Printed in the now normal format of A4 landscape it has in it high quality pages the following. It contains 137 black and white photographs of varying quality do not let this put you off. The quality of the photographs is as high as the original will allow. It is just that some of the photographs were taken under combat conditions and you must make allowances for this. Over 85% of the photographs are new to us in the west. It has 8 side illustrations in colour and 8 sets of 1/35 scale plans of outstanding quality.

This Part One of what promises to be a very interesting story about the development of the early Russian Tanks.

By using the previous book on Russian Camouflage I have been able to understand more from this book.

I always thought that "We the English invented Engineer tanks and in particular the Funnies was the final outcome". How wrong can you be? Here is the story of the development of bridging tanks, mine roller, mine plough, flame-thrower tanks. The Russians beat us to by a least a decade.

What does surprise me is that all the development which started in the 1930's were not carried through to the war years.

The book starts with a short section on the T-19 and then Vickers 6 ton Tank and then to the T-26 series of tanks. Next is the Engineering section and Interwar, and then the last section is about the early battles on the Leningrad front and lastly into 1941.

The section on pages 24 to 29 is a scratch builders dream, here are all the photographs needed to build a Bridgelayer, this section is worth the price of the book alone.

In conclusion, if this was a meal then as a starter, I cannot wait for the rest. It is going to build into a very serious work on the fascinating story of T 26 Tank in Russian service.

I look forward to part two and recommend this very highly; once again the authors are to be congratulated on a first class job not only in research but also in presentation.

Go out and buy yours today if early Russian Tanks are your period then you will not be disappointed and it will give many hours of serious research and allow better models to be built.

Many thanks to Alexander Egorov  for this advance review copy.

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