The Reaper's Harvesting Summer: The 12.SS-Panzer Division ‘Hitlerjugend’ in Normandy

Author(s): Angelos Mansolas 

ISBN: 9781781558171
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A detailed combat history of the elite 12-SS Panzer Division during the Normandy campaign from June to early September 1944.
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  • The full and detailed combat history of the 12-SS Panzer Division’s epic struggle through Normandy

  • Riveting first-hand accounts of small unit actions based on war diaries and dramatic personal accounts

  • List of the division’s highly decorated members for actions committed in the field of battle, complete Orders of Battle and Combat Organisation tables

  • Beautifully illustrated with high-quality photographs and plans from the author’s personal collection


‘I know every single one of these grenadiers. The oldest is barely eighteen. These boys have not yet learned how to live, but by God they know how to die!’

These were the words of the division’s commanding officer, SS-Oberführer Kurt Meyer, for his own men: men admired even by their very opponents.

Established in 1943, the 12th SS-Panzer Division was designed to become an elite unit formed by ‘…a generation of future soldiers, tough as leather and hard as Krupp steel’ and commanded by a nucleus of hardened SS officers and NCOs.

This is the detailed history of the division from its formation all through the Normandy campaign where it received its baptism of fire. Although employed in the field for the first time, those young soldiers fought with a tenacity and ferocity unexcelled by any other unit Allied or German deployed on the invasion front, defending doggedly every single yard of ground from Caen to Falaise, a distance of just 25 miles, over which the Canadians and British fought, paying a high price in blood.


BOOK ISBN 9781781558171
FORMAT 234 x 156 mm
BINDING Hardback
PAGES 368 pages
PUBLICATION DATE 25 March 2021
TERRITORY World
ILLUSTRATIONS 96 black-and-white and 14 colour photographs


 

 






Interested in aviation from an early age, Angelos Mansolas served for thirty years as a communications technician in the Hellenic Air Force, retiring with the rank of flight lieutenant. Mansolas is a dedicated military aviation researcher and since 1996, he has worked as an author/writer and aircraft colour profile artist for several Greek-language history magazines. He currently works for the Greek magazine Military History and specialises in Byzantine history, the American Civil War, military aviation and First World War/Second World War battles.


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