Panzer Warfare on the Eastern Front Hardcover – May 1, 2012

...except this time Hell is frozen over!This is yet another excellent book from Stackpole. Truthfully, I'm only about 1/3rd the way through, as I like to milk these kinda books about the soldiers in the field over a period of time. Especially when every few pages is a different perspective of the same cesspool of difficult times these people had to live through. So far it's mostly mechanized (well...) infantry stories, with the occasional armored perspective, but it's from the grunt up to the divisional commander, so the book covers alot without getting into heavy logistic details.What is always nice about these - and most Stackpole books - is the descriptive narrative of these guys slogging their way through the horrible reality of war, and painting the day-to-day with individualism and the beauty that is the minds eye; iow, the trying to make sense of this giant monster of what life has given them, and the basic humanity which runs through us all. These are not some evil Nazis bent on taking over the world, these are your brother man fighting for survival with what life has given them, only with cool tanks and MG-42s and the olden days of World War II, and the simplicity of what was available to get the job done.Highly recommended if you like to be dropped in the hot seat over and over again, and can then put the book down and go get a cup of coffee, "excited" about the next time you get to pick the book up and feel the cold Russian air chill the back of your neck, bullits whizzing overhead, and the hard comfort of a Panzer tank churning it's way through the snow to Oblivion and beyond!

This is a very interesting book. Personal accounts of men who fought on the eastern front from the beginning of Barbarossa to the end in 1945.I have two complaints:#1: The title is a little misleading. The men portrayed in the book did all serve in panzer divisions. However, much of the stories took place in units that could have been in any type of division. For instance, the author, who provides probably 1/3 of the stories, served in a communications unit running wire between regiment and battalion HQ's. Don't get me wrong, his stories were fascinating, but weren't exactly panzer warfare. Many of the stories didn't involve tanks at all. Nevertheless, those stories were fascinating as well.#2: Quite a few grammar and spelling errors. nothing that stops you from understanding the stories, but I just don't understand why someone couldn't just read the book once and correct the errors before publishing.

I read this book the first time in 1972 when it was published in Germany as Der Weg war Weit: Panzer zwischen Weischsel und Wolga. The English edition is an excellent translation, and includes five Appendices that the German edition did not have. They are: A, Comparative Rank Table; B, 4th Panzer Division Order of Battle; C, 9th Panzer Division Order of Battle; D, 11th Panzer Division Order of battle; and E, 16th Panzer Division Order of Battle. The Appendices and the translator’s notes on the page bottoms, make the English edition a much better reference source than the German edition, though the first-person accounts are identical in both editions. People who expressed disappointment with the book because it was not about tank battles were, probably, unaware of how a German tank division was organized. The Appendices, B through C, provide that information. The only small complaint I have is that neither the German edition nor the English have an Index. I think that is the case because German books rarely have an index, and this English edition is a direct translation and format copy of the original German. I gave it 5 stars because it provides accurate, personal accounts of the war on the Eastern Front. Dwight R. Messimer

This book is varied. Some of the first hand accounts are merely a boring listing of what a unit did, while other accounts are full of the details of war from a very personal perspective. Some of the writers were so close to death that their survival was sometimes a matter of freak luck.Because the accounts vary so much, from the boring to interesting, I am only awarding three stars. However if the German war in the East is an interest of yours then I recommend you buy this book.

Overall a very well written book with many personal insights of what battle was like on the Eastern Front. The only negatives were that the photos really looked poor because of the paper they were printed on and that the map on page 78 showing the front in 1942 was very hard to read and zoomed in enough so that it was virtually impossible to tell what part of the front it was. I bought it primarily for the first hand reports and they were excellent. If its photos you want try the RZM or Schiffer publications.