A noted authority examines the roles played by Germany's Hetzer tank destroyer and the Soviet SU-76M self-propelled gun during the battle for Hungary in 1945.During World War II, Germany and the Soviet Union soon found that their light tanks were obsolete; while their small guns were no longer useful against the enemy's armoured vehicles, the chassis allowed for installation of a larger gun at the cost of a rotating turret. Keen to utilize existing technology, Germ...

This illustrated study pits Germany's PzKpfw III against the Soviet Union's T-34 in the wake of Hitler's 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union.This book evaluates the PzKpfw III and T-34 medium tanks fielded by Germany and the Soviet Union during 1941. Both designs were intended to be the primary medium tanks of their respective armies, but owing to manufacturing difficulties, neither was available in quite the numbers intended. Even though both tanks were relatively n...

When the German army launched Operation Barbarossa – the invasion of the Soviet Union – on June 22, 1941, it was expecting to face and easily defeat outdated and obsolete tanks and for the most part it did, but it also received a nasty shock when it came up against the T-34. With its powerful gun and sloped armour, the T-34 was more than a match for the best German tanks at that time and the Germans regarded it with awe. German Field Marshal von Kleist, who commanded the latter stages of B...

This fully illustrated volume investigates the battles between Germany's Panzer IV medium tanks and US Lend-Lease M3 tanks crewed by Soviet tankers on the Eastern Front in 1942.In December 1941, a shipment of M3 medium and M3 light tanks, the latest and still unproven products of the US arms industry, arrived in Murmansk. Rapidly pitched into combat, these American designs had to contend with the PzKpfw IV, originally envisaged as a close-support tank but refined i...