Book Review: Russian Armour Volume 2: Light Tanks

There are several sources out there now for most armoured fighting vehicles of WWII. Osprey and Squadron/Signal between them cover most of the vehicles used. The more famous, like the Tiger and Panther tanks, often have multiple books available covering their statistics and history in extreme detail.

Despite those sources, there are still some holes to be filled in the available reference material, and Light Tanks does a decent job of filling some of them.

First the good stuff. This book covers the light tanks and tankettes that the Soviet Union produced prior to and during WWII. These include the T-27, T-38, BT, T-26, T-40, T-50, T-60, and T-70 tanks. Many of these haven't had much coverage in other readily available books.

The book begins with a short overview of the history of light tanks in the Soviet Union, then proceeds with more detailed descriptions of each series in chronological order of development. In addition to the text, each section features period photos, photos of surviving museum pieces, profile line drawings, cut-away line drawings, and profile paintings. The resulting combination provides a lot of interesting information in a compact package.

As a personal note I have to mention that there is a picture included of a T-60, along with KV-1 and a T-34 all from the 121st Tank Brigade in May 1942 "before an attack". This photo was almost certainly taken just prior to the beginning of the second battle of Kharkov, the conflict that my personal miniature force of soviets is modelled to represent. The KV pictured appears to be a KV-1 1941 with a welded turret. It is not a KV-1e, KV-2, or KV-1 1940, and the welded turret would seem to rule out it being a KV-1s or a KV-1 1942. While not a definitive answer to the question of what kind of KV my own force was likely to have fielded, it certainly provides some useful clues. In Flames of War game terms, the KV-1 1941 and the KV-1e (which is what I currently use) have identical stats, but it's still interesting.

Now the bad stuff. First, it suffers from a lack of editing. There are several typos in the stats, such as using 1978 instead of 1938 at one point, using mm instead of m at another, and using T-24 instead of T-34 more than once. Also, it would appear that the author wrote the text directly in English, and that English is not his native language. While it is generally readable, there are several places where his unfamiliarity with English sentence structure shows through.

The worst aspect of the book is one that it shares with other books of this type and that's a complete lack of citations, either in the form of footnotes or a bibliography. There is nothing to indicate where the author is getting any of his information from. It could be from archival research, interviews with survivors, or he could be just making it up. We simply don't know because of the lack of citations. This seriously limits the usefulness of the book for any serious purpose, which is a shame because there are some interesting bits of information here.

It's a bit unfair to criticize this book for failings that exist in most books of this type, but it's become something of a pet peeve of mine so I feel that it's necessary to point out.

If you have any interest in the Soviet light tanks of WWII, then you shouldn't let any of my criticisms prevent you from reading this book as it does a good job of describing the development of Russia's light tanks, as well as providing several good photographs and illustrations.