Customer Reviews

Illustrated Directory of Tanks and Fighting Vehicles: From World War I to the Present Day

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3 star:		(2)
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This is not the best reference book on tanks, but it is absolutely the best reference you'll find for under ten dollars! It is a small format, a bit larger than a paperback dictionary, but the book contains an amazing amount of information, and most illustrations are in color. If you want coverage of famous vehicles, like the Sherman tank, or the T-34, or the M1 Abrams, there are better specialty publications. But for obscure vehicles, this book is excellent. It helps decipher the myriad of new tank designs now coming out of China and the states that once made up the Soviet Union. It also gives coverage of hard to find historical subjects like Polish, French, and Italian armor in 1939-40. Think of it as an ilustrated tank dictionary.

David Miller's "The Illustrated Directory of Tanks of the World" is a compact, easy-to-read, chronological guidebook to the weapon which has dominated land warfare since World War I. Featured are well over a hundred tanks of all nationalities with three times that many photographs and illustrations, and each tank is succintly described in terms of armament, armor, performance, and deployment history. All the major designs are here, including:
*M-4 Sherman, the American workhorse of WWII
*T-34, the innovative Russian trend-setter
*The awesome Tiger, the most infamous tank ever
*The mighty Merkava, Israel's contemporary "war chariot"
*Sweden's turretless S-tank, a bold but failed experiment
*England's dwarfish Scorpion, with a variant for every need
*America's M1 Abrams, which thanks to its dominant performances in the Middle East and its lethal "silver bullet" anti-tank shell now reigns as the world's pre-eminent AFV
*and dozens of other great and small vehicles from all over the globe and every major armored conflict.

Sadly, the book is marred by a number of typos and editorial misques. These are generally minor but nonetheless jarring, and do detract somewhat from the book's overall authoritativeness. Even so, this is a tremendous value considering the sheer volume of information jam-packed into its 480 pages. Mr. Miller is to be commended for the work which went into such a project, and his book is an easily recommended purchase for any fan of tank design or armored warfare.

An excellent example of how small reference material should be written. Anyone with any interest in armored vehicles would do very well to have this book at hand. David Miller has well earned his place in the lists of good military equipment authors along with Ian Hogg and Kenneth Macksey. The book even covers the lesser known prototypes like the MBT-70 and the German pre-war experimental models. I only wish this easy to read and well researched style would be copied more often.

This small book is a very good guide to modern and some old tanks but it can be more oriented towards the more acknowledgeable reader. It is a good book for people who now little or some about tanks but has too little information for someone who has considerable knowledge about tanks. This book has great pictures, specifications, armourment, and other small facts as well as some development history. I would highly reccommend this book to anyone who likes to raed about modern day tanks. This book doesn't include much on experimental tanks though.

First of all I was surprised at the ease of reading through this book. I am not a military buff and had purchased it to look up references in movies, videogames, and other books. Instead I ended up reading through it in its entirety. While it may seem exhausting and at first glance, it is quite interesting when read in small doses. The individual tank biographies are well written and full of information. I can't really comment on the historical accuracy, as I wouldn't know, but it is very detailed and seems to include almost everything you would want to know. It covers not only the basic stats on the vehicles but also goes into great detail with some fascinating developmental history and all the different variations. My major complaint with the book is the low quality of imagery and some layout issues. While some of the of the included photos, paintings, and drawings are good, quite a few have a very cheap feel to them as though they were low resolution scans from other books or the web. Some are very fuzzy, low-res JPEGS that have been stretched page wide, and others seem oddly chosen as they don't show much of the tanks themselves. While I realize many of the old tanks are difficult to find imagery for, even some of the new ones are poorly represented or at odd angles. Also some of the layout is confusing. Many of the images cross both pages, but with the deep binding crease (since the book is fairly thick) sometimes a quarter inch of the image is obscured and some of the text difficult to read. Even though it is a budget book, I think it could have benefited from a graphic design makeover and maybe a bit more polish (more standard\organized layouts for quick browsing, national flags above the vehicle, better laid out intro stats, and more precise imagery) like some of the similar (and under $10) books I have on military aircraft. Still if these kinds of thing don't bother you the reading itself is quite good and especially at the price.

I think that this book is a great reference of all the tanks that have been produced from WWI to the present day. It shows all the techinal info and history of the tanks.

A great book for gear-heads and history buffs alike.

This book is a good, probably great, reference for anyone who wants to start learning about armored fighting vehicles. For the money, it is unequaled by any piece I have ever seen.

What annoyed me, though, was the atrocious thickness to width ratio of the book, making it very difficult and awkward to read in low-light conditions. I found it very hard not to inadvertently damage the spine of the book.

For someone who has a mild interest, this is a great book. For those who already have vast encyclopedic knowledge of the subject, it's too much work to get very general information you probably already knew in the first place.

I bought this for my 11 year-old nephew. It is a perfect mix of pictures and written information. He loves it.

IN A NUTSHELL: HANDY - FULL OF NICE PHOTOS & USEFUL INFO BUT . . . .

