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Panther on the Battlefield 2


Mike

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Panther on the Battlefield 2

Peko Books

 

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After WWII the Panther has played second fiddle to the more popular Tiger I, despite its superior firepower and advanced sloped armour design.  It was intended to counter the Soviet T-34 tank, which made its shocking debut during Operation Barbarossa when it appeared seemingly from nowhere and gave a good account against the previously unstoppable Panzer IVs.  Taking on the sloped armour to reduce overall weight, and eschewing heavy side-armour, the Panther was quicker and more manoeuvrable than the larger Tiger, and it also sported a long-barrelled 75mm main gun with a high muzzle velocity imparting more penetration power to its shells.

 

With only around 6,000 built during the closing years of the war, the Germans failed to take the simplicity of the T-34's design to heart, which slowed production down assisted by the massive bomb damage inflicted on the factories by US and RAF area bombing campaigns.  The tanks saw continued devastating action in the defence of the Reich, but ultimately they were overwhelmed by the superior numbers of the Allies, and as experienced crews became scarce they eventually became easy prey, often abandoned after running out of fuel or suffering a relatively breakdown as their will to continue to fight ebbed away.

 

The Book

This is the second book on the Panther from Peko's World War Two Photobook Series, and as the name suggests it is primarily a book of photos.  No surprise there.  The photos are almost without exception full page, apart from a small portion of each page devoted to the captions, which is in Hungarian and English, with each one adding valuable information to the photo, which may not be immediately apparent without it.  Items such as the series of photos of a Panther having its tracks changed, the tools used, and even that the Zimmerit had been field applied, which explains the huge chunks of it missing in the photos.  A good example of what happens when you don't prepare your surface for painting!

 

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For the modeller there are plenty of diorama possibilities, as well as opportunities to see how the crews actually festooned their vehicles (or otherwise) with stowage and spares in real-world circumstances.  Seeing how the tremendous forces involved rend and tear the hulls apart when blown up is also useful for diorama purposes, but thankfully there are no grisly scenes accompanying the destroyed vehicles.  Quite a few of the photos must be from private collections, as there are a substantial quantity of soldiers posing in front of damaged or abandoned vehicles after the fighting is over, plus a number of groups investigating the wreckage after a cataclysmic explosion of the tank's magazine.  I wonder if they ever considered that their snaps would become part of a history of the tools of war that they battled against?

 

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Of course the source photos are all black and white, and some are a little challenged by a combination of the photographer's skill, equipment and the ravages of time, but the reprints are as high quality as is possible to obtain.  It is nice to see such large prints too, as crowding several photos onto one page usually results in postage stamp sized pictures that are little use as a source of detail.

 

Whether you are a history buff or a modeller, there's a lot to recommend this book, and with the hard-backed binding, it should give you good service over the years.

 

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Review sample courtesy of

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