Customer Reviews

Infantry Aces: The German Soldier in Combat in WWII (Stackpole Military History Series)

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Both my husband and my son are military history enthusiasts and I bought this book as a gift for them. It has turned out to be even better than I expected. My husband can't put it down and my son keeps asking him to read it to him.

My husband has read a lot of different military history books and he is very critical of most written works because they are not factual enough or don't contain enough interesting information. This book has actually been very interesting and informative to him and he has asked me to look into getting other books in this series.

I highly recommend it to anyone that is interested in WWII.

Mr. Kurowski has used his experience as a reporter in the German army during World War II to write a series of books that tell the history of the war from the German individuals point of view.

This book is a set of eight mini-biographies of German Infantry soldiers. Most of them fought through the entire war and surprisingly most of them survived the war, few without wounds. These are not stories of high ranking officers, but of ordinary soldiers of rather low rank who did their job very, very well. They fought in all the theaters of war from freezing in Russia to burning up in Africa.

I am sure that there were men like these in all armies, but these men happened to be German. We can only be happey that they didn't have a whole lot more men like these.

This book is one of the must have's! Are you are looking for the real info on the Eastern Fornt from the German perspective? Well - this is it! You wont be able to put it down, after you do you will reach for the next one! First hand accounts and an insight into the personalities of some of the Wehrmacht's best during WW2.

This is an outstanding book describing the experience of eight first person accounts of German soldiers who earned their nation's highest award, their equivalent of the Medal of Honor, the Knight's Cross, and is highly recommended. What makes this book unique is that the accounts cover multiple years with campaigns spanning from 1939 to 1945.

There are very few US WW2 veterans that have a similar amount of experience. There are a handful of US veterans who survived through the campaigns and battles from 1943 to 1945 in the European theatre and fewer in the Pacific theatre from 1942-1945.

The experience of these eight German soldiers who fought on multiple fronts for so many years is quite remarkable as they fought against armies that did not lose their combat strength throughout the years.

What makes this book unique is that it provides a chronological history of the first person experiences of those soldiers who fought in the many campaigns and earned their country's highest military award, sometimes for a second and third time and is not based on one specific battle.

If one also reads Panzer Aces 1 & 2, some of the events and persons involved will coincide with this book. Many history books provide a general overview, often a mere sentence in passing, of an engagement that was part of a larger battle. This book provides the details of the difficult fighting experienced by those who fought and survived.

Infantry Aces is pure Wehrmacht war porn - the whiff of gunpowder, with Tiger tanks and stuttering schmeisser's sticking it to Ivan and the Amis and the Tommies at every turn. The German landsers described therein are invariably brave, loyal, steadfast and true, with thoughts of mutter, strudel and Mercedes-Benz under their stalhelm.
The dialog seems fabricated, there's no mention of atrocities and the overall impression is the romanticism as the salve for catastrophic defeat.

Kurowski was a reputedly a former war correspondent for the Wehrmacht,
and his work reads like an OKW press release or an article in Signal magazine, circa 1943. Exciting and heroic? Definitely. Accurate historical biography? Probably not so much.

I have read hundreds of books about WWII, and I can truly say this is one of the top five ever published. The author does not glorify war, but simply tells the story of the individual. The most impressive one is the combat medic who is credited with saving over 2000 battlefield wounded - by carrying them to safety after initially tending to the wound.

I must say that this book is a good read because of the dramtization of the events. It is difficult to accept that everything written is correct but one thing for sure, the facts about the location of the various units as well as the key commanders are true. For me this is good enough. If you want only truth, read a doctoral thesis on the subject.

Great insight to the hardships faced by the common soldier who sill went on to perform outstanding acts of bravery

I find it hard to criticize an author's hard work but to be fair I must. While I found parts of the book interesting it was those parts told by the soldier's own words and there were not enough of them. The best readings of war stories I've come across are those taken from journals written by soldiers while, or directly after, participating in the horrors of war. This book tells a good story as to where, how, when and what happened but the sense of actually being there is not present. It's an excellent read for those that only want to know some facts and third parties words on what happened to individual soldiers as they fought.
Is it worth the price? Yeah, I'd say so. I guess I just got spoiled reading first hand accounts.
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