Introduction

This book covering the M29 Weasel Tracked Cargo Carriers and Variants is part of a series of titles from Pen and Sword as part of their ‘Images at War’ series. These books cover the subject matter mostly in photographs and so offer a great visual reference for anyone interested in the subject matter regardless of the reason for that interest. For the modeller these books represent a horn of plenty when it comes to visual information.

Review

This offering from Pen and Sword is part of the ‘Images at War’ series. This series of books are soft backed offerings having a good card cover with a very good spine to the book that keeps the contents in good order. This book covering the M29 Weasel Tracked Cargo Carriers and Variants has been authored by David Doyle who is or should be well known to most interested in finding reference material for their model building. The contents of this title are provided over 146 pages of good quality semi gloss paper.

The contents are presented in the following sections:
Chapter 1 – The T15/M24
Chapter 2 – T24/M29C
Chapter 3 - The M29C

The first section of this title looks at what eventually became the M29 and what the vehicle was intended to do. I found the text covering the purpose that this vehicle was intended for quite interesting and that intent reminds me of the cold weather training the British Army performed and may still do in Norway. The vehicles photographed here are a great reference for oddities I suspect most of us never knew about or even heard of them and may wish to try and replicate some of these strange beasts.

The photographs in this release across all of the chapters are for the most part modern colour offerings, now I would normally get upset about this but in this case I will let the author off as I suspect period photographs are few and far between; so the author has gone for preserved vehicles and presented them in a walk around format for the most part. I must compliment the author for his efforts in identifying what is in the photographs and making the vehicle type known. Yes I would prefer period images as I like the physical perception that they can create in the viewer. There are a selection of period photographs that do add the authenticity that a book of this nature requires and again I appreciate the effort put in by the author on the data provided in the captions.

Conclusion

This offering from Pen and Sword has had to use images of restored vehicles and those on display in museum and the like and as we are all aware this can result in changes during restoration that become accepted fact in error. I do however cut David Doyle slack where this vehicle is concerned as I have seen very few images of it and I suspect hunting all of the included ones down was a real headache. The result of all this is a book that provides a good selection of period photographs, and excellent look at the vehicles created on route and finally a very large number of walk around photographs.