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Christmas celebrations during the Second World War often had to be scaled down or adjusted as restrictions and shortages took their toll. Von Luck gives an open and honest account of his war experience from Russia to France to Africa and his eventual capture and internment in Russia.
Von Luck represents the ideal German officer from a generation that grew up during the Weimar years before Nazi propaganda took control of hearts and minds. Reporting back for duty on 1 April 1942, he reached Africa on 8 April and assumed command over the 3rd Panzer Reconnaissance Battalion of the 21st Panzer Division.Luck was born in Flensburg, Province of Schleswig-Holstein, into a Prussian family with old military roots, going back to the 13th century. He comes across as rather honorable as he changes names or does not give full names to people he thought would get in trouble or should be left alone. The following division, the Guards Armoured Division did not heed the fate of the 11th, and it too took massive losses in the area, effectively halting the British armoured advance. We sometimes make mistakes in our spelling, transcription or categorisation, or miss information out of our records.
Von Luck comes across as fundamentally decent, a gentleman, the kind of man who would make convivial company. The withdrawal could only be conducted on two roads, with very high piles of snow alongside them, meaning that no maneuvering could take place. On one occasion Luck, facing the Royal Dragoons regiment, received a radio transmission from the British asking about the well being of a British patrol gone missing. He supports with the regime's initial moves to win back German pride and control of territories lost by the punitive retribution of the Treaty of Versailles.To hear him tell it, he never abused a prisoner; never made a major blunder while commanding; and never got free or cheap goodies from the occupied French via the implicit threat of "for else. I am about a quarter of the way through the audio version (for some reason the voice actor puts on an obviously fake German accent and reads with a downbeat tone, which take a bit of getting used to) of this Second World War memoir.
About half of the 100,000 trapped troops managed to escape, though most of the heavy materiel and vehicles were destroyed in the pocket. On 26 July Panzer Lehr's lines were broken, and 21st Panzer Division reoriented themselves on this new threat. He also became good friends with several of his former opponents, most notably British Airborne Major John Howard. In 1936 Luck assumed command over the 3rd company in the 8th Armoured Reconnaissance Battalion, stationed in Potsdam. I have often felt that in the first half of my life I was, in a double sense, a prisoner of my time, trapped on the one hand in the Prussian tradition and bound by the oath of allegiance, which made it easy for the Nazi regime to misuse the military leadership; then forced to pay my country's tribute, along with so many thousand others, with five years of captivity on Russian soil.Colonel Luck starts before the war and discusses his training, but as with most of the book, he doesn't detail what he is doing involving the Army as much as what he is doing and who he is meeting outside of the basics of what is going on. During this action Luck was wounded in the hand, but after a night's rest he was back with the unit. During this advance Luck had a narrow escape, when he and his adjutant in a Mercedes cabriolet stumbled into a large group of Russian infantry along a narrow wooded track. After the war, von Luck wrote a memoir which was highly praised; this led to his acquaintance, and ultimately friendship, with both historians of the war and also Allied officers he had fought against.
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