Comments by "Dave M A C" (@davemac1197) on "It Never Snows in September | Military History Book Review" video.

  1. A little out of date now (1990) but an essential foundation course together with Cornelius Ryan's A Bridge Too Far (1974). It's the first book on the German side of the operation. Possibly a publishing decision and not Rob Kershaw's, but he translates the German nomenclature into English instead of preserving the proper names and providing a glossary. This can make further research difficult, as many unit identifications are ambiguous, especially in the Reserve Army and because of the many temporary ad hoc kampfgruppen (battlegroups). One correction on TIK's video - Division 406, aka Division zbv 406 (zbv = zur besonderen Verwendung = for special deployment) was a pre-existing administrative headquarters, just a small office basically, in the Wehrkreis VI (Military District 6) HQ based in Münster (Westphalia, bordering the Netherlands region around Nijmegen). It was mobilised in the first week of September 1944 under the 'Valkyrie' Plan (see the 2008 Tom Cruise film 'Valkyrie' for how the military districts are organised and the Valkyrie Plan was first used to stage a coup against Hitler back in July 1944) and deployed in the northern sector of the Westwall, where it terminated in the Reichswald forest near the Dutch city of Nijmegen. This is the reason it came into contact with the US 82nd Airborne division on 17 September, but it was not really equipped to be operational and even had to requisition civilian transport like cars and busses to move the division HQ to Geldern. After the airborne landings, they had to move again to Kleve, nearer the landings. It had a collection of training units and home guard type militia battalions under command, with none of the usual infantry division service units and logistics to support them - they were all 'depot' units in British terminology. Perhaps the biggest error in Kershaw is that he's not a German armour expert and doesn't know his StuGs from his Jagdpanzer IVs, so unfortunately copied wholesale Wilhelm Tieke's mistake of placing SS-Sturmbannfürer Erwin Franz Rudolf Röstel's SS-Panzerjäger-Abteilung 10 in the southern sector of the MARKET GARDEN corridor near the town of VALKENSWAARD, when it was actually detached to 7.Armee at Aachen near the town of VALKENBURG just east of Maastricht, fighting the US 1st Army with all 21 Jagdpanzer IV/L48 vehicles. The four StuG IIIG assault guns Kershaw believes were detached from Röstel's unit and sent to Nijmegen were from SS-Obersturmführer Franz Riedel's 7./SS-Panzer-Regiment 10, so Wilhelm Tieke (In The Firestorm of the Last Years of the War - II.SS-Panzerkorps, 1975) made an error that has caught out Rob Kershaw and many others as well. The reason the II.Abteilung of the 9 and 10.SS-Panzer-Regiments were formed with StuGs in the 7 and 8.Kompanien was a legacy of being raised as panzergrenadier-divisions in 1943, and then Hitler ordered them converted to panzer-divisions. The StuG Abteilung was then rolled into the new Panzer-Regiment and made up for a lack of Mark IV tanks to make up the numbers in the II.Abteilung. The StuGs that were seen in the southern MARKET GARDEN corrider near Valkenswaard were from an army unit - Heeres schwere.Panzerjäger-Abteilung 559. Despite the errors, I still rate this impressive body of work as a solid 80%, and for many readers it would be 80% of knowledge they didn't have before reading the book. The other 20% can be corrected by reading more recent works on specific German units, if the reader wants to dive even deeper. I haven't read TIK's other recommended book by Robin Neillands, but another option is to jump ahead to something really up to date, and that is Swedish historian Christer Bergström's excellent update of Cornelius Ryan's research in Arnhem 1944: An Epic Battle Revisited vols 1 and 2 (2019, 2020). I didn't know that A Bridge Too Far (1974) was rushed to publication unfinished because of Ryan's terminal cancer, but I have since found that some of the interviews in his documentation in the online Cornelius Ryan Collection at Ohio State University is bibliographed in A Bridge Too Far, but the story the interviewee told doesn't appear anywhere in the text. Bergström also includes the untold story of the operation's compromise at Nijmegen on the first day, first exposed by RG Poulussen's Lost At Nijmegen (2011) and was completely missing in Ryan and (inexcusably) the recent 2018 Beevor book on Arnhem - both aimed at the lucrative American market no doubt. As TIK recommends, get the large format paperback (or even hardback if you can find it) with the photo montage and German eagle on the cover, and not the more recent pulp paperback version without the maps and photographs.
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