Introduction

The following introduction is as supplied by Tankograd:
The size of the German tank force in World War One remained extremely small. Only twenty A7V tanks were ever built and saw action in the Great War. Nevertheless they were the landmark of German 'Panzer' development in the 20th Century.

The story and technical details of the A7V's development and combat are subject to intensive research for the past forty years. This publication aims at telling the story of the A7V based on today's improved knowledge. It also highlights the tank from a different perspective, including individual data sheets with records for each A7V ever built, the war-time use in the three Abteilung and the variants in Freikorps service.

Review

The books released by Tankograd publishing are usually within the 60 to 70 page count using a good quality glossy paper for the presentation of the contents, but this is one of those special titles offering 96 pages. These are protected by a card cover that does a pretty good job as long as the books are not abused by liquids and the like. The pages are held in place with glue which is possibly the only weak aspect of the book as a whole. This particular offering has no less than three authors mentioned who are Rainer Strasheim and Max Hundleby using the Jochen Vollert collection. This offering is provided with English text only and is a newly updated offering providing new written and extra visual content. The content in this book is presented as follows:
Introduction by the publisher
Authors foreword
The birth of the tank
A7V Variations of the armoured hulls
Abteilung 1 the combat veterans
Abteilung 2 the tank busters
Abteilung 3 the poor relation
A7V deployments and engagements
A7V tank technology and combat
Technical data
A7V individual data sheets
A7V scale drawings
The A7V Uberlandwagen tracked lorry
The A7V in Friekorps service
The trench digger
A7V crew uniforms
Preserved A7V’s, dummies and replicas
A7V addenda

This book was last published 30 years ago and so I doubt it is an easy book to obtain and so I feel this book will be a popular offering due to its limited print run. The information that is corrected is referred to at the very start of the title and it is good to see that everyone can make a mistake, but as some of these errors have become fact a correction is a big plus for the history buff.

The text in this offering is in English only and so considering the increased page count you get some idea of how much information is provided here. The text is very well written as I have come to expect from Tankograd and there is decent amount to take in from this title. The work put in to this title initially and the subsequent corrections is incredible when you consider just how few of the A7V tanks were built and so the limited data that is available in any form of concise way, and why this book has so much value.

As we all know with Tankograd offerings it is the images that steal the show and this title is no different. The photographs offered differ in quality, but some are so good and so clear it is hard to believe the photographs are over 100 years old as they look like a group of rein-actors from yesterday in some cases and really are stunning in their clarity. Added to this are a number of drawings that are both scale and otherwise, the data provided will be a reall plus for the modeller who wishes to depict a specific A7V with all the trimmings.

If the photographs are the star of the show then it is the captions that run a close second. The captions accompany every photograph and are well written in English. The information provided varies in quantity, but due to their age it will have been rare to talk to anyone around when the image was taken.

Conclusion

This offering from Tankograd is limited to 999 copies and I have one of those, so if you have an A7V in your future pick one up quick due to this being a one stop shop for A7V data in both written and visual terms. I have not looked for data on the A7V before but I would be surprised if there is a better combination out there for the modeller; you don’t build models then this book is just as good for a balanced look at the early days of armoured warfare and the first Panzer.