Slaughter Over Sicily: The Airborne Massacre

by Charles Whiting (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  1992

  $4.20

  This book tells the story of how in the summer of 1943 the Allies began their invasion of the European Continent by landing on Sicily. Spearheading the assault were four airborne drops by the troops of the British 1st Airborne Division and the American 82nd Airborne. This would be the biggest aerial assault in history up to that time. Four drops were planned and they all ended up in terrible disaster. Some pilots in the towing aircraft let the tows drop too early and gliders plunged helplessly into the sea. Nervous gunners in the Allied invasion fleet knocked planes carrying their own paratroopers out of the sky by the score. Unnerved Allied aircrews dropped their paratroop cargoes all over Sicily, and even as far afield as Sardinia and Southern Italy. Losses were terribly high - an estimated 23 to 30 percent of the assault force - and in every case, the objectives of the shaken paras were finally taken by the seaborne straight legs , as the US paras contemptuously called the ordinary infantry. Indeed, after the debacle it was seriously intended in Washington that all parachute formations over the strength of a battalion should be disbanded.

• Used

  Hardcover
  1992

  $7.17

  By November, 1942, the empire of Adolf Hitler had reached its zenith. It stretched from North Africa to the Arctic, from the English Channel to Stalingrad deep inside the Russian interior. The German Army seemed invincible, but then in a matter of only five days, from 19th to 23rd November, 1942, the seemingly impossible happened. During a massive Russian counter-offensive involving over a million men, 1,560 tanks, 16,261 field-guns and mortars and 1,327 aircraft, not only were two Rumanian armies wiped off the Axis order of battle, but more decisively the crack German 6th Army, under the command of General Friedrich Paulus, was encircled at Stalingrad. Despite being cut off from the ramainder of the Eastern Front in a huge cauldron (Der Kessel), the 269,000 troops of the 6th army continued to resist against impossible odds for 72 blood-soaked days. Devoid of adequate winter clothing, enduring temperatures of minus 35 degrees centigrade on a bare, blizzard-swept steppe, with nothing to eat but scraps of bread and watery soup, the doomed army suffered an infinity of agonies including frostbite, dysentery and typhus. While they slowly froze and starved to death they were constantly pounded by Russian artillery and bomber sorties. When the 6th Army finally surrendered on 2nd February, 1943, only 91,000 of the original force remained alive to be herded into Siberian prison camps. Surrendering to the Russians, however, proved to be only an alternative way of dying, for only 5,000 survived the captivity to see Germany again. The author has drawn on German and Russian sources to write this commemoration of the battle which broke the back of the Germany Army and turned the tide of the war in the Allies' favour. This book aims to give a balanced account of Stalingrad from both the German and the Russian perspectives.