Osprey Publishing has a series known as “General Military” which has one-off books on different topics. This one is dedicated to the Tiger tank, although reading the book also provides a good insight on armored vehicle operations, as it includes descriptions of how the Tiger tanks worked together with Panzer III and half-track armored carrier personnel.

The book is divided into nine chapters. The first three chapters (Development, Organization, Mobility) basically evaluate the tank’s performance as a vehicle and how it was used in combination with other AFV. The following three chapters (Firepower, Armor, Combat), cover the combat experience of the tank, with specifics sections for combat in each front (Western, Eastern, and Africa), while the final three (Maintenance, Under Fire, Conclusions) cover different aspects from the recovery of those vehicles to how they performed in the last years of the war, facing upgraded allied armor vehicles.

This book is probably one of the best books I’ve ever read regarding a specific armored vehicle. It covers the breadth of the design and engineering going into the tank, plus the vehicle’s tactical use and operational considerations of armored warfare. The author has done a superb work of researching the subject by including many firsthand accounts from crews and even many official reports, plus several reproductions of training manuals.

Finally, the book is beautifully illustrated with period (b&w) pictures, some of them taken by combat photographers and others showing the tank in their operational setting in the Eastern Front, the Western Front, and in North Africa. Those pictures are likely to inspire diorama modelers, as the tanks are shown while crossing a bridge, while being loaded in a ship for crossing to Africa, or camouflaged with foliage in the Western Front.

Highly recommended to armor modelers and history aficionados.

I would like to thank Osprey Publishing and IPMS/USA for the review sample.