WWII Tank Encyclopaedia

This fantastic book gathers together more than 500 color drawings, profiles and three-quarter views, composing a vast compilation of Jean Restayn’s work.

A great specialist of armored vehicles, Jean Restayn, author, of works covering many subjects published in France and abroad, of a first collection of profiles (in 1996) and two books on the tiger (in 2000 & 2001), all by Histoire & Collections Publishing, is a world famous illustrator. Today, with this volume that brings together a great part of his work, the reader is offered an overview of the combat tanks used by all sides in the Second World War, which was the golden age of armored warfare.

The reader will obviously find the most famous turreted tanks, such as the Tiger, the Panther, the various types of Panzer’s, the Sherman, the Churchill and the Soviet armored “Steam Rollers”. But he will also discover the unjustly little-known French tanks and those of many countries that took part in the greatest conflict that the world has ever seen.

The book just covers turreted tanks rather than self-propelled gun tanks like the Hetzer, Elephant, Marder etc., or tankettes. What is covered in there is great! Each page has three-color illustrations (some pages have four) that show the markings and wear and tear on these tanks. Jean Restayn does beautiful work. All the illustrations have captions.

Tanks are illustrated from:

• Germany
• Belgium
• Bulgaria
• China
• United States
• Finland
• France
• Commonwealth
• Hungary
• Italy
• Japan
• Romania
• Slovakia
• Soviet Union

The book is hard-cover 9” x 12” format of 176 pages.

I highly recommend this book to armor modelers. The color schemes and markings shown are a great source for alternate markings to put on models of these tanks and the illustrations show the weathering beautifully. This book rapidly became one of my favorites, about AFV’s in WWII, the minute I first saw it.

My sincere thanks to Casemate Publishing for this review sample!