Darren Baker takes a look at another title in the Images of War series from Pen and Sword and this time it is the ''Hitler''s Heavy Tiger Tank Battalions 1942-1945''.

Read the Review

If you have comments or questions please post them here.

Thanks!

Since I have some Tiger knowledge, I'll quickly comment on the sample pages in this article. I may review the entire book at a later date.


The publisher promises "rare, often unpublished photographs". But in the five samples of the review, there are no Tiger photos new to me. On the book's cover, two of the photos clearly show Panthers!


Sample 2:

The lower photo is claimed to be January 1943. But in fact it's well established that this is 26 February.

The caption says that Tigers were a "relief to the... Afrika korps".
In fact the Afrika Korps had no Tigers. The Tigers in Tunisia all belonged to Panzerarmee 5, in a different country to the Afrikakorps. They did meet up at the very end.

Sample 3:

A caption claims that "PnKpfw.IV, especially during the latter part of the war, were often found in Tiger battalions..."
Well, I can't say categorically that this is untrue, but it would certainly surprise me. Despite looking at thousands of Tiger photos, I have not seen Pz.IV with them "often". Nor do I recall Pz.4 being mentioned in Tiger battle reports "often". (Panzer Regiment 7 in Tunisia is a notable exception.)

The photo for this caption shows some Pz.IV but I see no reason to think that they're in a Tiger battalion!


David

Hello David. I too have found the occasional (and sometimes occasionally more) factual or descriptive error in these books, and while I appreciate photos that I might not have seen, I have little patience with sloppy identifiers or simply factual errors casually committed and passed off as "facts". If this is the case in this book I'll give this one a pass; it is not like I'm short on quality reference material already. I can vividly recall one so-called reference source that identified Rommel and the 7th Panzer serving on the Eastern Front no less! Or a row of mid-Tigers purportedly on the way to the battle at Kursk, etc.