Word: panzer
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...recruits from Eastern Europe. Only 70,000 of the defenders were stationed near the targeted beaches. The Luftwaffe's fighter defenses had been seriously depleted in two years of air battles, and the remnants were in the process of being pulled back to defend the Reich itself. Three crack panzer divisions stood ready as a reserve, but Rommel could not count on them, for Hitler insisted on retaining personal control over their movements. Only recently had Rommel succeeded in organizing a crash program to install 1 million mines a month along the heavily barricaded beaches...
...hear the news, he persisted in believing that the Normandy invasion was just a feint, that he still had to guard against the real invasion that would occur at Calais. Not until ten hours after the Normandy landings did the first tanks of the 21st Panzer Division go into action against the British, and the British beat them back. When Rommel finally returned to his headquarters that night, he found his chief of staff, Lieut. General Hans Speidel, listening to Wagnerian opera records. One of Rommel's aides protested, but Speidel coolly
...conquest of Caen was considered essential for Allied armor to break out of the checkerboard hedgerows of Normandy and move on to the plains leading to Paris. But Montgomery's British forces could not manage to rout the two panzer divisions that had quickly established themselves on the outskirts of Caen. In the first week, the British tried a direct assault; toward the end of June, they tried two encircling attacks. Each time they failed. On the night of July 7, some 450 heavy bombers pounded Caen, and only then did the Germans begin to evacuate the rubble...
...same selective memory, veterans dwell on spontaneous displays of mercy in combat rather than on acts of brutality. Although no one wants to be reminded that both sides occasionally shot prisoners, usually because they lacked the time or means to guard them, one notorious exception is the 12th SS Panzer Division's murder of nearly 40 Canadian and British prisoners in a château garden near Bayeux. Liska's unit ran into a handful of soldiers in German uniforms from the conquered Eastern territories who had probably been pressed into service. Said Liska, "They kept saying they were Russians...
...crack German units was the Panzer Lehr Division, in which Colonel Helmut Ritgen served. Ritgen, who retired eight years ago from a military career and now lives near Hannover, says that Allied fire power in the Normandy campaign was overwhelmingly greater than anything he had faced on the Eastern Front. "We felt superior to the Russians," he recalls. "At first we were even convinced that we would be able to throw the Allies back from the beaches. But just moving up toward the front in Normandy under air attack discouraged...