Des Tigres dans la boue. Les mémoires de guerre d’Otto Carius

Devoured by tens of thousands of readers around the world, republished seven times in German and English, this story which has inspired many artists, including the director and designer Hayao Miyazaki who will make a manga of it in 1998, is finally available. in French !

"Tigers in the Mud" is an essential work that any military history enthusiast or specialist in mechanized warfare must have read. This is a raw testimony, written less than ten years after the end of the war, by a tanker who lived through the events.

Otto Carius is an antihero, a skinny and sickly patriot, who finds himself thrown at the head of a company of Tigers in the most epic of military campaigns: the war in the East, the Ostfront. Nothing predisposed him to this and he honestly recounts his strengths and weaknesses, his doubts and his certainties. The anecdotes are omnipresent and we learn a lot about the Tiger, the armored combat, the living conditions on board and at the front, the state of mind of the Landser from 1941 to 1945.

Carius spares us nothing, he does not glorify himself and avoids melodramatic storytelling. He also does not hide a certain admiration for the tenacity of his Soviet enemy.

"Tigers in the Mud" establishes a fascinating atmosphere, a particular climate with the reader; we are placed in the turret, like a privileged witness, and we understand that it is not so much the tank that wins the duel, as its commander and his subordinates. Success rests on the shoulders of the entire crew.