Customer Reviews

Bridgehead Kurland: The Six Epic Battles of Heeresgruppe Kurland

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There are very vey few books that deal in such detail the final battles of Army Group Kurland in the waning months of the war.
Cut off and isolated from the rest of friendly forces the Army Group fought six major battles against a Soviet force much larger than themselves and brought all advances of the soviets to a halt.
Jokingly refered to by the Russians as the largest self supporting POW camp in the war, the germans hung on grimly till the bitter end despite the best Soviet attempts to elimante the pocket.
With major assistance from the last capital ships of the Kreigsmarine and helped by a dwindling Luftwaffe fighter force many divisions were pulled from the pocket and transported to the Reich where they were again utilised in a combat role against the Soviets.
The book is not large and consists of a little over 300 plus pages filled with a large number of maps and some very rare photographs of men and machines involved in the battles. It has numerous personal accounts of those that were there and orders and logs of the various combat units.
One of the topics covered was the evacuation of thousands of wounded and civilians from the battlezone in Operation Rescue carried out by the Kreigsmarine and initaited by Admiral Donitz. This greatly surpassed the evacuation at Dunkirk, but yet little is known of this in the west.
This is a must read for those who have an interest in the Eastern front campaigns and written by the prolific authour Franz Kurowski is very readable.

If you are interested in the advance of the Red Army into Germany during 1944/1945, you will find that BRIDGEHEAD KURLAND fills in a lot of gaps in a titanic, fast moving strategic offensive. It presents a lot of information in English that I haven't seen available anyplace else.

The author focuses his research on a strictly military analysis of this operation. His use of first-hand accounts from German soldiers is helpful and pertinent to understanding the situation on the ground.

I would disagree that there is anything pro-Nazi in giving the hard-pressed Landser his due. He fought well against a determined enemy, the Ivans of the Red Army.

The details of combat are worth noting in their own right. This was tough fighting and realizing that does not make the reader more sympathetic to Hitler, or to Stalin.

There are libraries full of books describing the horrors of the Holocaust and the Heer's complicity in it. I think that is why the author focused on the tactical details of combat. Nobody else really has.

I didn't find any neo-Nazi themes underlying this book. It deals with soldiers in combat, not ideology or morality. If you don't realize that the Nazis were evil and you aren't aware of the Holocaust, you won't get much from this book. If you want to learn more about the military history of a neglected chapter of World War II, you will need this book in your library.

Finding accessible information on the Eastern Front in WWII is quite difficult. A number of wargames are available, often accompanied by notes describing the actual events they simulate. Much rarer is material in English from the German perspective. This book attempts to fill that gap, and it does a reasonable job. There is a lot of detail about individual soldiers, and some excellent photographs are included. The biggest drawback is the lack of reasonable maps. In any book of this nature, one is always confronted by place names. The value of the book is tied to how well you can follow the action on the ground. Unfortunately, text and maps (when available) are in total disconnect in the book. You can get a general feeling about where the action is taking place, but you are never really certain. You set the book down with the general impression that it was really quite interesting, but....

It is pretty much impossible to see fully what happened from this book because a companion volume from the Soviet side is needed.

If you like reading about the Germans' desperate attempts to hold off the Soviets, then you will like it. But there is nothing about the Soviets -- or indeed for that matter the poor old Latvians living in the area while this was all going on.

It should be titled "Bridgehead Kurland: the German view of six epic battles of Heeresgruppe Kurland".

Kurowski's "Bridgehead" is one-sided, dry, and sometimes poorly organized. That said, there is not an over abundance of books in English on the topic, and for that reason, it is a valuable addition most most collections.

I approached this book with some degree of trepidation. I have always been interested in the large aggregation of troops who held out in Courland (Latvia) until the end of the war. However, the list of books published by J.J. Fedorowicz Publishing of Winnipeg was very suspicious. Was this some type of neo-Nazi publisher? Well, I don't think the publishing house is a neo-Nazi front, but you need to approach this book forwarned. This is German WWII military history completely cleaved of any whiff of Nazi ideology. You would never know from this book that when the Wehrmacht first entered Latvia in 1941, it either allowed, precipitated, cooperated in, or planned the complete extermination of all Latvian Jews, and other lovely stuff like that. This book ignores the fact that for the past 20+ years we have known that the "clean hands" of the Wehrmacht on racial matters has been exploded as a complete myth. The Heer was either involved in killing Jews, partisans, "Commissars", etc., and/or certainly knew in a generally approving manner about what was going on. This book is out of a mythical land where German soldiers were just brave and noble warriors, doing their duty for their fatherland. Everyone seems to be getting a Knight's Cross, Golden Cross, Iron Cross, special clasp, etc., etc.

If you understand where the book is coming from, and accept that, the book has quite a bit of value. It is generally well-written, with a very accessible style. I was a bit surprised at this, since one would not have thought this by just briefly perusing the book. That is, looking at it quickly, it comes off as disjointed. Its not. The author has a tremendous range of knowledge, and the story of over 200,000 troops holding out against many, many times that of Soviet troops is quite interesting and well told. However, you will learn almost nothing about the Russian side of things, about the various generals and overall war strategy involved, or the greater geopolitical view of the war at this point. Its far from a classic narrative history, and does not come off as a monograph written by someone with a "Ph.D type" of training. There should be quite alot to say about the decision within the Nazi hierarchy (i.e., Hitler)to waste over 200,000 well-trained troops in Courland, when they were so desperately needed in the Reich to defend against the Russkis. Yet this is never discussed in the book beyond a few short paragraphs on Hitler not allowing the evacuation of the troops. The whole subject of "Bridgehead Kurland" is poorly served by the author not tackling this issue. But, like I said, the book is not in the usual graduate school trained style of monograph writing.

So, if you know what you are getting into the book is fine, though definitely casting too much glory on the German armed forces. No doubt the author would say, perhaps rightly, that brave men are brave men, no matter who they are fighting for. I am guessing the other books put out by this publisher are along these same lines, and I think a well-versed student of WWII can use these type of books in a useful manner. However, if you know little about WWII this type of book is badly misleading and definitely not recommended.