Being there . . . . to sit among the OKW Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (The German Armed Forces High Command) strategic planning masterminds to examine and establish new principles of mobile defensive operations . . . . . .
AGAIN, NONPAREIL CASEMATE MILITARY PUBLISHING SURPRISES SERIOUS WWII ENTHUSIASTS
WITH THE REINTRODUCTION OF A LONG-FORGOTTEN BATTLE SERIES ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED
IN GERMANY IN THE 1950s AND 1960s“COUNTER – STRIKE OPERATIONS – Combat Examples and Leadership Principles of Mobile Defense”, by F.M. von Senger und Etterlin, translated by Linden Lyons. An AUSA Book (Association of the United States Army, published and distributed by CASEMATE PUBLISHING: 137 pages hc; $45.
Reviewed and Highly Recommended by Don DeNevi
For nearly eight decades now American World War II readers have been reading exceptionally balanced and reliable viewpoints and discernments based upon the latest information available at the time how it all happened, was nearly lost, then ended in victory.Will the full story ever be told, illuminated, and understood? Twenty million Russians died, the British Commonwealth lost 480,000, Germany nearly five million the Japanese nearly two and half million, while America lost nearly 300,000. Perhaps, someday we’ll make sense of it all, but today it is still too immense and infinite to grasp. And especially since we know so little about the efforts and strategies of our enemies to destroy us.
Now, thanks to the perennial visions of the Casemate Military Publishing staffs, a whole new chapter is being introduced to not only add to our comprehension of audacious daring, speed, and critical secrecy for attack measures and operations, but also realization and acknowledgment of our enemies’ phantom methods, deceptive feints, tricks to outwit, sickle sweeps, and just about anything to evade and advance.
“Die Wehrmacht Im Kampf - - Battles and Problems of the Second World War” was a series originally edited by Hermann Teske and published in German in the 1950s and 1960s. Written by former members of the German Army during WWII, it provides valuable and historically significant information on the enemy German Army’s perspective of many crucial campaigns and battles especially in the Ukraine and Balkans. Casemate editors recognized how important it was to readers to publish the series in English for the first time. Thus far, the company has published four additional titles, “Panzer Operations”, “Operation Crusader”, Panzer Tactics”, and “Leningrad”. Each volume has an up-to-date introduction by Matthias Strohan, head of historical analysis at CHACR, the British Army’s strategic think tank, lecturer at the University of Buckingham, and one of the world’s leading experts on the WWII German Army.
This volume, “Counter-Strike Operations – Combat Examples and Leadership Principles of Mobile Defense”, examines the principles of mobile defensive operations by analyzing examples of defensive combat on the Eastern. The author, Ferdinand Maria von Senger und Etterlin, was a German officer in the panzer troops who fought in several defensive battles against the Russians, virtually all of which he narrates in the chapters that follow. It should be noted he served as a young officer, troop commander, battalion commander, and regimental adjutant in the panzer troops, meaning that his account here uniquely combines personal experiences with doctrinal analysis, a rarity in war literature. Casemate couldn’t offer a better volume to understand the nature of counter-strike operations, especially when case study after case study with maps and organizational charts accompany the narratives.