You can easily distinguish between the fast rattle of the German MG42 and the slower steady beat of the British Bren gun, Even the number of shots in a burst of fire tells the listener which side is firing. Germans using longer burst whilst the British firing two or three shots at a time, To save ammunition and stop the barrel over heating!!
@@paddyret7968 They were probably just rotating units. Or advancing. I don't know how long the British spent on the lines, but most militaries, since at least ww1, will have a unit spend x amount of days on the line, then rotate them out with a fresh unit while the former line unit gets some sleep in the rear. It's just to keep the troops fresh and in good fighting order both morale wise, and physically.
@@BurtSampson Who knows. WW2 and conflicts since and before didn't have such a system though as the front was more rapidly changing and some companies or brigades could spent weeks or months being engaged. Until it was over or needed to replenish. They may have been rotating out to get some sleep at best, or run out of ammo. At worst, they may have been too depleted to continue pushing. From the looks of it on wikipedia, the British were losing about a company of men a day at Overloon.
@@BurtSampson World War 1 was exceptional in how static the front lines were and how much fighting there were on such lines therefore creating that system. Normally, it's more like units on the front may find themselves in combat for a few days, then not doing much of anything but a constant cycle of repositioning and hunkering down as the lines warp for weeks or months at a time due to fighting elsewhere.
@@paddyret7968 The US would rotate their line units. You'd be surprised at how little action a lot of the US Army infantry units actually saw in ww2. Most of the time, unless there was a big offensive or something going on, they'd just hang out on the line for like a week or two or whatever it was, then go to the rear for like 3 days or whatever. You never wanted to be the unit on the line when the Germans decided to do shit though. One book that covered that stuff pretty well was "If You Survive", I think that's the book where he went more into the mundane stuff than books usually do. It was one of the books I have about the Hurtgen Offensive that covered it, and I think it was that one. Shit was kind of static there for a bit though prior to Germany's Hurtgen offensive. That book is a really good read btw. Fucking brutal stuff.
A strange feeling listening to this as my dad was a tank driver with churchills and flame thrower tanks .perhaps I am listening to his tank all these years later. He fought up to hamburg and then towards Berlin. 7:56
Its really sad in a way, the jounalists were scared to waste tapes and camera film for general atmosphere, hearing real men on both sides going to work is...sureal, very rare recording
At the time, they were mutually exclusive. Audio and visual recording were done with seperate devices. Is there film of this fight? Maybe, but not guarenteed.
WW2 was such an enormous conflict, literally enveloping the world. With Europe at its core. Todays wars, while vicious, do cont compare to ww2 in scope.
This is immensely interesting. To peak back in time, to hear what it was like. Ironically, the sounds of war haven’t changed much. Definitely a lot of activity back and forth. You can hear a lamb in the background “bahh, bahh”.
Yeah they did. You would be amazed what people can and are capable o f doing in a war.
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It makes the whole war like it happened yesterday. This is as close as we can get in person to the WW2 and it sends shivers on my back in a way that normal WW2 footages cannot do it.
The artillery barrage is the sound of the canons firing in distance, then comes the whistle and explosion. As I can hear, the shells are flying above the point of recording. SCARY!
This is chilling stuff; the sounds of battle echo almost unchanged, for hundreds (if not thousands) of years. It sounds just like when I saw battle myself, even in these old recordings.
After listening to these recordings, I needed to learn as much as I could about the fighting around Overloon. That town, along with Venray and Blerick, were all that remained of the German military presence on the west bank of the Meuse River. Allied command believed that Germany's armed forces were on the brink of collapse, and that the enemy assigned to this area were heavily undermanned and of poor quality. Montgomery believed that his forces in the Netherlands would be able to easily eliminate the German bridgehead west of the Meuse and then subsequently capture the town of Venlo, part of a slender strip of Dutch territory which abutted Germany on the eastern side of the river. Venlo would be subsequently used as a staging area for an invasion of Germany from the East, enabling the Allies to avoid the Sigfried Line's heavily fortified defenses. Unbeknownst to the Allies, the Germans had been able to stabilize their military situation, and envisioned spearheading their own offensive via the Overloon bridgehead. In September, Field Marshall Model heavily reinforced the defenders of the bridgehead, including elite paratrooper battalions and a panzer brigade of mechanized infantry. Contrary to the Allies' overconfident assessment of approximately 2,000 Volksgrenadier defenders, the German salient east of the Meuse now contained around 15,000 high quality, well-supplied veteran troops. These soldiers were still highly motivated believers in the German propaganda's promise of wonder weapons. They were aware that the bridges over the Meuse had been blown, and dutifully accepted the reality that the only way out of the bridgehead would either be by capture, injury, or death. They feverishly began preparing a highly organized network of defenses, saturating the roads with landmines, while strategically placing MG-42 nests and panzerfaust ambush points in the buildings which ran alongside them. The British had to fight tooth-and-nail for every building, which the Germans would immediately counterattack. Eventually the British had to resort to a creeping barrage (the idea is that your artillery hits defended positions within the immediate vicinity of your attacking forces, and slowly advances as your units do). Beginning on October 12, the British were dropping between 40-100,000 artillery shells A DAY on the German positions within this fairly small town. One last thing which I found really fascinating about this audio ....in the first clip you can hear the buzz of bombers. The German defenses were so stout, and the defenders themselves so fanatical, that the Brits were calling in airstrikes of white phosphorus, basically forced to incinerate resistance. The recordings which you've so generously released paint a picture as grim as it is terrifying. I cannot imagine sustained exposure to such unrelenting carnage. That any of these veterans were able to raise families and hold jobs after experiencing combat of this intensity is truly remarkable.
I'm hearing MG42's, Vickers and Bren Guns, mortars and arty. The drone of heavy bombers overhead. The odd Lee Enfield and Mauser shots. A calf calling for its mum. Tanks firing into buildings- you can tell those from the low trajectory "Ka POW" sounds.
Am I hallucinating or is that a goat or goats bleeting ? I am listening to this while watching football with the sound off…very surreal experience and scary 😧
