Tiger Tracks - The Classic Panzer Memoir

Wolfgang Faust was the driver of a Tiger I tank with the Wehrmacht Heavy Panzer Battalions, seeing extensive combat on the Eastern Front in 1943-45. This memoir was his brutal and deeply personal account of the Russian Front's appalling carnage.

Telling the story of a vicious three-day tank battle, Faust describes how his Tiger unit fought on the steppes of Russia against the full might of the Red Army: the T34 tanks, the Sturmovik bombers, suicidal Russian infantry and the feared Katyusha rocket brigades. He reveals the merciless decisions that panzer crews made in action, the devastating power of their weaponry, and the many ways that men met their deaths in the snow and ice of the Ostfront.

Originally published as ‘Panzerdammerung’ (‘Panzer Twilight’) in the late 1940s, this memoir's savage realism shocked the post-war German public. Some readers were outraged at the book's final scenes, while others wrote that, ‘Now, at last, I know what our men did in the East.’ Today, 'Tiger Tracks' stands as one of the great semi-autobiographical accounts of World War Two: a crescendo of horror, grim survival and a fatalistic acceptance of the panzer man’s destiny.

The only other surviving memoir by this author is 'The Last Panther' - an astonishing account of panzer warfare in the final hours of the Third Reich - also available on Kindle and in paperback.