Allied - Axis Volume 15

Ampersand produces an excellent armor modeling magazine called Military Miniatures in Review. The branched out into some other books for modelers too. One is a book on doing Tiger kits, one on doing Kubelwagens and one on doing Jagdpanzers. All are excellent books.

Allied-Axis books is a series where Ampersand puts together virtual picture albums of very sharp and clear pictures of Allied - Axis vehicles, most of which have never appeared in print elsewhere. This new book is the 15 th in the series. I have all but issues 10 through 13, due to the fact that my local shop never got those in. I have to hunt them down as I hate to miss them.

These books are produced in 11” x 8 ½” soft-cover format. They are roughly about a quarter inch thick each time. This new issue has 96 pages in it.

Chapters are on:

1. The Harley-Davidson series of WLA World War Two motorcycles - This chapter gives us 30 black and white photos. Twelve of these are of the walk-around type, showing many details. This chapter will be very helpful to modelers that are tackling the old Esci kit, that is now under the Italeri label as kit no. 7401, of the WLA-45 in 1/9 th scale.
2. The 6-Rad German Armored Cars Sd.Kfz. 231, 232 and 263 - This chapter gives us 38 black and white mixture of war time photos and illustrations. 13 of these are illustrations out of German tech manuals.
3. The M24 “Chaffee” Light Tank - We get 14 black and white war time photos (some are during the Korean War) and no less than 80 walk-around type photos, of every inch of the Chaffee’s anatomy…both inside and out. This chapter will help when building the Italeri kit.
4. The 2.8cm Schwere Panzerbuchse sPzB 41 Anti-tank Gun - This is the famous German Squeeze-bore gun, that had a tremendous muzzle velocity for it’s size. We get 11 war time black and white photos, 7 illustrations out of a German tech manual and 8 shots of the walk-around type taken in a museum. DML makes a kit of this weapon with a crew and also has mounted the 2.8cm on their latest release of the Sd.Kfz. 251.

These books are always of high interest to armor modelers and arm chair historians too. The pictures are large and very clear. The text is not unwieldy and it is relegated to captions for the pictures.

Highly recommended.