Brief History

Tankograd as a publisher has reached the milestone of ten years of publishing excellent publications for modellers and those interested in the military especially, historically.

Review

The magazine is laid out to give good and precise information about historical events, battles, tanks and people. They also have a more modern section which covers modern day armies and their vehicles; another nice piece of work comes in the form of information about events and museums. The Tankograd magazine starts with a small editorial before going onto readers’ letters, these letters are in German but some are quite self-explanatory.

The first article proper is a special report on the Swift bridge a fantastic vehicle of the German Amphibious M3 rig. This vehicle is one of my favourite modern day German army vehicles and I only wished that Revell or one of the major plastic manufacturers would make this vehicle in kit form rather than just in Resin. The pictures in this article really are impressive, with a large amount of the M3's spread across a large expanse of water with Fuchs and various other vehicles like the Boxer APC crossing this military bridge of vehicles.

As is usual with this magazine they usually have some section on the American Army either modern as in this article or historical titled Arctic Abrams certainly a very popular item at the present time with several Abrams being manufactured by various companies at the present time. This article follows the US Army in the NATO exercise cold response 2016 with several high-quality pictures of the Abrams tanks in various snow covered ground ideal for any modeller looking for ideas for a potential diorama other than the sands of the Middle East will be of use to them.

Next up is another one of the articles you would usually find inside this title is news from the industry where we see pictures of the new Radpanzer (meaning wheeled armour) Centauro II, three pictures are included of a brand new Centauro II.

A great article is the Panzertruppen International Strong Europe Tank Challenge 2016, this article runs over six pages and tells of the competition between the US, Germany, Denmark, Poland and Italy. Some absolute cracking photos with some stunning action pictures with tanks firing, some transversing the ground at high speed.

Tanks on display and in pictures at this event include M1A2, Leopard 2A5, 2A6, Ariete and Polish Leopard 2A5. This is a picture heavy article so is easy enough to follow if your German is not great.
One of the Museum articles follows the tank challenge the military museum at Wildegg is just on one page with four pictures.

Venerable Gauntlet is an article about the NATO Very High Readiness Joint Task Force (Land) 2017 on exercise in Germany four pages detailing the exercise with various NATO armies taking part in the exercise. Lots of pictures here showing different tanks, Apc's and LMV's light multirole vehicles.

Further articles on the museum and events see some lovely pictures of cold war military vehicles.

A very large article on the Leopard 2A6M with some great detailed close-up pictures sure to help anyone building Leopards with some scaled drawings in 1/35th scale.

The Fahrschulpanzer der Wehrmacht in World War II large section with many pictures that have probably never been seen before.

A Tank competition in Japan was a nice surprise with various pictures of APC's, Artillery pieces, bridge layer and various soft skins.

The final section is a 5-ton Iveco-Magirus soft skin truck, a picture heavy section with some nice pictures ideas that could be used for dioramas

Conclusion

Tankograd for the last ten years have been producing lots of very well detailed fascinating books on various subjects, most of these are factual and to the greater part photo-heavy books. Their library of titles is very extensive and is being updated on a regular basis through their technical titles, in detail, specials or indeed one of their magazines like Militar Fahrzeug. Although in German, you don't have to be a multi-lingual to be able to get the gist of what the article is about, and certainly for those modellers that love to model through the ages it is a good magazine with modern military and historical military articles and photos, some of which I am sure you won't have seen before. The thorough way in which the research is done on the material covered is meticulous and helps you to understand the subject more easily. I recommend all of the Tankograd books that I have been lucky enough to review so far and find myself looking on their website to see what is actually coming out next.