Overview

In March 1945 the German Wehrmacht undertook its final attempt to change the course of the war by launching a counteroffensive in the area of Lake Balaton, Hungary. Here, the best panzer forces of the Third Reich and the elite of the Panzerwaffe were assembled - the panzer divisions SS Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler, Das Reich, Totenkopf, Wiking and others, staffed by ardent believers in Nazism and armed with the most up-to-date combat equipment, including up to 900 tanks and self-propelled guns. At the time, this was considered a secondary axis for the Red Army, and thus the troops of the 3rd Ukrainian Front had to stop the German counteroffensive with their own forces and could not count upon reinforcements from the Stavka Reserve, which were needed for the decisive storming of Berlin. Relying upon their combat skill and rich combat experience, the Soviet troops carried out this task with honour, stopping the tidal wave of German armor and inflicting a decisive defeat and enormous, irreplaceable losses upon the enemy. The defeat of the Sixth SS Panzer Army became a genuine catastrophe for Germany, and Balaton became the tomb of the Panzerwaffe. In this book, penned by two leading Russian military historians, this major defeat suffered by the Wehrmacht has been described and analysed for the first time using data from both Soviet and German archives. It focuses not only on Operation Spring Awakening, but also describes the preceding Konrad offensives conducted by the Germans in the effort to come to the aid of the encircled and desperate German and fascist Hungarian defenders of Budapest. This edition is lavishly illustrated with over a hundred rare photographs of destroyed or disabled German armor taken shortly after the battle by a Soviet inspection team, besides other photographs and specially commissioned colour maps.

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9781912174546

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Reviews

This book analyses the catastrophic German defeat at Balaton in 1945 and for the first time uses data collected from both Soviet and German archive sources Primarily a written account of the battle, the book is well illustrated throughout with around 120 B&W photos --Military Machines International ... an engaging operational history of the significant battles that took place near Hungary's Lake Balaton from January to early March of 1945 ... I must mention one other highlight of Tomb of the Panzerwaffe; that being its wonderful use of archival pictures taken by Soviet photographers not only during combat operations but also of knocked out Soviet and Axis armor following the end of each battle--Globe at War

Author Information

Aleksei Isaev was born in 1974. Since the year 2004 up to the present date, he has written approximately 20 books on the history of the Eastern Front in the Second World War, with a particular emphasis on the events of 1941 and the Stalingrad battle. His particular research interest today is the war's final period. In the years 2007-2010, he worked as an academic scholar in the Russian Ministry of Defense's Institute of Military History. He was a contributor to the new 12-volume official Russian history of the war. Thanks to the opening of the previously classified military archives in Russia, since then he has done a lot of work with the war's documents as an independent scholar. Mikhail Kolomiets was born in Moscow in 1968. He is a 1994 graduate of the Moscow Higher Technical Institute. Upon graduation, he did his compulsory military service in the Soviet Army. His childhood interest in military history gradually focused on the history of the armored vehicles and tank forces of Russia and the Soviet Union between 1914 and 1950. In 1992 Kolomiets began work in the Russian State Military Archive, at a time when a large amount of the Red Army documents dating to the period before 1941 were still classified. Thanks to his specialization in the institute, he was able to obtain one of its allotted access passes, so he was one of the first to become acquainted with the documents of the Red Army's Main Motorized Armor and Tank Command from the 1931-1941 period. In September 1995, he became one of the first independent scholars to receive access to the documents in the Central Archive of the Ministry of Defense after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Kolomiets is the author of several dozen books on the history of the creation and combat employment of the armored vehicles of Russia and the Soviet Union. Stuart Britton is a freelance translator and editor residing in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. He has been responsible for making a growing number of Russian titles available to readers of the English language, consisting primarily of memoirs by Red Army veterans and recent historical research concerning the Eastern Front of the Second World War and Soviet air operations in the Korean War. Notable recent titles include Boris Gorbachevsky's Through the Maelstrom: A Red Army Soldier's War on the Eastern Front 1942-45 (University Press of Kansas, 2008) and Yuri Sutiagin's and Igor Seidov's MiG Menace Over Korea: The Story of Soviet Fighter Ace Nikolai Sutiagin (Pen & Sword Aviation, 2009). Future books will include Lev Lopukhovsky's detailed study of the Soviet disaster at Viazma in 1941, Svetlana Gerasimova's analysis of the prolonged and savage fighting against Army Group Center in 1942-43 to liberate the city of Rzhev, and more of Igor Seidov's studies of the Soviet side of the air war in Korea, 1951-1953.

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