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Lt Col James H. Howard's P-51 Mustang with 12 kill marks for aerial victories over German and Japanese pilots. A victory marking (also called a victory mark, kill marking, or kill mark, or mission symbol) is a symbol applied in stencil or decal to the side of a military aircraft, ship or ground vehicle to denote a victory achieved by the pilot or crew against an aerial target.
Its name, Totenkopf, is German for "death's head" – the skull and crossbones symbol – and it is thus sometimes referred to as the Death's Head Division. [ 2 ] The division was formed through the expansion of Kampfgruppe Eicke , a battle group named – in keeping with German military practice – after its commander, Theodor Eicke .
In World War II, overclaims were a common problem. Nearly 50% of Royal Air Force (RAF) victories in the Battle of Britain , for instance, do not tally statistically with recorded German losses; but some at least of this apparent over-claiming can be tallied with known wrecks, and German aircrew known to have been in British PoW camps.
Totenkopf (German: [ˈtoːtn̩ˌkɔpf], i.e. skull, literally "dead person's head") is the German word for skull. The word is often used to denote a figurative, graphic or sculptural symbol, common in Western culture, consisting of the representation of a human skull – usually frontal, more rarely in profile with or without the mandible .
In all, approximately 5,318,000 soldiers from Germany and other nationalities fighting for the German armed forces—including the Waffen-SS, Volkssturm and foreign collaborationist units—are estimated to have been killed in action, died of wounds, died in custody or gone missing in World War II. Included in this number are 215,000 Soviet ...
On 10 June 1944, four days after D-Day, the village of Oradour-sur-Glane in Haute-Vienne in Nazi-occupied France was destroyed when 643 civilians, including non-combatant men, women, and children, were massacred by a German Waffen-SS company as collective punishment for Resistance activity in the area including the capture and subsequent execution of a close friend of Waffen-SS ...
Erich Marcks (6 June 1891 – 12 June 1944) was a German general in the Wehrmacht during World War II.He authored the first draft of the operational plan, Operation Draft East, for Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union, advocating what was later known as A-A line as the goal for the Wehrmacht to achieve, within nine to seventeen weeks.
Contrary to popular belief, the German Army in World War II was not a mechanised juggernaut as a whole. In 1941, between 60 and 70 percent of their forces were not motorised, relying on railroad for rapid movement and on horse-drawn transport cross country. The percentage of motorisation decreased thereafter. [23]