Kagero has come up with another winner if you’re a Panzer IV nut, like I am. The book is soft cover with heavy stock and full color art on the front and back covers. This book covers the Panzer IV J. The strength of the book isn’t the text, unless you read Polish. The 1/35 scale drawings are beautiful showing all the angles of the tank, in all twenty seven pages. The drawings do have some text in English, so you know what variant you’re looking at. The reader does know which production version is being represented. Included are exploded drawings of the different muffler systems, return rollers, idler wheels, road wheel assemblies, treads, muzzle brakes, cupolas, and armor skirts. There are also four pages of 1/48 and 1/72 scale drawings. Thirty-one pages in all. Add to this there are four pages of full color prints. They come with two tanks on each page.

I admit to being a little confused when I requested this assignment; I was expecting something else. Still, these are very welcome components as I have two 1/72 scale Spitfire Mark Vs in my “to-build” pile.

The Spitfire was among the earliest production fighter aircraft to adopt 20mm cannon as armament, and the “B” arrangement for the cannon was introduced in the Mark I and Mark II models that fought the Battle of Britain. While the success of the armament was spotty at that time, it became standard on the Mark VB...and the same guns were also used on the initial production Seafire. The earliest Mark VC Spitfires also used this pattern of gun barrels before going to the “beefier” barrels as standard (parts that Master also offers separately). So these parts are compatible with more then the Spitfire VB.

Soft cover, 192 pages of black and white detail drawings and photographs covering both of these aircraft and their varying roles in Naval as well as civil service.

This book starts by covering the aircraft’s beginnings with the predecessor Lockheed (Electra) 10s, (Electra Junior) 12s and (Super Electra) 14s, and segues on to its wartime role as a patrol bomber used not only in England, but in the U.S. Navy as well.