He was wounded twice but stayed with his unit. He knocked out Soviet tanks at an incredible pace, receiving another Iron Cross Second Class on July 12 for destroying six of them. When three Nazi armies swarmed across the Russian border on June 22, 1941, the LSSAH panzers rolled southward and Wittmann quickly distinguished himself as a tank commander in the first of many clashes with the Red Army. Early that June, Wittmann and the LSSAH armored formations were shipped eastward to prepare for Operation Barbarossa, the German Army’s massive-and ill-fated-invasion of Russia. He soldiered against British Commonwealth troops and partisans in Greece until mid-1941 and then headed for another front where he was to come into his own as a warrior. During the brief Polish campaign and then in the German blitzkrieg sweep into Belgium, Holland, and France, he commanded a six-wheeled heavy armored car on reconnaissance sorties.Īfter German forces invaded the Balkans on April 6, 1941, Wittmann led an assault gun platoon in Greece, where his skill and gallantry earned him the Iron Cross Second Class. Now promoted to unterscharführer (sergeant), Wittmann was in action from the start with the LSSAH assault gun battalion. Germany invaded Poland on Friday, September 1, 1939, and Great Britain and France declared war the following Sunday. The unit was reduced in status to a panzer scout platoon in the summer of 1938. In late 1937, Wittmann received driver training, excelled in handling light and heavy armored cars, and joined the 17th Panzer Scout Company of the LSSAH. The hand-picked unit was led by the brutal but able Dietrich, a World War I sergeant major, early Nazi street brawler, and Hitler favorite. 1 of the elite Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler (LSSAH), the personal bodyguard formed by the German Führer in 1933. That October, he enlisted in the 19th Infantry Regiment of the Reichscheer, the interwar German Army, and served for almost two years.ĭischarged as a corporal in September 1936, the ambitious young man then joined the Waffen SS in April 1937 and was assigned to Sturm No. After graduating from high school, the quiet, industrious boy worked on his father’s farm and served in the Reichsarbeitdienst (National Labor Corps) for the first six months of 1934. The son of farmer Johann Wittmann, Michael was born on Wednesday, April 22, 1914, at Vogelfal in the scenic Oberpfalz district in southeastern Germany. Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler: Hitler’s Elite Bodyguard A slim, boyishly handsome man, the 30-year-old Wittmann was already a legendary figure in the Wehrmacht. He was Obersturmführer (lieutenant) Michael Witt-mann, commander of the 2nd Company of the 101st Heavy Tank Battalion, one of the spearhead squadrons of Col. Erskine’s tanks managed to penetrate as far as the town of Villers-Bocage, 10 kilometers southwest of Caen, but were halted there in one of the most astonishing actions of World War II.Īlmost singlehandedly, one German soldier blocked the advance of the armored force and upset the British timetable by a month. “Bobby” Erskine’s 7th Armored Division, the famed Desert Rats, part of Brigadier Robert “Loony” Hinde’s 22nd Armored Brigade. Montgomery, the Allied forces’ ground commander and leader of the powerful British 21st Army Group, ordered a bold “right hook” to try and envelop Caen. Caen, a key communications and transportation center viewed as the “hinge” of the Normandy campaign, was fiercely defended and would remain in German hands for a critical month. The assault forces secured their bridgeheads and started pushing inland.īut they soon ran into concentrated resistance as the Germans swiftly drew the bulk of their panzer groups to the Bayeux-Caen-Falaise area, where the bocage country-a patchwork of small fields hemmed in by sunken roads, ditches, and thick embankments-strongly favored defense and hindered the Allied advance.Ī costly slugging match developed, and a series of frontal assaults by British and Canadian armored and infantry units produced heavy losses and little headway. 1st and 29th Infantry Divisions at Omaha Beach. The Allied landings on five Normandy beaches had gone well that fateful Tuesday morning, despite fierce initial German opposition on the British beaches and a bloody setback for the U.S. Sir Miles Dempsey’s British Second Army on D-Day, June 6, 1944. Straddling the River Orne nine miles from the English Channel coast, the French medieval city of Caen was the focal objective of Lt.
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