The German army faced a gun-armor race and placed a premium on technological quality and superiority over mass production. The army and Adolf Hitler pushed for larger and more powerful tanks than had ever been built. The heaviest tanks and assault guns developed and fielded by Germany continue to capture interest confirmed by current restorations.
The agile M50 Ontos and M56 Scorpion gained renown in the jungles of Vietnam. This book offers a combat history of these vehicles for historians of the Vietnam War and US tank enthusiasts.
Kenneth Estes studies the 100,000 West Europeans who fought against Russia as volunteers for the Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS. A retired Marine Corps lieutenant colonel, Estes shows tremendous knowledge of combat and writes gripping battlefield prose. Two-thirds of the West European volunteers came from Spain and the Netherlands, yet Estes demonstrates wide range and covers Flemish, Walloon, French, Danish, and Norwegian combat units. Avoiding over-generalization, the author distinguishes carefully among the Danes and Flemings who fought competently with the SS-Wiking Division and later with Nordland, the courageous but poorly-armed Spanish, the ill-trained Dutch and French in Landstorm Nederland and SS-Charlemagne, and the Norwegians who after a first wave of enthusiasm held back altogether. Estes pulverizes the Nazi propaganda notion of a multinational European army defending 'Western civilization' against 'Bolshevism'.
The super-heavy tanks of World War II are heirs to the siege machine tradition - a means of breaking the deadlock of ground combat. As a class of fighting vehicle, they began with the World War I concept of the search for a 'breakthrough' tank, designed to cross enemy lines. This book deals with these super-heavy tanks.
The T43 design represented the pinnacle of US Army tank engineering of the late 1940s. The heavy tank proved fairly popular with its crews, who above all respected the powerful armament it carried. The outbreak of war in Korea brought a rush order in December 1950 which led to a complete production run of 300 vehicles.