Tiger Tales - First-Hand Accounts of Tiger Life

[fallschirmjager]

Not sure if many here have seen this or not, but there is some interesting insight into Tiger life in the field at:

http://www.panzer-vi.fsnet.co.uk/talesmenu.html

[Matt]

This is great reading. Thanks

-Matt

[JasonC]

I read some of it. I didn't believe a single word. The subjects are nothing whatever like what real vets talk about, or what real vets discuss. It is all armor grog gamey shibboleths, wall to wall, unrelieved by a single item that is not a cliche.

[Gyrene]

Seemed like the typical tales of vets told 40 + years after the fact, interesting stuff to be sure, and probably mostly authentic.

They do make it seem like they could drive their Tigers around with impunity wherever they went in Russia and that 4 or 5 Tigers were a match for an entire company of Russian tanks; and the lack of a single mention of Sturmoviks (sp?) or even of the Russian tanks firing back (Only one such mention) makes it a bit hard to swallow.

If T34's were such pushovers the Germans would not have needed to build Panthers.

The Normandy accounts seem a little more believable.

Gyrene

[ 06-05-2001: Message edited by: Gyrene ]

[Mr. Johnson--]

I would bet that the Germans that encountered nasty Russian attacks probably did not get to write in their journals that evening.

Where as in most of these Tiger tales, the crews got a chance to do some imbelishing in their journals before they went to sleep.

[Ralph Beaman]

Not a bad site, very interesting. Are there any other sites like this, that are on the web?

[ 06-06-2001: Message edited by: Ralph Beaman ]

[Viceroy]

JasonC,

why are you so convinced it's fake?

I read many tanker tales in George Forty's "German Tanks of WW2". The vets in his book sound very like the vets on that site.

I'd be curious to know why after, as you said, a brief reading you were convinced it was all lies?

I'll quote from Gantter's foreword page XI

"You'll find errors, possibly some misinformation in this ...... but I'm not going to worry much about a few errors of fact.

..... portions of this book would seem false or distorted or incomplete to many of the men who shared a common experience, saw different things and saw them differently."

[Michael Dorosh]

Talking to veterans is an art. If Jason talks to them the way he talks to us, I don't doubt he has no concept of how "veterans really talk."

The trick to talking to a vet is to not talk about the groggy stuff. Some vets won't remember it anyway. The ones that do - they will come to it, but you have to be casual and patient. Ask them how many girlfriends they had when they were in England before moving to Normandy. That kind of stuff. Knowing what you are talking about is important too - basic stuff like the rank structure of the army.

Above all, you can't argue with them, even when you know they're wrong about something. If a vet tells you they were issued bright red baseball caps in the 4th Armored Division, smile and nod....and move on.

The journal seems to match closely with one reprinted in one of the SOLDAT volumes. It might be 100 percent made up, who really knows, but it is a decent forgery.

As for soldiers not having time to keep journals - nonsense; most soldiers spent hours and hours waiting. The Germans seem to have been the best at documenting things. Go to ebay and check out the photo albums on sale.

I went to a Panzer Lehr vet's house to look at his photos. It was amazing how well kept up his album was, and how many pictures he took in Russia - and how many survived the war.

I worked in a German militaria store for a while; we had one photo album come in under the arm of a collector (not for sale!) and every photo, from an officers service in the Reichswehr and later Wehrmacht, was neatly labelled by hand. Turned out the officer (or perhaps his brother) was in prison for rape after the war and had plenty of time on his hands!

Check out translations of official histories too - the writing seems similar to Spaeter's quotes and reprinted diary entries in the official GD histories.

The Germans were big on documenting stuff, and this all seems perfectly reasonable.

EDIT - I'll add that talking to German veterans is quite different than talking to North American vets. Perhaps Jason is using his knowledge of Americans and applying it things beyond the Continental 48. While American vets may not tend to remember things like unit names, technical data, etc., the German vets I have spoken to seemed to be more interested in that kind of stuff. Not all of them could name with precision what unit they were in (50 years after the fact) but all had a keen knowledge and interest in weapon nomenclature.

Some things just stay in your mind; the Panzer Lehr vet remarked to me on the phone that he remembered the different hues of Allied and German flares at night.

There are limits to how much info you can get from them, but they always have interesting things to say.

Oh, a German vet I met online shared part of his diary with me - check out

http://members.home.net/calgaryhighlanders/knolle.htm

My reserve regiment fought in the area he served in; there are some interesting details in this diary account. No doubt the vet was assisted by research from Canadian sources - which is a good thing.

The style seems similar to some of the stuff on the Tiger site.

[ 06-06-2001: Message edited by: Michael Dorosh ]

[lcm1947]

Very interesting. Thanks for thinking of us.

[Grunto IV]

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Gyrene:

They do make it seem like they could drive their Tigers around with impunity wherever they went in Russia and that 4 or 5 Tigers were a match for an entire company of Russian tanks...

