Tank Craft, Tiger I and Tiger II Tanks, Germany Army and Waffen-SS Eastern Front 1944

The publishers have a deserved reputation within the model 
making community for the high quality of their Craft series. 
Tank Craft books are very well produced and presented and this 
new book is well up to that standard. It will also appeal to 
those who are interested in armoured vehicles and WWII. Much 
Recommended.

NAME: Tank Craft, Tiger I and Tiger II Tanks, Germany Army 
and Waffen-SS Eastern Front 1944
FILE: R2393
AUTHOR:  Dennis Oliver
PUBLISHER: Pen & Sword
BINDING: soft back 
PAGES:  65
PRICE: £14.99
GENRE: Non Fiction
SUBJECT: WWII, World War Two, Second World War, Panzers, tank 
technology, the heavy tank, advanced designs. Waffen-SS, Wehrmacht, 
Eastern Front, Russian armour, tank battles, plastic model kits, 
specialist enhancement kits
ISBN: 1-47388-534-5
IMAGE: B2393.jpg
BUYNOW: http://tinyurl.com/gsqqbuz
LINKS: Special discount for our readers 
http://www.pen-and-sword.co.uk/catalogues/aid/1170#catalogue-15  
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DESCRIPTION: The publishers have a deserved reputation within the 
model making community for the high quality of their Craft series. 
Tank Craft books are very well produced and presented and this new 
book is well up to that standard. It will also appeal to those who 
are interested in armoured vehicles and WWII. Much Recommended.

 The Tiger I and Tiger II armoured fighting vehicles introduced new 
standards into tank design and construction. They evolved into a 
family of vehicles based on the same chassis but this book only 
deals with those sent to fight on the Eastern Front against the 
Russians.

The Tiger I was an impressive fighting vehicle that had low ground 
pressure through the use of wide tracks that required a complex set 
of overlapping road wheels. The track system allowed what was a 
very heavy tank to achieve good speed and movement across open 
terrain, and the hull and turret allowed the impressive 88mm 
anti-tank gun to be successfully mounted. Essentially, the Tiger I 
was a direct response to the Russian T34 and was designed to outgun 
this innovative tank that had come as a nasty shock to the Germans 
when it was first introduced to the battles.

The Tiger I included many new features and advanced equipment. This 
provided a huge advance in armoured capability, but it also 
introduced all of the reliability issues that attend the 
introduction of any advanced design.

The Tiger II introduced a series of improvements and new features, 
but it did not entirely remove the teething troubles. Where it met 
Allied tanks on the battlefield it usually triumphed, but frequently 
failed to follow initial successes because of breakdowns and the 
difficulty in operating such a large and heavy vehicle on the poor 
roads and bridges that sat across its line of advance.

The author has made a good job of providing a history of the two 
Tiger models and those variants operated on the Eastern Front. The 
high quality artwork and photographs will appeal to a much wider 
readership than solely the model engineering and model making 
communities.

Specifically for model makers, all of the kits potentially available 
are reviewed, together with components available from specialist 
supplies to turn a stock kit into an outstanding model of one of the 
most important tanks yet designed and operated.

There have been kits produced to 1:100 and 1:144 scale, but the 
1:72 scale is the most readily available small scale offering and 
makes into an impressive model without necessarily requiring great 
skill. The popular scales have been 1:48 and 1:35. These result in 
large models with considerable detail and the availability of 
specialist enhancement parts to create competition and museum grade 
models, requiring very much greater skill. The Tanks have also 
been produced in 1:12 scale which requires some space to display 
and many hours of skilled work to really draw out the considerable 
advantages of a large scale model. One advantage of the larger scale 
options is that the builder can add motor power and radio control.