Product Description

As a result of the heavy losses in armoured vehicles, and tanks in particular, on the Eastern Front the assault gun units played an increasingly vital role in supporting the beleaguered infantry and countering Allied armour, The Stumgeschutz was one of the most numerously produced and effectively deployed of the German armoured vehicles. Total production of the Ausf G alone was close to 7000 vehicles; a further 1299 were equipped with the 10.5cm gun as self-propelled howitzers. This book reveals how the Sturmgeschutz provided the backbone of Germany's amoured forces in every theatre and on every front during the long fighting-retreat of the final years of the war.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #222947 in Books
• Published on: 2001-06-25
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 48 pages

About the Author
Peter Sarson has produced graphic cutaways for many armoured vehicle publications, and is regarded as one of the world's great illustrators of military vehicles. Hilary Louis Doyle, born 1943, is an expert on German armoured vehicles and has written numerous books on AFV's including the Encylopedia of German Tanks. Tom Jentz, bom in 1946, is one of the world's leading AFV researchers and is best known for the Encyclopaedia of German Tanks.

Customer Reviews

Worth every penny
One for WW2 obsessives, and non the worse for that. The book covers the F and G versions in immense detail, the photos' are nearly all new (to me at any rate) and the text shows that it was written by a master of the subject. The Osprey books are a patchy lot to be honest (at least on WW2 anyway) but this is worth every penny. It's just too short!

All Ospreys should be like this
This is exactly the sort of book osprey should be publishing. Too many of their books attempt to cover vast areas of military history in 40-odd pages and end up being little more than a summary. Some appear to be little more than cut & paste works from other sources.

This isn't.

Although its the same length as every other Osprey its so detail heavy you don't end up feeling cheated. It sensibly covers only the STUG variants with high velocity guns: basically the Stug III F & G with the long 75mm cannon and the very similar Stug IV plus the infantry support variant with the 105mm howitzer. The authors at the very start specifiy which sources they used & which they discounted. As such the book is both specific and accurate. As the first reviewer says its probably not intended for the general reader, but I personally find this a good thing.

There are good photo illustrations throughout and unlike many books you will not find these pictures via google images. Generally the pictures are front aspect and mostly taken in Germany so they don't give a total picture of what a real combat STUG looked like but there are a few photos taken on the eastern front and the colour plates are well drawn and highly detailed. Some internal photos would have been nice, although there's a Finnish stug cut open which gives an idea of crew layout.

The book would benefit from a slightly more detailed breakdown of units that used the vehicles and some descriptions of combat would have been good too. Its primarily written about the actual vehicle with less emphasis on who used it and how. Basically if you want lots of technical details about late war Stugs this book should be your first purchase.