By Tank Into Normandy - Stuart Hills MC

[Wisbech_lad]

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0304362166/qid=1065576514/sr=2-1/104-4294139-8051920?v=glance&s=books

I picked this up at an airport book stall. Highly recommended, the author was a UK tank commander of a troop of Shermans of the Sherwood Rangers, 8th Armoured Brigade, at D-Day, ending up as oi/c of the recce squadron (Stuarts) by VE day. Even has simple sketch maps to help scenario builders... And he fights with the US Airborne during Market Garden so there's something for US readers too. I would say that it is up there with "18 Platoon" by Jary.

Review from London Diary:

Winner of the ‘Distinguished Book Award’ from the US Society for Military History for the best memoir of 2003.

“one of the best half-dozen personal accounts of the Normandy campaign” RICHARD HOLMES

“This is a superb, awe-inspiring but intimate account of warfare at its most intense. BY TANK INTO NORMANDY should be obligatory reading at Sandhurst.” BRITISH ARMY REVIEW

A direct, harrowing and exciting account of tank warfare at the invasion front by a Second World War tank commander. It is also a beautifully written and moving wartime memoir.

Stuart Hills embarked his Sherman DD tank on to a landing craft in Southampton at 6.45 am, Sunday 4th June 1944. He was 20 years old, unblooded, fresh from a public school background and Officer Cadet training. He was going to war. The tank he commanded was the latest high tech model - it was able to float (mostly hidden) and propel itself thought water to the enemy on the beach, a key weapon in the D-Day invasion of the 6th June and an element of surprise closely guarded by the Ministry of Defence which afforded the landing much success. But his Sherman DD tank sunk. He and his crew landed from a rubber dinghy with just the clothes they stood in.

After he and his crew were given a replacement tank (of the non-swimming variety), they struggled through the Normandy bocage landscape engaging the enemy in a constant round of close encounters, which led to a swift mastering of the art of tank warfare and remarkable survival in the midst of carnage and destruction. We are acquainted in fascinating detail with the practicalities of tank warfare; learning of the Flame Thrower tanks, the chain lashing Mine Clearers, how the Sherman too easily becomes an incinerator of it’s crew-so nicknamed the “Ronson Lighter”; and the horror of the annihilation of fellow infantrymen viewed from inside the tank.

Stuart Hill’s story of that journey, from Bayeux in France all the way to Hanover in Germany, from hell to victory, makes for compulsive reading.

Stuart Hills MC survived his war to lead a varied and successful career, in part in the Civil Service in Malaya. This is his first full length book, and is based on the war diaries he kept at the time. He lives in Tonbridge in Kent.

Edited to add unit information

[ October 08, 2003, 04:10 AM: Message edited by: Wisbech_lad ]