By early February 1943, Soviet tanks and reinforcements were pushing towards the River Dnieper hammering the Germans hard. The Soviets then developed their push on Kharkov with a huge pincer movement. The Waffen-SS fell back deliberately towards Kharkov, during blizzard conditions, in waist-deep snow subjected to frequent ambushes by Soviet troops using the blizzard as cover for their movements. SS-Obergruppenführer Paul Hausser's Waffen-SS troops held their front along the Donets with grim determination against furious attacks by the Soviet 7th and 15th Tank Corps. In their positions east of the city, Waffen-SS heavy MG-34 machine-gun detachments inflicted massive casualties on Soviet human-wave infantry attacks across the barren steppe outside Kharkov. The brunt of these assaults were borne by the SS-Panzergrenadiers, Hausser was keeping his panzer regiments well behind the frontline, ready to deal with any major enemy penetration of his front. These were desperate days for the Waffen-SS. With temperatures dropping to minus 40 degrees centigrade, it was vital to hold towns or villages to provide shelter from the elements. Retreat into the freezing night spelt disaster, so the Waffen-SS volunteers were literally fighting for their own survival. It quickly became clear that sooner or later, Kharkov would become endangered by the Soviet advance. Credit: British authors Gordon Williamson and Tim Ripley. Middle clip: an armoured half-track personnel carrier Sd.Kfz. of Hausser's SS-Panzerkorps in February 1943. Footages from Die Deutsche Wochenschau. Bottom image: according to some sources, an observation tank belonging to SS-Sturmbannführer
Joachim Peiper's 3rd Battalion of the SS-Panzergrenadier-Regiment 2
Leibstandarte SS. This unit made quite a name for itself for its night attacks on the Eastern front and was known in divisional and corps areas as the
Blowtorch Battalion. The vehicles even used a blowtorch as a tactical symbol. However, some post-war accounts claims that the unit gained the nickname after having set two Ukrainian villages on fire. Photo by war correspondent SS-Kriegsberichter Max Büschel. U.S. National Archives.
The story about how the Blowtorch name came about is endlessly repeated in books and on the net by American writers. Like the Americans did not burn villages. Sgt. Oakley Honery of American 99th Infantry Division said, "There was an unwritten code. If you had to fight for a town, anything in it was yours." Ted Hartman, a tanker in the 11th Armored Division wrote “after ridding the berg of enemy soldiers, our men caught any fire, we’d burn the village to the ground, no questions asked.” When they entered the town of Unterbreizbach, locals fired on the advancing Americans, and the 358th burned the town down. When the 11th Armored Division’s Combat Command B entered Austria, a sniper killed the commanding officer of the lead company. Col. Wesley Yale, Combat Command B commander, ordered, “These six checkpoints [towns] ahead will be burned to the ground by nightfall. These people have got to learn that resisting is useless.” The hypocrisy of America and their actions during World War II is never going to end.
ReplyDeleteUS the land of hypocrisy and ignorance.
DeleteThe American 11th Armored Division committed several more war crimes, most notably the Chenogne massacre in January 1945, and the starving and killing of surrendered prisoners of the 3rd SS panzer division in Austria in May 1945. The issue of Allied war crimes is an incredibly sensitive one.
DeleteThe truth of this Blowtorch story is questioned by many scholars, what is not questioned is the fact that the death toll in bombed-out cities of the shattered Reich is estimated at over 500,000 by the West German government. The destruction of historical Europe was a war crime. Also it is estimated that the Allied bombing of French medieval towns in Normandy before and after D-Day claimed between 50,000 and 60,000 French civilian lives, not to mention Soviets' scorched earth policy during the retreat of 1941 that caused hundreds of thousand deaths of civilians in the Soviet paradise. But hey, what is that compared to two destroyed Ukrainian villages in the heat of the battle.
ReplyDeleteThe observation-vehicles communicated with units behind the frontline. As can be seen on the picture, these tanks had their cannons removed and replaced with machine guns. On the right side of the mantlet, a dummy cannon was installed. An important vehicle in German combined-arms warfare and crucial for the accurate deployment of artillery fire.
ReplyDelete