Fascinating history - not just a picture book

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	• The World's Great Tanks from 1916 to the Present Day Roger Ford Amber Books - 176 pages average customer review:based on 1 review view larger image
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Fascinating history - not just a picture book

I bought this book anticipating some good pictures and a little story. I ended up reading it cover to cover and really enjoyed it.

I'm not expert in this field. I have enjoyed military history for about forty years, and so maybe know a bit about it, but nothing on the level of the author. This book definitely gave me all sorts of great information beyond what I already had, and a new respect (for example) for the Russian tanks of WWII.

"The World's Great Tanks" covers from the earliest proto-tanks, and why we even call them tanks (because of the attempts by the English to disguise their development project), all the way through to the late 1990s.

Sometimes the detail is overwhelming, and I would have appreciated Mr. Ford's taking a bit more time to define terms - perhaps a glossary for those of us who are not weapons systems experts? But that's only sometimes and, for the rest, the book was full of great stuff about vehicle speed, armour thickness, weapons penetrations, and just about every other implication of specific tanks and how they were used operationally, not to mention what they looked like and what it was like to operate them.

There were few weaknesses. Two come to mind: (1) the text sometimes seems to jump around a bit, as though someone pasted it together and dropped a few pieces, which is primarily why I didn't give it a five-star rating (I gave four); and (2) illustrations and photographs were either missing or nowhere near the relevant sections in a few cases, some significant - which made it difficult to visualise what was being described. In light of the many other illustrations and photographs, it wasn't a huge weakness, but still irritating given the completeness of the rest of the book.

Mr. Ford brings in real operations and real results on numerous occasions. I found that an indispensable part of the book. I hope he'll go back and write another with even more detail along those lines.

The story of Michael Wittmann and his PanzerKampfwagen VI Tiger on 13 June, 1944 was memorable - his tank alone reportedly took out 25 vehicles of the British 7th Armored Division. SS Obersturmfuehrer Wittmann was credited with somewhere between 119 and 138 kills in his 2 years as a tank commander!

The book's sections carry through chronologically in reasonable chunks (WWI, between the world wars, WWII, etc) and then cover each country's developments, whether they saw the light of day or only lived on drawing boards or perhaps on test/proving grounds. There was plenty of data about minor countries' contributions, or non-European developments, which I found enlightening.

I read this book within a few months of The Collapse of the Third Republic: An Inquiry Into the Fall of France in 1940 by William Shirer. It was an experience which I highly recommend. There was a fair amount of overlapping information on various points throughout the two which enhanced my enjoyment of both.

The book that seemed more like a coffee table picture book came out being a highly informative and at times compelling read which I recommend to all my military history friends.

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