Customer Reviews

Panzer Colors, Vol. 1: Camouflage of the German Panzer Forces, 1939-1945

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This is a 3-book series covering the color patterns and insignia of prewar and WW2 German military vehicles. It covers tanks, self-propelled guns, artillery, half tracks, trucks, and automobiles. Their coverage of artillery and automobiles is not very extensive. Each book is about 80% black and white photographs of German vehicles, with limited amounts of text discussing them. There are also some color prints of paintings of vehicles. I would much prefer it if they had included some actual color photographs of the vehicles instead, since the paintings lack the rigorous detail of a photograph (although these are nice paintings). I could not notice any particularly coherent overall structure to the books: they all cover the entire war, and simply stick in various themes in an eclectic manner. However, the photographs are rather nice. This should be a useful reference for the model builder.

This book goes over camouflage schemes and markings of German military vehicles covering the entire range of war years. And all fronts. The book has many nice black and white war time photos. They show the various vehicles with they vast variety of schemes used. And the different methods used to apply them.

Though I love the photo's, they are no very easy to use for reference in painting. But there are color plates of the various camouflage schemes shown in the photos and discussed. These will come in very handy for the modeler.

I will be getting the other two volumes of this series.

I would recommend this book to any scale modeler out there that is striving for accuracy. This book, along with the rest of the set, provides a great deal of information regarding the colors and schemes used by the Heer and the SS for the duration of WWII. Please remember that it can be extremely difficult to reproduce accurate colors on a page in a mass produced book that is 100% accurate to real life, but this book does a good job and provides the RAL#'s (where appropriate) to help reproduce the correct color scheme. The other thing that this book and the rest of the set does really well is to present a good representation of the various camouflage patterns, both "approved" and improvised that were used by German forces. This set of books I would consider essential research material for all those rivet counters out there that want to make their models as accurate as possible. While not the only work that covers this topic, this set of books is the most comprehensive and easy to use that I have found.