Osprey New Vanguard 127
"German Panzers 1914-18"
by Steven J Zaloga, illustrated by Brian Delf

Osprey, well known for their massive series of military history publications, has now published yet another booklet in their New Vanguard series. This one is called "German Panzers 1914-18" and follows their tested standard format, with fine text, many new photos and excellent artwork. 

This time we are all in for a treat, for the man that has written the text is the Doyen of all armour experts, Steven Zaloga. His expertise in the fields of WW2 and modern AFV's is well acknowledged, and I guess it is a proof of the growing interest in Great War subjects that he has now commissioned to do a work on the German AFV's of WW1. 

The structure of the text is quite logic, in that is follows the develepment of the German AFV force from its birth, right up to the end of the war, thus:

INTRODUCTION
EARLY ROOTS
THE EARLY TANK PROGRAM
THE CAMBRAI SHOCK
A7V VARIANTS
PANZERS IN TRAINING
INTO COMBAT
REBUILDING THE TANK UNITS
GERMAN ARMORED CARS IN COMBAT
FINAL TANK BATTLES
PLAN 1919

The text doesn't just cover the AFV that you can see on the cover, i.e. the A7V, but it also discusses experimental types and prototypes, like the armoured Marienwagen, the A7V-U, the K-Wagen, the LKI & LKII and the Krupp Kraftprotze, and also the Mk IV in German service (Beutepanzer). (Of course, as captured tanks, as we all know, was the backbone of the German armoured units in WW1.) But that is not all: it also contains material on the different German armoured cars, and to top it all up, even has quite a lot of (quite good) material on the A7V Geländewagen (with variants!) that cannot be considered to be Panzers at all.

This generosity when it comes to subjects of course comes at a price, and this is what I think is the only real weakness of the book: perhaps it tries to cover a little bit too much ground. There simply isn't room to go into any new depths regarding these machines. But I guess that this comes with the territory, with Osprey having a very fixed format of some 3.500 words and that's it. However, for the general reader, pretty new to German AFV's of WW1, this is IDEAL, as it will give one an excellent overview of a subject otherwise seen as very complex and obscure. And there are news. Zaloga has made a nice work trying to summarize what we know about, for instance, of the camouflage of these vehicles:

"The predominant camouflage color for German heavy ordnance in World War I was feldgrau (field gray). However, the army did not rigorously enforce color standards and field gray ranged from a medium to dark gray as well as from a cold, neutral gray to a distinctly greenish shade of gray, much like the uniform color. Photographic evidence from the Daimler plant suggests that the first batch of ten A7V tanks were finished in a dark color that has been interpreted to be a dark green; most likely it was a decidedly greenish and dark shade of field gray. The second batch of A7V tanks appear to have been finished in a more typical medium field gray. When issued to the troops, the vehicles were not camouflage painted. Camouflage paint began to be applied prior to the March 1918 battles, probably at Charleroi. The most probable colors were a clay yellow/ochre and red-brown/chocolate-brown colors. ... In September 1918, a new Buntfarben-anstrich (multicolor paint) camouflage was ordered, usually painted in ochre, red-brown, and dark green and sometimes with the colors being divided by black lines."

What I find interesting is that Zaloga - as in his other works - never gets too technical, but instead don't loses sight of other factors when it comes to explaining, say, the enormous problems the German tank problem had, that has sometimes been depicted as sheer Teutonic folly, but he shows that it was more complicated than this - that the main factor was simply lack of resources, combined with an initial under-estimation of the potential of the new weapon. Also, he makes a very interesting point in the end of the book, with the Germans emerging from WW1 much impressed with the French solution, i.e. betting on large numbers of small, cheap tanks (i.e. the FT-17) instead of small numbers of big, expensive ones (i.e. the A7V, or even the K-Wagen) and that it was this experience that led to the Germans when re-arming initially betting big on small tanks, like the PzKpfw I and II.

The artwork is, as always, fine, including a nice cut-away of the A7V "Wotan". But I must say that I feel unsure about some of the colours. The artist has in general opted for a very light-grey version of Feldgrau, and in the case of the Beutepanzers showing them in an almost sky-blue version of feldgrau. Now, I don't want us to go down the long and winding blind-alley road of the WW1 Aero people, who have spent too much energy on questions of exact colours, etc. Which is a pretty impossible venture, as it is very hard to know such things now. We know from German research that Feldgrau came in many hues, from green to grey, and anyone saying that they know for sure what colour an individual vehicle was painted in, must be a psychic of sorts. Anyway: this is my only real reservation: the Feldgrau is perhaps a bit too light. 

Highly recommended! You can use the link below to order it directly from Amazon!