Heinz-Georg Haase (16 April 1914 - 25 November 1943) received the Ritterkreuz des Eisernen Kreuzes on 2 September 1943 as Oberfeldwebel and Zugführer in 11.Kompanie / III.Bataillon / Grenadier-Regiment 122 / 50.Infanterie-Division.
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Two German soldiers set up an Askania model R 35mm, a very expensive film camera, while a few more soldiers and passers-by observe what is happening. They are most likely from propaganda unit of the Wehrmacht. The picture was taken in Krakow, Poland, during the Nazi occupation, 1940. In the background we can see the headquarters of Commerzbank in the main square.
Lieutenant Hiawatha Mohawk, one of the few Native American fighter pilots of World War II, flew with the 319th Fighter Squadron, 325th Fighter Group. Here, he straps into his Republic P-47 for a mission in Italy supporting ground troops of the Fifth Army. Mohawk had two aerial victories during the war and went on to a long career flying fast jets in the Air Force.
U.S. Bombardier trainers are readied for instruction. The motorized units would simulate the track across the ground that the bombardier used to synchronize the optics in the Norden bombsight.
The Norden Mk. XV, known as the Norden M series in U.S. Army service, is a bombsight that was used by the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) and the United States Navy during World War II, and the United States Air Force in the Korean and the Vietnam Wars. It was an early tachometric design that directly measured the aircraft's ground speed and direction, which older bombsights could only estimate with lengthy manual procedures. The Norden further improved on older designs by using an analog computer that continuously recalculated the bomb's impact point based on changing flight conditions, and an autopilot that reacted quickly and accurately to changes in the wind or other effects.
Together, these features promised unprecedented accuracy for daytime bombing from high altitudes. During prewar testing the Norden demonstrated a circular error probable (CEP)[a] of 75 feet (23 m),[b] an astonishing performance for that period. This precision would enable direct attacks on ships, factories, and other point targets. Both the Navy and the USAAF saw it as a means to conduct successful high-altitude bombing. For example, an invasion fleet could be destroyed long before it could reach U.S. shores.
To protect these advantages, the Norden was granted the utmost secrecy well into the war, and was part of a production effort on a similar scale to the Manhattan Project: the overall cost (both R&D and production) was $1.1 billion, as much as 2/3 of the latter or over a quarter of the production cost of all B-17 bombers.[1] The Norden was not as secret as believed; both the British SABS and German Lotfernrohr 7 worked on similar principles, and details of the Norden had been passed to Germany even before the war started.[citation needed]
Under combat conditions the Norden did not achieve its expected precision, yielding an average CEP in 1943 of 1,200 feet (370 m) (a CEP of 1200 feet means 16% of all bombs dropped land within 1000 feet of the target), similar to other Allied and German results. Both the Navy and Air Forces had to give up using pinpoint attacks. The Navy turned to dive bombing and skip bombing to attack ships, while the Air Forces developed the lead bomber procedure to improve accuracy, and adopted area bombing techniques for ever-larger groups of aircraft. Nevertheless, the Norden's reputation as a pin-point device endured, due in no small part to Norden's own advertising of the device after secrecy was reduced late in the war.
The Norden saw reduced use in the post–World War II period after radar-based targeting was introduced, but the need for accurate daytime attacks kept it in service, especially during the Korean War. The last combat use of the Norden was in the U.S. Navy's VO-67 squadron, which used it to drop sensors onto the Ho Chi Minh Trail in 1967. The Norden remains one of the best-known bombsights.
Source :
National Archives and Records Administration, 342-C-K-885
Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norden_bombsight
https://www.flickr.com/photos/airandspace/albums/72157715574200936
German soldiers and the wall of snow. No information about when and where this pic was taken.
Source :
https://www.wehrmacht-awards.com/forums/forum/wehrmacht-era-militaria/photos-and-paper-items-forum/77941-post-your-exciting-winter-photos/page81
Two captured Russian T-34 tanks with camo under german command. It was captured and used by Panzer-Regiment 35 / 4.Panzer-Division, as can be seen by the blue bear in the turret (bears are supposed to have been painted in company colors).
In the May-June 1950 issue of the Armored Cavalry Journal, Mr. Garrett Underhill, in Part IV of "The Story of Soviet Armor," writes that the poor quality of Russian tanks is demonstrated by the fact that Germany made no use of the large numbers of Russian tanks (T 34 and KV) which it had captured, although it used Czech tanks and, in the Balkans, in the fighting against the Partisans, French tanks.
This gives a false idea of the situation. In order to clear up this matter, I should like to make the following points:
It is undoubtedly true that from time to time the armor used for Russian tanks was of very poor quality and often did not have the resistance to penetration normally required.
But there are other reasons for the fact that Russian tanks, especially the T 34, were not used by the German Army:
Mere possession of a captured tank is not enough. It is useless unless continuous maintenance of the vehicles is possible, and this depends on the availability of spare parts. Aside from technical difficulties, manufacture of spare parts for the T 34 in German factories would have been possible only at the expense of a reduction in the number of German tanks turned out. For this reason the use of T 34 tanks could not be considered.
In isolated instances the German Army organized captured-tank companies using captured T 34 tanks and tried to get the needed spare parts from captured matériel. But the method was unsuccessful, and these captured-tank units were dissolved very soon. In was impossible to get enough spare parts from the matériel captured. The method also involved an irrational expenditure of effort, which was increased by the fact that maintenance itself required special experts thoroughly trained in the work and the manufacture of special repair tools.
