By Ian Baxter

Hitler's mountain troops or Gebirgsjager have been a bunch of elite infantrymen prepared for conflict, regardless of the stipulations. those mountain males have been proficient to ski, climb and suffer lengthy marches, live to tell the tale appalling stipulations and got a job as crack surprise troops. but a number of the campaigns within which the Gebirgsjager fought have been on point floor the place they'd little chance to illustrate their specified abilities. as an alternative, they have been normally hired as attack infantry in traditional conflict, a job within which each person trooper excelled, yet no longer one for which they'd been trained.

They fought in almost all theaters of global battle II, significantly at the japanese entrance, the place operations took them into the Caucasus. The Gebirgsjager have been proud to put on the Edelweiss, the well-known badge that set them aside and individual them as Hitler's mountain males. This great booklet exhibits the Gebirgsjager in education and motion from Poland, Norway and France, via Yugoslavia, the japanese entrance and within the final levels of the War.

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They were back in Oxford, living near a factory, and he hoped there were no bombing raids that night. Beside Howard sat Lieutenant Den Brotheridge, whose wife was pregnant and due to deliver any day (five other men in the company had pregnant wives back in England). Howard had talked Brotheridge into joining the Ox and Bucks, and had selected his platoon for the no. 1 glider because he thought Brotheridge and his platoon about the best in his company. Another reason was that they were mostly Londoners like himself.

The pilot, twenty-four-year-old Staff Sergeant Jim Wall-work, of the Glider Pilot Regiment, anticipated casting off any second now that he had seen the surf breaking over the Norman coast. Beside him his co-pilot, Staff Sergeant John Ainsworth, was concentrating intensely on his stop watch. ' Howard suffered from air sickness and had vomited on every training flight. This flight, however, was an exception. Like his men, he had not been in combat before, but the prospect seemed to calm him more than it shook him.

Gale decided to drop his division east of the Orne River, about five to seven miles inland, in the low ground between the Orne and the River Dives. The main body would gather in and around the village of Ranville, and would guard the bridges over the Orne Canal and River. Specially-trained companies would capture and destroy the four bridges over the River Dives, then fall back on Ranville; others would destroy the German battery at Merville. Central to Gale's plan was taking and holding the bridges over the Orne waterways, without which the 6th Airborne would be unable to receive tanks, trucks, and other equipment from the beaches.

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