Those of you that know me might wonder why I, a confirmed Allied model builder, am reviewing a book on German armour. Well, don't let this out, but I've always liked early war German AFVs, mostly because they weren't the super vehicles of the later years and have more than their share of foibles & flaws. Which, strangely enough, make them interesting to me.

This new book, Fotos from the Panzertruppen - The Early Years, is from the same team that has brought out the Panzerwrecks series of books and it follows their format. Landscape, with 64 pages plus cover, this book will fit right in with many other similarly formatted books. The two things that make it stand out, however, are the subject matter and the images used. As I said earlier, the subject matter focuses on those seldom-seen early war panzers with Pz IV Ausf As, Pz Is, Pz II Ausf Cs and other intersting tidbits. Also, being early war vehicles, they are mostly in the grey or grey/brown paint schemes. There are even a couple of photos of the rare three-tone scheme from the first years of the war.

One of the things that I think makes the selection of photos quite interesting is that, according to the blurb at the front of the book, they are all from the private collections of soldiers. Thus, most, if not all, are previously unpublished, which is a boon for the Axis modeller looking for new subjects.

The second outstanding feature of this book is the size of the photos. All of the main photos on each page are the full 8" x 10" size that will fit on the page. This allows you to see the details of each vehicle and paint scheme and see them better than in most other books. There are a few inset images showing details or second views of similar vehicles, but, for the most part, the photos are large, clear and really interesting.

The only flaw I can find with this book is the page numbering. The numbers are on the inside corner of each page and, with the perfect binding, these numbers can be hard to see. As you can imagine, this isn't much of a flaw at all. I'm not an expert on early war German armour, so I can't say definitively that the captions are all correct, bue there are certainly no glaring errors that I could discern.

All in all a great little book and it is highly recommended to anyone who likes early war armour. Even us Allied guys.

Thanks to Panzerwrecks for the review sample.