Page 33 - Panzer Division News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

British Commanders Underestimated Italian Forces at Bir el Gubi (and Paid the Price) When planning the relief of Tobruk in late 1941, British Eighth Army commanders brusquely discounted the opposition they would face from Italian armored forces. Here's What You Need to Know: The first armored battle of Operation Crusader was an Axis—more appropriately, an Italian—victory. February 1941 saw the fortunes of war favor the British in the North African wasteland of Cyrenaica (modern Libya). Two months prior the Italian 10th Army, over 250,000 strong under Marshal Rodolfo Granziani, had been s...

One expects a ‘heavy tank’ to be heavily  armored—but the T-35s long hull made it prohibitively weighty to install thick armor plates. Here's What You Need to Remember: The multi-turret land battleship proved to be a blind alley in tank development—there was nothing one oversized and over-gunned tank could do that several, much cheaper armored vehicles couldn’t do better. Still, the T-35 amounted to an impressive icon of Soviet might—just not a successful war machine. Recently, a Russian military museum in Sverdlovsk unveiled a moving replica T-35 tank, recreating one of the la...

Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery meticulously planned the 21st Army Group crossing of the mighty Rhine. Here's What You Need to Know: Watching the offensive go forward, Churchill repeated to Eisenhower, “My dear general, the German is whipped. We have got him. He is all through.” “I am busy getting ready for the next battle,” Field Marshal Sir Bernard Law Montgomery wrote his son David in early March 1945. This was just weeks before the start of Operation Plunder, which involved the allies finally crossing the Rhine into German territory. “The Rhine is some river,” Montgomery s...

Bitter Fight at Gela: Beginning of the End of Mussolini's Italy This small Italian village on the Sicily coast hosted a stiff battle to repel Allied landings in July 1943. Here's What You Need to Know: Gela was a harbinger of how amphibious assaults would occur in the future at places such as Salerno, Anzio, and Normandy. The smoke had barely cleared from the battlefields of North Africa when the victorious Allies turned their attention northward to Europe. American planners were eager for the decisive battle against Nazi Germany in Western Europe, which could only happen after a successful ...

Hitler's Secret World War II Weapon: Horses Thousands of pack animals and cavalry horses in WWII labored in the German Army, and many were killed in combat or slaughtered by starving soldiers. Here's What You Need to Know: Horsemanship was taught at SS academies. By 1939 the German Reich possessed 3,800,000 horses to be used in WWII German cavalry while 885,000 were initially called to the Wehrmacht as saddle, draft, and pack animals. Of these, 435,000 horses were captured from the USSR, France, and Poland. Additional horses were purchased from Hungary, Romania, Czechoslovakia, and Ireland....