This is one of three books in Pen & Swords Land Craft series. The other books include The Jeep and Bren Gun Carrier. The Land Craft books are good resources for modelers as they provide background on the design of vehicles, detailed descriptions, and description of variants. They also include a gallery of completed models and kits available.

M2/M3 Half-Track Book Contents

Introduction

Provides a brief description of the history of half-track vehicles subsequent to World War I, including early French vehicles and the half-track car T1. These early vehicles were tested for use as prime movers.

This is the first release in a new series by Mushroom Model Publications. I am a big fan of their products, so I looked forward to reviewing this book. It is a softcover publication of 24 pages, 6 of which are in color. The cover is a heavy card stock with a color top view of a Russian P-39Q. There are also color side and bottom views of the same aircraft in the book.

The text in the book is limited to photo captions. There are 36 black and white pictures along with 10 color pictures. The pictures are of a good size and of good quality throughout. There is a mixture of walk around style photos from restored aircraft and wartime photos of U.S. aircraft in the Pacific theater. A couple of the photos are of P-39s undergoing maintenance and show several areas of the aircraft exposed.

This tome is the third in this new series, Single. This series format consists of a 4-view colour profile, scale plans, and photo details of a single variant; in this case the Hawker Hurricane I. You won’t find an introduction or background summary, as this series dives straight into the drawings, illustrations, and photographs. MMP was founded in 1996 by Roger Wallsgrove, to publish "Mushroom Model Magazine". This quarterly modelling magazine was developed from "Mushroom Monthly”, a club newsletter which ran from 1985 to 1995, achieving a world-wide reputation for quality articles, fearless and honest reviews, and a great sense of humor. From 1997 the magazine was produced in collaboration with Robert Peczkowski and Artur Juszczak (Stratus), which meant a big leap in print quality and design. MMP expanded into book publication in 1999, and since then they have built up a list of books on aircraft and aviation, naval, military vehicles, and military history.