Shaped like a small brick and filled with close-up photos of tanks on station and in action, 'The Illustrated Directory of Tanks of the World', by David Miller, is undeniably both handy and useful. Organized by country, the tanks are presented as they occurred -- historically. Each tank gets several full pages of text regarding operations and design developments, as well as a listing of the variants.

Unfortunately, this books greatest value, owing to its handy size and its all-inclusive promise ['TANKS OF THE WORLD'], is as a 'FIELD' identification tool, a job for which it failed me. Simply put, the tanks that one might have trouble identifying are not likely to be found in this book. Sure, there are all the tanks everyone has heard of and pictured in the most usual models that we are accustomed to seeing. However, if you are looking at a tank and need to know what you are looking at, this guide may very well leave you in the dark.

MY RECENT FIELD EXPERIENCE WITH THIS BOOK:

Over this past summer, I have enjoyed visiting the Patton Museum of Armor in Fort Knox, KY, on several occasions. The first time, I brought no tank FIELD reference material with me. Although I do know more than most people about tank identification, I found it to be more difficult than I expected. This was especially true when I ambled around the numerous outdoor tank exhibits which had no identification signs and only the odd markings on the tanks. Suffice it to say, it was a humbling experience. I vowed to bring an identification guide with me the next time I returned.

The next time came last week and I had a library of references to pick from. Limiting myself to one reference, I brought David Miller's, "TANKS OF THE WORLD FROM WWI TO THE PRESENT DAY." This book is a handy, little, brick-shaped reference, fully-illustrated featuring 480 pages. Since it covered the entire history of tanks on the entire planet, I felt it was sufficient.

As it turned out, the book did NOT show the different models and tanks that were outside on display with only some scribblings on their hulls. This left me as baffled as the book, the other visitors, and some of the armored personnel on hand too. There were some tanks in the indoor exhibits that I was unsure about because the weapons they featured were not in the book, so to speak.

To make a long story short, when I got home I still had two questions that I could not reconcile either by asking the personnel at the museum or by consulting my handy reference.

THE TIME HAD COME TO CONSULT "THE PICTORIAL HISTORY OF TANKS OF THE WORLD 1915-45"

FIRST QUESTION: There is a rather battle-worn German Panzer Mark 3 that was displayed inside the museum. It had a 75-mm gun and a slightly different turret. As it turns out it was a Panzer Mk. 3, model M, and there is a picture of this exact model in this book [PICTORIAL HISTORY OF TANKS OF THE WORLD 1915-45]. The index is by country, so I simply found the five pages that included the 30 or so plates of the Panzer 3 and, voila! Plate 48 on Page 53 clearly shows a very good profile shot of the exact tank I was checking out.

Although the fast and handy guide that I brought with me ["TANKS OF THE WORLD FROM WWI TO THE PRESENT DAY"] listed all the variants, it only showed one which had a 50-mm gun and a different turret, apparently a different tank. I wondered whether this mystery tank were, in fact, a Panzer Mark 4. This turned out to be a totally wrong conclusion.

Second Question: In front of the Patton Museum sits about the most formidable looking tank I have ever seen. The only identification was a painted "T28" rusting and fading on this huge tanks hull. I imagined that it must be Russian. T28. Again, the "TANKS OF THE WORLD FROM WWI TO THE PRESENT DAY" failed me, showing me a Russian medium tank for T28, obviously not the tank at which I was looking.

At home, I consulted the ["PICTORIAL HISTORY OF TANKS OF THE WORLD 1915-45"]. Researching "T28," I found an exact match. It turned out to be an American "SUPER-HEAVY TANK" which was never put into production and which was cancelled in 1947. According to the extensive description under plate 150 on page 191, the T28 weighed in at 190,000 lbs., was 36.5' long, 14.5' wide and 9.4' tall. The description in the text, as well as the small but clear photo, gave me the double-blind proof I was really looking for.

BOTTOM LINE: BEST ID GUIDE OF PERIOD TANKS -- THEIR MANY VARIANTS & PROTOTYPES

I frequently go through these types of books. When I find what I think is the ideal reference I send one to my son who is interested in the subject and keep one for myself. I have already sent him the "Great Book of Tanks," but I was looking for something handier. I was set on sending him "The Illustrated Directory of TANKS OF THE WORLD FROM WWI TO THE PRESENT DAY" by David Miller to expand his collection, but now, the "Pictorial History of Tanks of the World, 1915-1945" seems a far better choice.

REMEMBER: THIS IS AN ID AID - NOT A COMPREHENSIVE HISTORY OF ANY SPECIFIC TANK

After you have made a positive identification of the tank you are examining, there are a plethora of texts which go into great detail about the individual tank models and usually include large color photos and much more. Nonetheless, one must first identify the tank in question. That is the very purpose of these books.

COMING FULL CIRCLE: STILL A WORTHWHILE TANK BOOK FROM A FINE AUTHOR!

Despite my experience in the field with this guide, I can tell you that the lovely handiness, nice pictures and easy to use format makes this book a true value, especially here on Amazon where at the present time it sells for as little as 1 cent [plus S&H]. Also, David Miller has written many excellent books on this and many related military hardware history topics from handguns to battleships so he is certainly an expert on the subject.