This is an excellent reference book for young readers. Each section addresses specific types of weapons, providing a wide variety of color and black-and-white illustrations and multiple examples from around the world. Additional sections of the book also address armor, shields, siege weapons, fortresses, etc., and the combination of text and images provide very good, although brief reference information. You could do much worse for an easy reference on pre-gunpowder weapons. This is a great book.

This is an excellent book, highly recommended for writers, journalists or media of any kind. Fowler's style pulls you in as he tells his story in an enjoyable, gripping, humorous and often heartbreaking fashion. Is he still with us ??? ... because I want to tell him personally how much I enjoy this book.

This is a great book detailing the rise and fall of the German forces in WWII. It has over 200 photos (several pages in color) of the German army on all fronts. Theres photos of battles, POWs (german,russian,american,british), air combat, destroyed tanks, infantry, and just about everything else. This isnt a picture book, it has a good share of text, but the majority is pictures.

the book is nicely illustrated with color (and b/w) pictures.

Bad i found it unsatisfactory mainly because of its incompleteness.
Today armored vehicles they come in versions with A/A artillery,
SS/missiles and S/A missiles. You wont find any information
on these. I think the editor couls skip some old vehicles
in order to provide a full coverage of modern versions like
the finish automatic loading mortar, the russian Chrizantema,
the russian S-300 systems etc.

Not really a complete book, but of good quality.

This book is the best and most comprehensive millitary vehicle identification book I have ever read. I'm an M1A1 tank driver for the US army and I was impressed with the amount of information in this book. I actually used this book to point out flaws on our Vehicle ID test. Now that I have it, all my fellow tankers want a copy.

This book provides a good overview of the development of Soviet tanks from the early 1920s to the end of World War II and beyond. It also provides a good explanation of the Soviet's strategic military aims after the Revolution and Civil War and the tactics that these aims would entail. The tank was central to these tactics and Soviet armor design has to be seen in that light. In other words this book is not just a list of the tanks and their statistics.

The book also provides a detailed background to the design, manufacture and use of each major tank type. The T-34 and KV-1 are given the most coverage, as is only proper. The book also includes, but does not overemphasize, some of the odd prototypes and experimental vehicles that the Soviets developed. The book concludes with a discussion of the legacy of WWII Soviet armor and tactics down to the present day.

The book is attractively laid out and there are many good pictures and line drawings. There are also a number of interesting tables in the back of the book.

Unfortunately this is a very good book that is marred by numerous instances of lack of proof reading in the text and one badly mislabeled picture (an ISU 122 self propelled gun is labeled as a IS-2 tank on pg 26). I was able ignore these problems the first couple of times but it kept happening and became a bit annoying.

Errors and all, I read the book all the way to the end and enjoyed it. The authors obviously know the subject and I learned some things I didn't know. Even with the errors I give it 4 starts. If the publisher would clean up the editorial mistakes in the next printing this would be 5 star book.

Will Fowler publishes previously unseen photos of the bloodiest battleground of World War Two, the Eastern Front.

Laid out in cronological order, we are taken on that horrible journey that would ultimatley end up in Berlin. Pictures from both sides are used, not just of battles but of a way of life that ordinary humans were made to suffer in.

There are many books written about this subject and some are better than this one but for the fact that these pictures have come to life after so many years, makes for good but sad viewing.

Every now and then a book comes along that is unheralded and, if advertised at all, is done so only in esoteric publications. This is just such a book. It is a publishing diamond in the rough.

As the title indicates, this is a collection of photos "previously unpublished, from a former Soviet archive." While I'm no expert, I have been through many books and articles about the Eastern Front, and I don't recall seeing any of these before. Some photos appear to have been staged (not that there's anything wrong with that), but most appear to have been spontaneous. The photos span the entire Front during the whole of the war, almost entirely at the tactical level.

While the depth and breadth of the collection is impressive, the book's greatest strength lies in the captions that accompany each photograph. These are comprehensive, interesting and surprisingly full of detailed nomenclature of Soviet and German aircraft, weapons, vehicles and equipage. Some of the captions appear to be literal translations from Russian, and the resulting odd phraseology lends an unexpected authenticity.

The accompanying text provides a concise, well written, summary-level description of the course of the Russo-German war that puts the photos in each section into context. There are no maps, orders of battle, or other accouterments of military histories, but the text hangs together well and provides an excellent primer on this titanic struggle. Even for the more seasoned reader, insights abound that I have not seen in other such collections, such as the roll of Ultra and the Lucy spy network in Soviet preparations to meet the Wehrmacht's massive offensive towards Kursk in 1943, or the interwoven statistics throughout the book that quantify manpower and weaponry and thereby provide some sense of the opposing forces' capabilities.

This is not the definitive collection of photos, but it fits well with other albums and thus provides a valuable addition to one's WWII library. Whether used as a coffee table book or for more serious perusal, it will provide hours of enjoyable reading. Highly recommended.

Eastern Front by Will Fowler.

This is by far the best photo album dealing with the Eastern Front, from the Russian side.

The pictures and text are well laid out. The text in formative, the pictures interesting and varied. Taken in their totality they give a good impression of what it must have been like, seen from this distance.

I should point out that I also have a large number of photo album type books of the war from the German side and the percentage of photos in this book which appear to be propaganda photos is no higher then in similar books on the German forces, or the western allies.

Best collection of photos, from the Russian side, published so far. Now the archives have been open for a few years, with luck, there will be more books of a similar type from the Russian view.

All the best,
Kip.

It would be a disquieting statement, and not entirely accurate, were I to say that I liked nuclear war. However, I find the subject fascinating. After all, the technology for fighting wars has been increasing since the 1940s, with staggering implications, but many of the new technologies remain unused and poorly understood. While I'm not in a rush to see nuclear, biological and chemical warfare unleashed on our world, I would like to get a better grasp on the past, present, and future state of the technology.

This book did nearly nothing to help me toward that goal.

"NBC: Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Warfare on the Modern Battlefield" is, more than anything, a brief sketch of some of the NBC equipment that has been developed over the years. Even as this, the list is meager and lot particularly useful. The effects of various weapons, germs and chemicals are described in extremely vague and simple terms, and so much is left out that a clear picture can hardly be drawn from the included data. This isn't an issue, though; the book doesn't even try to explain how NBC weaponry might be used on the modern battlefield. It's up to the reader to take in the data and figure out applications for himself. Even doing that is complicated by the fact that the book's organization is loose and confusing.

Equipment is covered in more detail than in the comparable books which focus on agents. The historical details are interesting. There are omissions and errors beyond the previously mentioned errors on equipment. For example, the boxed summary of anthrax lists its effect as "blackening of skin with malignant pustules", when the most immediate and dangerous presentation in an WMD (weapons of mass destruction) event will be pulmonary anthrax (e.g. Medical Management of Biological Casualties Handbook, US Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases). At times it is simplistic, at other times incorrect, or sometimes both as in the following description of the effect of VX: "[The victim's] nervous systems and heart, lungs and brain functions shut down, causing the body to cease functioning." Effects on the heart are not noted as important by other sources (e.g. The Medical Management of Chemical Casualties Handbook, Medical Research Institute of Chemical Defense, or Textbook of Military Medicine: Medical Aspects of Chemical and Biological Warfare Borden Institute, Walter Reed Army Medical Center). To say that "Brain functions shut down" may be a little simplistic for those interested in detail. The price seems a lot for a 111-page book with black and white photos, scanned-in tables and a number of errors.

I am lived in Hong Kong, and would like to advise that I cannot be know how many picture in the book. (Just on the content or search in computer) Thanks