Thomas Fischer

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The Ss-Panzer-Artillery Regiment 1 Leibstandarte Adolf Hitle

This book is the first volume about Artillery Regiment 1 of the 1st Waffen-SS Division Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler (LAH). The artillery batteries of the LAH during the whole of World War II faced some of the hardest combat, and probably no other artillery unit was used as often at critical spots on all fronts. While it had only three batteries of light field howitzers during the French campaign, when the full artillery regiment was set up in August 1940, it later received heavier guns and 88mm flak. In April 1941, at Lake Kastoria in Macedonia during a tremendous artillery battle, the full regiment fired as a unit for the first time. During the battles on the Russian Front the regiment’s artillery equipment was constantly upgraded. One of the artillery batteries was equipped from 1943 with Wespe and Hummel self-propelled guns and later with Nebelwerfer rocket launchers that gave the regiment its tremendous firepower. Especially during the difficult defensive battles in the winter of 1943-1944 in the Ukraine, every artillery piece – whether a heavy field howitzer, or 15cm rocket launcher – was often used at such close range that it was fired with barrels in a horizontal position. The battery was later attached to the reconnaissance unit in the vanguard of the LAH and experienced the hardest battles while using “Panzermeyer tactics” that required rapid marches and lightning fast deployment into firing positions. Nearly 300 photos, most never before published, document the bitter battles of the LAH artillery regiment.