Warfare in the mountains--with its extremes of temperature and treacherous terrain--is unique and difficult. Hitler's Gebirgsjaeger, specially chosen troops of men who usually came from the Alpine regions, frequently succeeded in winning (or at least escaping) where others would have failed. Using anecdotes from surviving veterans, and photographs of men, landscape, and weapons, follow the troops from Poland down to Tunisia, chronicling their excellence, dedication, and esprit de corps.
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James Lucas fought with the British infantry in the Second World War. He haslong since established a reputation as a popular historian with a particularinterest in good soldiering. Battle Group! Is one of a number of books about
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Deeply Flawed,
This review is from: Cassell Military Classics: Hitler's Mountain Troops: Fighting at the Extremes (Paperback)
SUMMARY: An interesting, but highly unbalanced and deeply flawed -- in more ways than one -- account of German mountain troops in WW2.
PRODUCTION: Mediocre. Typesetting and printing is reasonably good, but there are numbers of typos (eg, Kandalaksha is rendered variously as "Kandaleksha", "Kandaleshka", or "Kandalushka", and so on). Clearly, the book required the care of a good and knowledgeable copy editor, but didn't get it. ILLUSTRATIONS: Good. The text is accompanied by 32 plates of good black-and-white photographs; however, neither photos nor plates are numbered. The captions are useful, if not always adequate (eg, there's no explanation for the Romanian soldier in the foreground of the photo of the Timoshevka anti-tank ditch on plate 14). MAPS: Poor. Without good maps, military history is little more than male entertainment. Unfortunately, map quality in this volume ranges from poor to very poor. While the text is concerned primarily with small-unit actions, the maps are mostly small scale and hence virtually useless. Moreover, the maps abound in toponymic inconsistencies (eg, "Doneck" on map 6, "Donetsk" on map 8) and in many instances use German place-names instead of English ones or of the official ones (eg, "Temeschburg" instead of Timi'oara, "Karlstadt" instead of Karlovac), and thus make correlation with modern, better quality maps difficult. Finally, there is poor correlation between text and maps. For instance, in the 1939 campaign, the XVIII Gebirgskorps' task was the capture of Lemberg (Lviv; in Polish Lwów, not, as Lucas would have it, "Lvov"); but Lemberg (as well as other places mentioned in text, such as, Przemy'l, Dunajec, Dukla Pass) does not appear on the only relevant map (map 1)! SOURCES: Very Poor. The severely unbalanced nature of the sources used by Lucas is the book's most serious shortcoming. There is no critical apparatus, but a selected bibliography of both published and unpublished works is attached. However, these sources are _exclusively_ German; worse, Lucas is highly selective even with respect to German sources, carefully avoiding any that might have shed a different light on his subject. (For instance, his account of 'Prinz Eugen' is -- from what I can tell -- based chiefly, if not exclusively, on Kumm's divisional history, while ignoring the severe criticism levelled at this work by the distinguished Donauschwabe historian Friedrich Binder.) As if that were not enough, Lucas has propensity towards lengthy quotes from German propaganda materials (eg, pp 22-26) and communiqués of various German headquarters. Clearly, someone needs to explain to this author what "propaganda" means, and remind him of the phrase "to lie like a communiqué". TEXT: Inadequate. After a brief introduction, the book concerns itself primarily with small-unit actions of selected Gebirgsjäger units in the various campaigns waged by the 3rd Reich. Very little attention is paid to the selection and training of the Gebirgsjäger; equally little attention is paid to his equipment and to logistics; and there is virtually no discussion of how any of those elements evolved as the German armed forces coped with increasing manpower and matériel shortages. The small-unit action descriptions, while interesting, suffer from the one-sidedness of the source material; moreover, Lucas makes few, if any, attempts at drawing conclusions, or investigating inconsistencies. For instance, a close reading of the attacks on the Metaxas Line (pp 50-62) suggests that they achieved, at best, a very modest success (Thessaloniki was actually taken by the 2nd Panzer, not by Gebirgsjäger); yet all Lucas does is cite an OKW Sondermeldung (communiqué). In another instance, from the Lapland campaign, Lucas describes how Soviet divisions broke under aerial bombardment and withdrew in in panic, leaving behind "masses of equipment and vehicles"; the advancing Jäger found abandoned "every type of military hardware [...]. The only thing they did not find was the highway they had been told to expect. All they found was a track which the feet of the retreating Soviets had worn in the tundra." (p113) The obvious question here is, How did those "masses" of Soviet vehicles get there without a road? Clearly something is amiss in this account, but Lucas doesn't see it. But the issue which Lucas avoids above all is that of atrocities. Kephalonia is not even mentioned. Rovaniemi was "hostile propaganda". (Lucas, who quotes a dubious German report, but never mentions the "scorched earth" retreat carried out by the XXth Army, alludes to Soviet statements and a Swedish newspaper article; curiously, he does not mention or discuss a single Finnish source -- yet, after all, Rovaniemi was a Finnish town.) And 'Prinz Eugen', whose record of atrocities is unequalled by any other mountain unit, is portrayed in highly misleading terms. Even the raising of 'Prinz Eugen' is described inaccurately. According to Lucas, it was raised only from the Banat, "a Volksdeutsche frontier province of the former Habsburg Empire [...] which had a low population" (p 145). In fact, the term "Volksdeutsche" is inappropriate (it was not in use until after the end of the Habsburg empire); the Banat was not a "Volksdeutsche province" (Germans made up about 1/4 of its population; the largest ethnic group were the Romanians) and it did not have a "low population". Contrary to Lucas, conscription was introduced not because the area was too small ('Prinz Eugen' would eventually include ethnic Germans from all over Yugoslavia, as well as from Romania and Hungary), but because the there was little enthusiasm for volunteering. This is also suggested by the August 1943 mutiny of some 170 Croat-German recruits (not mentioned by Lucas); one of their demands was to serve in the Domobrani (Croatian Home Guard) rather than in the SS. Lucas goes on to describe several 'Prinz Eugen' operations, providing details such as the number of trench foot cases (p 147), but rigourously omitting the wholesale burning of homes and killing or deportation of civilians. (That the guerillas -- be they 'etniks or partisans -- were also guilty of such atrocities is hardly an excuse.) The SS Gebirgsjäger followed the order to turn contested areas into "a desert and not to spare anyone, women or children"; whether or not the locals welcomed the guerillas (very often, they did not), according to Phleps, the division's commander, all of them were to be considered "rebel sympathisers". According to Kumm, the division's mission also included the "outright elimination of Jews and Communist sympathizers"... Finally, also lacking are overall conclusions. Given their training and equipment, were German mountain troops properly employed in WW2? Was their training cost-effective? Would the German armed forces have been better off with fewer mountain troops and more infantry divisions? Was there in the final phase of the war any real distinction between most mountain divisions and line infantry? And so on. To conclude, this is a strongly one-sided, incomplete, and ultimately unsatisfactory account of German mountain troops in WW2. While not without value, it is thin gruel indeed for those interested in military history, especially for those who are looking for the full picture -- warts and all -- as well as for those with a particular interest in the mountain warfare.
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Hitler's Mountain Troops,
This review is from: Cassell Military Classics: Hitler's Mountain Troops: Fighting at the Extremes (Paperback)
This book gives a very detailed account of the German Army's Mountain Troops during the 2nd World War. Although well researched and very detailed the books lacks a certain amount of excitement that one would normally associate with a title such as this.In addition topics such as selection criteria and training are not well covered which for a book on special forces is a bit disappointing.
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