If T34's were such pushovers the Germans would not have needed to build Panthers.

The Normandy accounts seem a little more believable.

<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

at long range, tigers were very tough on t-34s.

it was in close range fighting that parity was met.

cmbo doesn't model the long range german optical advantges.

andy

[Grunto IV]

the 'joachim scholl in russia' looks like b.s. for starters, the dates for citadel appear to be wrong.

on the other hand, the bobby woll one and the one from the radio operator sound like they could be authentic to me.

andy

[Triumvir]

The whole Joachim Scholl set smacks of a 90's hand; they don't sound like a German from the 1940s. Having read memoirs from that period, I'm pretty sure that they're a fabrication, or at the most charitable, a _terrible_ translation.

[Roksovkiy]

>the 'joachim scholl in russia' looks like b.s. for starters, the dates for citadel appear to be wrong.

The II SS corps Das were fighting around Prochorovka right up until 18,19 and 20th July, with only a slight general withdrawal from General Otto von Knobelsdorff's XLVIII Panzer Corps and General Ott's LII Army Corps.

[Viceroy]

Triumvir,

out of interest, are you fairly fluent in German? Did you read those German memoirs in German or in English?

I'll post something later from the interviews by George Forty and put them next to excerpts from the above mentioned site.We'll see if that sheds any light.

[M.McCulloch]

Hello, Aloow me to introduce myself. I am the webmaster for Panzer VI. Now for all those who think the material published is bull **** feel free to mail me directly instead of going behind the backs of people. I will gladly send all 22 MB of my late great uncles (Joachim Scholl) diary original german version. If you doubt its authenticity. I would prefer you to Email me directly if you wish to rubbish the site it is much preferred to stabbing people in the back. For all you amatuer historians that have read a few books & are now experts on WW2 all the information in the site come from the highest sources available & all were checked for authenticity prior to upload. I myself have devoted over 20 years to the subject so I can re assure you all that the tales are all genuine. Bull ******* is not my game. As for the point about Citadel for most of the operation the German army was in such disarray that command didn't know where most of it's units were for long periods of time & II panzer corps were not always assigned a full compliment of Tigers. Soure Prof John Ericsson Unversity of Edinburgh.

Hope that clears that up for you. If you wish to speak directly the Email address is posted as it is all over the site. :mad:

[Viceroy]

Well there you have it from the horses mouth.

So will the critics take him up on his offer? I doubt it ....... they'll just hide away and try extremely hard to ignore the challenge.

[Gyrene]

I don't think that posting on such a popular forum can be considered back-stabbing, but I agree that perhaps the comments could also have been directed to the author via e-mail.

I stand by my original post, I found the articles interesting and I assume that they are mostly authentic, by that I mean that every war tale as an amount of fabrication in it, the Normandy accounts I think are very realistic, while the Russian front ones have a little too much of the "We walked all over them" factor in it.

Gyrene

[Michael Dorosh]

That's ok, certain people usually disappear when it is obvious they have been proven wrong.

Gyrene, I have to agree with you - veteran's comments must be taken with a grain of salt. Even a wartime journal can get the dates and days wrong - how many soldiers had little idea of what day it was or where they were - especially in the wastelands of Russia? I'd be more worried if these accounts were perfect in every way. Look at the link I provided - the German veteran discusses Tiger tanks, yet I am not convinced there were Tiger units operating in that area. Does that mean he made up the whole story? No - just that to soldiers in WW II, EVERY tank was a Tiger (except maybe those actually serving in them!)

Thanks to the webmaster for making an appearance; I hope you will keep up the good work preserving this history for others.

[Gyrene]

Here are the return comments from the web site's author, he granted me permission to post this here:

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Hi

Thanks for your truthful comments. I agree the forum is popular however no-one with the exception of one person had the decency to ask me or my co-designer. I agree that the Russian accounts are a little "one-sided" however they were translated & written as quoted. There are large parts of the original journals & diaryies that are scored out hardly surprising due to the way the Nazu regime treated deafist talk so from this point it is accurate. You will notice on the site that at no part does it say this is historical fact, only that it is told as it was to me or Cliff. We get many emails from both sides of the war wishing to tell us about their adventures & I'm sure that a good percentage of it will be exaggerated but that is not for us to say. We will tell it as it is once the new site dedicated to all true stories is launched sometime next year. I have no doubt that wonderfully knowledgable historians such as Mr Jason C will still rubbish it. I hope he knows that the designers of Combat mission namely the chief 3d designer kitty actually approached us for the info on the Tiger! perhaps I should relay that on the forum as well. What I would suggest to all forum members is to join a proper WW2 forum where the vets actually post.

Feel free to copy & paste this if you want I will not be posting myself as that was a one off allowed by Battlefront. too busy on new sites

Thanks for your decency in replying directly.

