Biber

Der Brückenlegepanzer I in der Bundeswehr

Ralph Zwilling

Tankograd Publishing

Tankograd Special No. 5078

 Another book in Tankograd Publishing’s continuing line of military vehicle monographs, this volume looks at the development and operational service of the Biber assault bridging system based on a modified Leopard 1 chassis. The Biber eventually replaced the M48 Patton-based AVLB systems procured form the US in the early 1960's.

As with many of the monographs in this series, this book follows a pretty standard format. The first two pages are text (in both German and English) and hold the details of the Biber's, development, manufacture, and service. The rest of the book is broken up into a number of sections covering the service use of the Biber by the Bundeswehr, details of the hull, chassis, driver and commander stations, the bridging system and the various other subsystems making up the vehicle and its bridge. The photographs are really excellent and, with the addition of excellent interior photos of the crew stations and powerplant plus outstanding 10-view 1/35 scale drawings of the vehicle in both traveling and deployed configurations, this book provides everything a modeler needs to create a very accurate model of this vehicle. 

The only critique I can level at the text portions of this book is quite minor and that is that that the formatting of the paragraphs does not involve a blank line, which makes reading the small type-size text much more difficult and making the whole thing a bit more tiring to read. It doesn’t lower the technical value of the work, though.

The book itself is in standard A4 size and uses glossy paper throughout. The card stock covers show good views of several variants, and, this is another book where the images on the inside covers are not duplicated within the book. The exterior cover images are duplicated within, which is fair enough as the exterior cover can suffer wear and damage over time.

Very Highly Recommended. This is a near perfect modelling reference for this vehicle.

Many thanks to Tankograd Publishing for the review sample.

Reviewed by Paul Roberts

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