Introduction

The Germany-based publishing company Tankograd is already supplying the modeller for years with books filled with valuable reference material no matter if your taste is WW2 or modern or maybe something in between. For the German armor enthusiasts, they have a nice offering in Wehrmacht Special #4010 about a vehicle not much covered in the books (at least not as much as other armoured cars). This edition deals with the SdKfz 231 and 232 including both the 6 and the 8 rad version. These types of 6 and 8 rad vehicles were mostly in use in the early war years and the 8 rad was eventually changed for the better known SdKfz 234.

The book

Wehrmacht Special # 4010 is a 64 page A4 softcover edition dealing with all the variants of the SdKfz 231 and 232. As already mentioned in the introduction both vehicle types had the same designations. Both the early 6 rad and the 8 rad were designed to play a role as reconnaissance vehicles and to ride forward of the troops to scout the situation. Therefore several types of vehicles were produced. One equipped with a 2 cm turret (SdKfz 231) and one with radio equipment (SdKfz 232). The idea was that both vehicles would follow each other forward to the troops and when the 231 would find enemies or other things that needed attention he would make this clear to the SdKfz 232 who would then contact the command centre and action was taken according to that. Later another type was made with a bigger antenna and with that a longer range to make communication with high command possible. As said the versions were both available in 6 Rad and 8 Rad and to make out what the difference was between the vehicles the Germans added “6 Rad or 8 Rad" to the vehicle designation to avoid confusion.

The book starts of with 8 pages of history and information on all the variants of the 6 and 8 Rad written both in German and English. This includes the 231 and 232 variant of each vehicle type but also the 263 variant (schwere PanzerFunkWagen) and the 233 which was the 8 Rad with a 7.5 cm gun. In the English translation of the history and information there are some typos. For example some of the years are typed wrong and that make the English text a bit confusing however in the German text they have written it correctly.

From page 10 and on you start with pictures both accompanied with German and English captions. Pages 10 to 28 starts with the 231 and 232 variants of the 6 rad with page 10 showing the respective chassis the 6 rads were built on by the 3 manufacturers that did the production.

Pages 29 and 30 show 4 pictures of the 263 variant of the 6 Rad and pages 31 to 53 deals with the 231 and 232 variants of the 8 Rad. The pictures of the variants are a bit mixed with each other so you have both pics of 231’s and 232’s with no real order presented in terms of the vehicles types in question.

Pages 54 to 56 deal with the SdKfz 233 8 Rad Kanonenwagen which was equipped with the short-barreled 7,5 cm gun and the remaining pages 57 to 64 deal with the SdKfz 263 8 Rad Schwere PanzerFunkwagen (heavy Armored communications vehicle).

Conclusion

The book is put together with pictures from 17 different collections of which Jochen Vollert is one. One thing that stands out from everything is the very good quality of the pictures and in the whole book there is not one blurry picture. They also did good to limit the pictures with 2 per page in most cases. The pages where they did not do this, the subject of the pictures was to point out a detail.

The book is very good reference and the information provided, despite the few small (English) typos, is very complete and the captions with the pictures do show the interesting information or details depicted in the photograph. There are some true gems to be found such as good views of the roof of the SdKfz 263 for instance or pictures of Erwin Rommel in his SdKfz 263 8 Rad in both Africa and the Early France campaign. Wrapping everything up I can only say that Tankograd did a good job with their research and combined with the impressive collection of good quality photographs I think this is a must have for the early armoured car fan.