Posted on 07/28/2014 4:29:25 AM PDT by Homer_J_Simpson
Initially they didn’t want how he was killed to get out. He had a very quiet funeral which only a few senior officers attended. I think Patton attended.
The bomb hit him directly and about all they found that could be identified were some stars on a collar.
Oh, ick.
I can’t find Panzer Lehr. Have they taken it off the map?
Atkinson’s “The Guns at Last Night: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945 p. 186....
In truth, German defenses had been blown to smitherereens: the enemy was profoundly hurt, mortally hurt. The main opponent confronting VII Corps, the Panzer Lehr Division, has earlier been described as “worn out” by the German high command after six weeks of fighting; Tuesday’s “conveyor belt bombings” had devastated the weakened division, flipping tanks, smashing radios, and obliterating headquarters. The division commander, General Fritz Bayerlein, former chief of staff for Rommel’s Afrika Korps, described “half-crazed soldiers jumping out of the craters of a lunar landscape, running in circles... Everything was burned and blasted.” He calculated that 70 percent of his men were dead, wounded, or inert with “a feeling of helplessness, weakness, and inferiority.” Orders could be transmitted only by motorcycle couriers nosing a path through drifted debris. When Field Marshal Kluge passed word the the St.-Lo-Periers corridor must hold, Baylein replied, Tell the Field Marshal that the Panzer Lehr is destroyed. Only the dead can still hold.”
“Reste Pz Lehr” just south of “A A 2 Pz”
“Reste” in this content means “remnants.” It took the Germans a while to realize Panzer Lehr was gone. Also, “A A 2 Pz” means “Aufklarungs Abteilung 2nd Panzer,” or reconnaisance battalion of 2nd Panzer Division. The Germans tended to use their panzer division recon elements as rapid deployment light combat forces, because they had to.
She flew a V-1? I have a mental image of Slim Pickens riding the Bomb.
Actually, Hanna Reisch was probably well-known as an aviatrix from before the war. Perhaps not as accomplished as Lindbergh or Earhart, but the aviators were celebrities at the time.
I'm only aware of Slim flying a V-2.
I suspect the article and probably the German radio report blended her ME-163 and V-1 test experience. The description of her accident sounds a lot that what happened to her when she got pretty messed up in a ME-163 crackup.
Thanks. Sometimes I feel sorry for the German dogfaces who are not fanatical Nazis.
The lucky ones were US POWs.
Life as a Russian POW wasn’t worth a crap.
True, that!
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