Both German and Soviet military theorists in the years leading up to WW2 incorporated tanks into their battle plans to exploit breakthroughs in the enemy’s lines. These tanks incorporated turrets capable of rotating 360 degrees, thus making them expensive and time consuming to produce and maintain. Little thought on either side was put into providing the slower moving foot soldiers with self propelled artillery or anti tank capabilities. The Germans were the first to see the utility of providing their troops with SPGs, with the introduction of the Sturmgeschutz (StuG) and Sturmartillerie, self propelled tracked vehicles with limited traverse guns protruding out the front end of the vehicle, and capable of knocking out enemy hard points and limited anti tank duties. Such vehicles were cheaper to manufacture than tanks.

For those readers not familiar with this series of publications, they are published by Ampersand Publishing, the firm responsible for the excellent Military Models in Review (MMiR) armor modeling magazine edited by Pat Stansell, one of my favorite magazines. As the title suggests, each issue of Allied-Axis contains a number of photo journal articles covering various aspects of the Second World War. The issue under review today contains three separate articles. For the most part, each page of any given issue is devoted to a single photograph, with an appropriate written caption. Thus the detail contained in each photograph is extremely good, due to its size. For the most part, the clarity of each photograph varies from good to superb, depending on the quality of the original print used. The Journal paper quality utilized is also very good.