Customer Reviews

Sturngeschutz & Its Variants: (Spielberger German Armor & Military Vehicles Series, Vol 2)

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The book covers self-propelled assault artillery used by the Germans in World War Two. The Germans first created the Sturmgeschutz as a cheap fire support vehicle for the infantry, but it soon became a mount for long-barreled, high-velocity antitank guns. The first chapter covers prewar experiments, but the bulk of the book is devoted to the Sturmgeschutz based on the Panzer III chassis, and each production variant gets a chapter. The Sturmgeschutz IV, based on the Panzer IV chassis, is also covered, as are the self-propelled 105 mm and 150 mm assault howitzers on the Panzer III chassis. There are also bonus chapters covering antiaircraft vehicles, halftracks, and recovery vehicles used by Sturmgeschutz units. The technical history is well-balanced, offering information for both the model builder and the automotive engineer, and the three-view drawings and cutaways by Hilary Louis Doyle are to the modeller's scale of 1/35th. Though the title was one of the first of Walter Spielberger's books to be translated into English, it is actually one of his most recent books, and is far superior to the Panzer III, Panzer IV, and Panther books. This was also one of his last collaborations with researcher Thomas Jentz, and the style is almost identical to that of Jentz's own series of books on German armor (also published by Schiffer).

I enjoy reading this book very much. Speilberger has written a good history of the assualt gun sturmgeshutz. Included are a lot of excellent, high quality photos, line drawings, a history of the development of the assualt gun, the varients to the stug as well as support vehicles.

Also of interest are sections on the factories, subcontractors where the vehicles were made, operational information written by the crews who used these turretless tanks.

What would have made this better? A bit more detail, but not all of the line drawing information was translated from German, so something is lost there. Some of the drawings were used in other Speilberger works, but I still highly recommend this work.

I can recommend this book for a statistical reference and a factual source. The image are fairly good and some are really new, since they show the assault gun in factories and in dismantle view. You can follow the development of the assault gun even to the slihtest detail. In that optic this book is aim at the modeller and the detail devotee.

And what really, really bug me with all the Schiffer Military books is that they use a old Typo and that mainly all the photography and schema have poor description and use a even worst Typo. It could sound odd, but when you read a manual like this, you dont want to be stress by the Typo.

Dont go for this book if you want a photographic reference and avoid at all cost this book if you intend to entertain yourself.

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Paul Bourgault
2Lt/Fus MR21/34thCBG/RCAC