Yours

Martyn Mcculloch / Cliff X

Panzer VI team east & west

Scotland & PRC<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Gyrene

[JasonC]

It was indeed the J-S stuff that struck me as bad fiction and very thin. Some of the rest may well be better. Several of the things I noticed about the JS portions - every comment was either tendentiously directed at some much debated political issue among historians, technical issue among later grognards, or was a cliche, or both. Unrelieved by a single example of freshness, vivid picturing, curious incident, anecodotal account of friendships, hardships, loves, hates, etc.

As Michael quite correctly says, vets will spend hours on such topics for two paragraphs about anything military-technical. And when they do address military technical issues, they do not do so with one liner throw-aways. The issue arises for some reason connected to a story, and it is necessary to get it right for the point of the story.

Then there is the complete absence of vivid imagery, unit details, mission details, coordination issues - if fact, anything beyond the platoon while in action, and the company while not. Then there are particular places that are plainly unbelievable, like one passage about getting out of the Tiger and it taking an hour to get warm again afterward and being surprised about it, for all the world like it was the first time he had done so in Russian in the cold, when it was supposedly after years of action and tank crews are out of their vehicles all the time when not in direct action. Or another where it was the first time he was scared of dying, when he supposedly spent years driving Pz IIIs. Or the unbelievable three line paragraphs that Italy was just boring, but at least warm and the whole description of it, which are more consistent with writer's block than realism. Or the fact that every rear area or politically related item in the whole is the most worn and thread-bare cliche, something out of movie cartoon versions of history.

It is possible the effect is a result of a ridiculously clusmy choice of passages to present, but I rather doubt it. And I don't care how much padding is put around any of it. I don't believe a word of what is there in the J-S stuff. And the site operator, so all-fired concerned over it (hardly a response suggesting merit to my mind, on the contrary), will just have to deal with the fact that I don't believe anything he is saying.

Having already blown such credit by charity I readily extend to most, he is not going to re-establish it with me by anything amount of pontificating. He may enjoy that for the sake of the rest of his potential audience, and I don't give a darn about that, one way or another.

If he thinks he has any sort of rights of ownership over my own judgments and opinions, I can quickly disabuse him of the notion. I owe him nothing. He will just have to live with the fact that one person in the world doesn't believe one of things he has published.

[Michael Dorosh]

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Gyrene:

the Normandy accounts I think are very realistic, while the Russian front ones have a little too much of the "We walked all over them" factor in it.

Gyrene<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

The Russian front vet I talked to proclaimed, practically on a stack of bibles, that they passed huge stockpiles of equipment on the Soviet border in June 1941 as Barbarossa began. He also described how he was in training in July 1945 to go to war with Russia again - with American instructors teaching them small arms. This was a face to face conversation.

There is something of the revisionist in many German veterans....or perhaps there are stories that have not been fully told....?

I think many Germans really resented being beaten by the Russians; they were indoctrinated and trained to regard them as subhuman. A lot of those ways of thinking died hard. Look at Ernst Otto Remer - who commanded Hitler's bodyguard in Berlin. He went to prison in the 1990's for denying the Holocaust. I don't doubt that many German vets have exaggerated their own abilities - especially with regards to their Russian foes. It's how they were conditioned to think.

[Gyrene]

Michael, when did the T34 make it's appearance in the Eastern Front? I was under the impression that they showed up later after the German assault started to lose mommentum.

From the little I know about the Eastern Front, your description of masses of abandoned Russian equipment early in Barbarossa seem up to par, and I wonder if T34's would be included in it.

Gyrene

[Stalin's Organ]

IMO you're being way to analystic Jason.

There are individuals recollections and journals of what was important to them - not sweeping histories of the war.

It is entirely possible that an individual may have found Italy boring and never felt threatened while driving a Pz-III.

What proof do you have otherwise?

[Michael Dorosh]

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Gyrene:

Michael, when did the T34 make it's appearance in the Eastern Front? I was under the impression that they showed up later after the German assault started to lose mommentum.

From the little I know about the Eastern Front, your description of masses of abandoned Russian equipment early in Barbarossa seem up to par, and I wonder if T34's would be included in it.

Gyrene<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Not abandoned equipment - this vet was telling me Russia was preparing to invade Germany. Pretty debatable. It was an example of German veteran's revisionism. Maybe he was right, maybe not. Most historians would say he was, as the French say, full of ****. Many German accounts read that way.

As for T-34s, as moot as it might be, I am trying to find a photo of the first T-34 encountered by an SS unit. I think the date was summer 1941 - so quite early on - but will try and dig out my hard source.

[offtaskagain]

I saw a picture of the first T-34 encountered by the Liebstandarte. It was knocked out on the side of the road, with an SS officer being carried away on a stretcher. The caption said he tried to destroy it with a Hafthollahdung mine, but got injured somehow. I believe it was dated mid July '41.