units, such as the Gro deutschland Division, Company Hummel, and Tiger Group Meyer. Based on combat diaries, the text tells the history of each unit, but most of the book is devoted to photos of the tanks and the men who manned them. It offers as unique and comprehensive a look at these lethal machines as is possible sixty years after World War II.

"The destruction of the trapped German forces in the Falaise pocket in August 1944 is one of the most famous episodes of the Normandy campaign ... In this perceptive study Anthony Tucker-Jones dispels misconceptions about the battle, describes the combat in graphic detail and reassesses the outcome in the context of the campaign to liberate Europe. Although the Falaise battle is often portrayed as a total Allied triumph, the Panzer divisions caught there were reconstituted rapidly; just four months later they launched the last extraordinary German offensive of the war, the Ardennes. The author takes a broad view tracing the course of the campaign mainly from the German viewpoint"--Jacket.