Superb WW2 historical books source, from US Army

[Bixby]

Long time no post :-)

A year or two ago I discovered the US Army has (rather buried) on its web-
site PDFs of hundreds of its book, here;

https://history.army.mil/catalog/browse/title.html

Some of these books are thousand-page works on esoteric subjects, and are
absolutely priceless.

Some are of material which you could not imagine finding anywhere else - a
book where just post-war German Generals were asked to describe the
problems and experiences of fighting Russia, on the Eastern Front.

(In that book, there's a marvellous story about Russian partisan activity;
a partisan, working on the railways (the Germans lacked the staff to run
them, themselves) attached a mine to a German fuel supply train, the mine
exploded, the train went up in flames - which induced another train, an
ammo train to go up, which then gutted another two trains, one carrying
Tiger tanks, the other carrying rations. This was in winter, I think
1944.)

A few, which tend to be those written close to the war, are written in
non-objective styles ("us", "our troops", etc), which is fasinating.

A few also are lightweight works.

I've read a couple of dozen books from this source now.

[John Dallman]

Post by Bixby
Some are of material which you could not imagine finding anywhere
else - a book where just post-war German Generals were asked to
describe the problems and experiences of fighting Russia, on the
Eastern Front.

Presumably you mean "German Campaign in Russia: Planning and Operations,
1940-1942"?

John

[Bixby]

Post by John Dallman

Post by Bixby
Some are of material which you could not imagine finding anywhere else
- a book where just post-war German Generals were asked to describe the
problems and experiences of fighting Russia, on the Eastern Front.

Presumably you mean "German Campaign in Russia: Planning and Operations,
1940-1942"?

"Rear Area Security in Russia"

https://history.army.mil/html/books/104/104-16/index.html

Page 25.

It's such a good story I'll take the liberty of posting it. Copy'n'paste
from the PDF resulted in a very strange paste (I think it was doing
something like OCR on the fly), which I've manually fixed up (and so
excuse any errors).

"In the fal1 of 1943 four supply trains were destroyed simultaneously at
the Osipovichi railrond stntion, and all traffic on that ]ine had to be
suspenued for n. long time. Investigations revea led that a magnetic mine
had been attached, presumably by a native railroad worker, to one of the
tank cars of a gasoline train. When the mine went off it set the car on
fire, and the spreading blaze soon enveloped the entire train. An
ammunitioll train stunding nearby was ignited and blew sky high, setting
fire in turn to an adjacent forage train. Finally, a fourth train loaued
with "Tiger" tanks suffered the same fate and also burned out completely.
The shortagc of personel ns well as the lack of extta locomotives made it
impossible to save even part of the trains by removing individual cars.
Moreover, the explosion of the ammunition train hnd caused considerable
dnmage to many of the switches, so thnt the line as no in operation
condition."