As far as the Czech and French tanks were concerned the situation was different. Factories and repair installations for these types of tanks were available. However, the French tanks were at best useful only to frighten peasants; they were altogether inferior to the T 34 regardless of the poor materials used in the latter's construction.
The fact that in the East the captured T 34 was not used except in a few cases had a second and equally important reason:
From a tactical viewpoint the T 34 was inferior to the German tank types (Pz III and Pz IV with long barreled 75 mm gun) because it combined the functions of commander and gunner in one person. As soon as the commander began firing, he lost his overall viewpoint and was unable to direct his tank. Even as gunner, however, he was unable to fulfill his mission because when functioning as such he had no commander from which to receive directions. As a result, the T 34 was in most cases hopelessly inferior to the German tanks, especially after German tank were armed with a long gun, in the spring of 1942. I often saw Russian tank attacks in which the T 34's charged like a herd of wild bulls and continuously fired their guns, obviously without aiming, while driving forward. While the limited training given tank crews as a result of the high losses incurred may have been one of the reasons for adopting such tactics, it is certain that the union of the functions of commander and gunner in one person was a contributing factor.
Partly as a result of this tactical inferiority, in the Ukraine my Panzer regiment, from the end of October to the middle of December 1943, destroyed 356 Russian tanks, most of them T 34's, with a total loss of only 12 German tanks. The regiment was equipped with a little more than 100 tanks, half of them Pz IV and the rest Sturmgeschuetz III (self-propelled assault gun), both equipped with the long-barreled 75 mm gun model L 48.
Signed: B. Mueller-Hillebrand
Source :
https://panzerworld.com/german-opinion-of-captured-t-34s
https://www.wehrmacht-awards.com/forums/forum/wehrmacht-era-militaria/photos-and-paper-items-forum/586209-original-ww2-color-photo-slides/page111
Traugott Herr (16 September 1890 – 13 April 1976) was a German general during World War II who commanded the 14th Army and the 10th Army of the Wehrmacht. He was a recipient of the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross with Oak Leaves and Swords.
Born in 1890, Herr joined the army of Imperial Germany in 1911 as an Fahnen-junker (officer cadet) in the infantry. Serving in the Wehrmacht of Nazi Germany in the late 1930s, he commanded the 3rd Battalion of the 33rd Infantry Regiment.
Herr commanded an infantry regiment, part of the 13th Motorized Infantry Division, from 8 September 1939 to 14 October 1940, taking part in the Invasion of Poland (September 1939) and France (May 1940 to October 1940). In October 1940, the division was reformed in Vienna as 13th Panzer Division. Herr was given command of 13th Rifle Brigade, which controlled the division's two infantry regiments, on 14 October 1940.
In the invasion of Poland, the division used civilians as human shields in the battle with the retreating Polish Prusy Army and on 8 September 1939 attacked a medical column marked with the Red Cross signs near Odrzywół. A day later, soldiers from the division took part in the revenge killing of 11 civilians and two Polish priests including Dean Stanisław Klimecki in the nearby town of Drzewica in retaliation for their own military losses. Killings have also been reported in nearby settlements of Gielniów, Kamienna Wola, Klwów, Ossa, Przysucha, Potok, Rozwady and Zarzęcin.
In May 1941 the regiment returned to Germany to take part in Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union, as part of 1st Panzergruppe under Paul Ludwig Ewald von Kleist in Army Group South. In December 1941, Herr was given acting command of 13th Panzer Division.
On 31 October 1942, on the Terek River deep in the Caucasus, Herr suffered a serious head wound, being struck by shrapnel, and was repatriated to Germany to recuperate. He was later appointed commander of the LXXVI Panzer Corps stationed in France; in August 1943 it was sent to Italy. In Italy, his unit faced the British Eighth Army in Calabria, and the U.S. Fifth Army in Salerno.
Herr commanded the corps in the Italian Campaign until 24 November 1944. He also temporarily took command of 14th Army for a brief period from late November to mid-December 1944. On 18 December 1944, he was awarded the Swords to the Knight's Cross. On 15 February 1945 he took command of 10th Army. The Allies final and decisive spring 1945 offensive in Italy opened in early April, Herr was defending the Adriatic sector with orders to hold the lines. On 2 May 1945 the 14th army was overrun by British forces, and Herr was taken prisoner. He was never charged for the war crimes committed in the east and was released in April 1948.
Awards and Decorations:
Wound Badge in Black
Iron Cross (1914) 2nd Class (14 September 1914) & 1st Class (21 October 1915)
House Order of Hohenzollern with Swords
Bavarian Military Merit Cross (3rd Class)
Panzer Badge in Silver
Clasp to the Iron Cross (1939) 2nd Class (24 September 1939) 1st Class (12 May 1940)
Knight's Cross on 2 October 1941 as Oberst and commander of 13. Schützen-Brigade
110th Oak Leaves on 9 August 1942 as Generalmajor and commander of 13. Panzer-Division
117th Swords on 18 December 1944 as General der Panzertruppe and commanding general of LXXVI Panzer Corps (LXXVI. Panzerkorps)
Source :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traugott_Herr