Customer Reviews

German Railroad Guns in Action - Armor No. 15

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This volume in Squadron's "In Action" series provides a handy reference on German railroad artillery in the Second World War. The volume includes 76 excellent B/W photos, 12 line drawings and 7 color illustrations. Although brief, the volume does manage to cover a wide range of weapons, including German 15 cm, 17 cm, 20 cm, 21 cm, 24 cm, 28 cm and 80 cm guns, as well as captured French 30 cm, 32 cm, 34 cm and 37 cm railroad guns. Readers should particularly enjoy the coverage on the 80 cm "Dora" gun (biggest artillery piece ever made) and the lethal 28 cm K-5 "Anzio Annie" guns.

This volume outlines the development, testing and use of German railroad guns, although information on actual employment is rather limited. While the other does list the various German railroad artillery regiments and batteries, the OB is incomplete and confusing. Basic technical data on each German-made weapon is listed, but not for the French weapons (although figures for range are usually given in photo captions). While certainly only an introduction to this subject, this volume does succeed in providing a handy and inexpensive reference to a relatively obscure subject.

It is a brief summary of the subject, but gives more than enough to introduce the reader to a subject that is just not covered elsewhere. I have yet to find too many books on this subject, the other one is in German. The number of drawings could be more, but is more than enough to provide me the necessary information to create a model of a gun in a video game. It gives the reader information as to how difficult it is to fire and load these guns. Photos also show the roundtables used to traverse these guns. More than ample coverage for what I needed.