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Forests, wood and bunkers.
Hello friends.
Today I am going to start a short thread that I have called "Forests, wood and bunkers". I intend to give a perspective on the territory that the German soldiers found when the Wehrmacht began the invasion of the USSR on June 22, 1941.
And I want to describe with images how what they found were fundamentally immense and deep forests.
In a deep forest this soldier points out the position of his unit on a map of Europe. -Wir sind here !. We are here.
I will start with the typical map of the German advance in Operation Barbarossa, but immediately afterwards I will use a forest map of Eastern Europe.
On it I have drawn blue arrows in the forward directions of the three Army Groups: North, Center and South.
Forest density in the former Baltic Republics and north-western Russia is the highest. That was the terrain that Army Group North invaded to the limit of its advance on the banks of the Volchov River, where the front line would stabilize.
The Army Group Center, on their way to Moscow, invaded the rest of Belarus and Central Western Russia. The forest density was also great there and some, already in Belarus, were immense and the same will happen after passing Smolensk to Moscow.
Finally, Army Group South in its invasion of Ukraine, found rather an immense grass-covered plain and cereal and sunflower plantations and where forests did not form the landscape of the territory.
Last edited by TabsTabs1964; 05-03-2020 at 03:05 PM.
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05-03-2020 01:04 PM
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In these immense forests, German soldiers first fought and later lived in.
The huge Białowieski Forest in Belarus.
Another image of a deep forest in Belarus.
For this, they had an inexhaustible source of the raw material with which to build their shelters and bunkers: wood from the forests.
The different German defensive positions between 1941 and 1944 were formed by lines of trenches, infantry shelters, artillery posts and chains of buried bunkers. Its main construction material was logs obtained from forests.
Finally we will see that these deep forests were a hostile terrain for the German soldier, since they were inhabited by infinite bands of partisans, whose reason for being was precisely to annihilate the invader and destroy their transport networks.
Two Belarusian partisans lurk in the woods.
For years, German security units and rear divisions played a bloody cat-and-mouse game with the partisans.
Der Bandenkampfabzeichen.
In short, these dense forests of the USSR were the grave of thousands of German soldiers and Soviet partisans.
As you all know, today weapons, ammunition, military effects, corpses are still being recovered…. and even intact bunkers, almost as their occupants left them before rushing out.
I hope we enjoy it together.
Santi
Last edited by TabsTabs1964; 05-03-2020 at 08:47 PM.
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TABSTABS1964
From the first day of the invasion the soldiers live in the forest, even in a place as far west as the Augustowa forest, in eastern Poland, from where these soldiers look at us, in their camp of tents.
TABSTABS collectión
"Mückenplage, sehr schlimm" = Mosquito infestation, very bad.
Must have been fairly miserable.
Todd
Former U.S. Army Tanker.
"Best job I ever had."
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I can look at these pics for hours! Thanks Santi.
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