Introduction
Peko Publishing is a Hungarian company producing a range of books for the military historian and military enthusiast. For the military modeller, the photo book series they offer is likely to be of the greatest interest. Here we take a look at volume 22 covering German Support vehicles on the battlefield.
review
This offering from Peko Publishing is authored by Tom Cockle, which is a name which is well known to modellers - certainly on this network. This release is a hard backed book printed in a landscape format and protecting 112 pages of a good quality glossy paper that presents the contents very well. The contents of this book look at the soft skinned and armoured transports of World War II utilised by the German military.
This book from Peko Publishing is a duel language book in Hungarian and English. Its prime role is to provide good sized period photographs, showing the German World War II vehicles both in use and having been destroyed in combat. The text itself consists of a well written introduction, and duel language captions under each photograph. The information in the captions primarily gives details on the vehicle in the photograph, and in some cases details on what in occurring in the photographs and even dips into specific paint colours and tactical units. Where possible the author has included details on the specific units, and also taken the time to point out areas of interest the viewer or in our case the modeller may be especially interested in. I will be honest, I have not read every single caption but from what I have read I found the information to be well presented, accurate to my knowledge and also provided details which I found of interest in many cases.
The photographs included in this title are over four time bigger than they would have in in reality, and I am pleased to say that this does not seemed to have affected the clarity of the images in any way. What this has enabled is for the viewer to not only pick specifics, but also note details that may otherwise have been missed. We have already touched on the captions included with many pictures, so I will not go into that again. The images begin with mostly soft skinned four wheeled vehicles, which along with the more common Kubelwagen used in huge numbers by the German military, we also get to look at the more unusual such as the civilian saloons that were pressed into service. The Schwimmwagen appears in a number of images, which I found particularly pleasing. You then move into the lorries, both two and three axle versions both with and without armour. A section covering what I class as spotting and policing vehicles is particularly well done, and provides a very good mix. The biggest section of all looks at the half tracked and tracked vehicles, and again does a very good job of covering vehicles of this type.
Conclusion
This offering from Peko Publishing looking at German support vehicles on the battlefield and authored by Tom Cockle is a very pleasing title to me, due to the way in which is it presented, as in the format and hard cover. The images are clear and well chosen with pleasing captions in both Hungarian and English. Of particular interest to myself and modellers in general will be I suspect a combination of three features:
1 that the vehicles are used in the field
2 that damaged, destroyed and in tacked vehicles are presented
3 the fact that the vehicles are shown in a number of conflict zones and weather types.
The result is a book that I believe has something for everyone interested in German vehicles of World War II.