Armoured Fighting Vehicles in Profile (AFVs of the World Series); Volume 4: American AFVs of World War II

26 cm. viii, 240, 63, [1] pages. Illustrations (some color). Index. Bookplate. Review slip laid in. Wrinkling to top edge of a few pages. DJ soiled and edges worn with a scratch at rear. Errata on page iv. A not on the American Designation System on page iv. Part I includes Eighty-eight Thousand to Come, Light Tanks M1-M5, T3 Christie, M3 Medium (Lee/Grant), M4 Medium (Sherman), The M6 Heavy and M26 Pershing, M22 Locust Light Tank, M24 Chaffee Light Tank, Hellcat, Long Tom and Pries, Complete Checklist of All U.S. World War II Self-Propelled Weapons, M3 Hack-Track APC, Landing Vehicles Tracked, U.S. Armored Cars, M103 Heavy Tank, M41 Light Tank (Walker Bulldog), M47 Patton, Index. Part 2 (separately paginated) United States Armored Organization (1917-1967). Index. Among the authors, in addition to the Editor, were Chris Ellis, Peter Chamberlain, Stevenson Pugh, Robert J. Icks, and B. H. Vanderveen. Colonel Robert J. Icks, USAR-Retired was a student of and writer on armor. He authored five books and numerous articles for professional journals. Having an enlisted man in World War I, he was commissioned in the Infantry Reserve upon graduating from Ripon College in 1927. During World War II. he served as a colonel with the Ordnance Department. Chris Ellis has been a technology enthusiast since his school days. He has nearly fifty years of experience as a writer and editor, having started out in the early 1960s as editor of Airfix Magazine. He has also written numerous books along with articles on military, aviation and transport subjects. An armored fighting vehicle (AFV) is an armed combat vehicle protected by armor, generally combining operational mobility with offensive and defensive capabilities. AFVs can be wheeled or tracked. Tanks, armored cars, assault guns/armored self-propelled guns, infantry fighting vehicles and armored personnel carriers are all examples of AFVs. Armoured fighting vehicles are classified according to their intended role on the battlefield and characteristics. The classifications are not absolute; two countries may classify the same vehicle differently, and the criteria change over time. For example, relatively lightly armed armored personnel carriers were largely superseded by infantry fighting vehicles with much heavier armament in a similar role. Successful designs are often adapted to a wide variety of applications. For example, the MOWAG Piranha, originally designed as an APC, has been adapted to fill numerous roles such as a mortar carrier, infantry fighting vehicle, and assault gun. Armoured fighting vehicles began to appear in use in World War I with the armored car, the tank, the self-propelled gun, and the personnel carrier seeing use. By World War II, armies had large numbers of AFVs, together with other vehicles to carry troops this permitted highly mobile maneuver warfare. In 1903, H. G. Wells published the short story "The Land Ironclads," positing indomitable war machines that would bring a new age of land warfare, the way steam-powered ironclad warships had ended the age of sail. Wells' literary vision was realized in 1916, when, amidst the pyrrhic standstill of the Great War, the British Landships Committee, deployed revolutionary armored vehicles to break the stalemate. The tank was envisioned as an armored machine that could cross ground under fire from machine guns and reply with its own mounted machine guns and cannons. These first British heavy tanks of World War I moved on caterpillar tracks that had substantially lower ground pressure than wheeled vehicles, enabling them to pass the muddy, pocked terrain and slit trenches of the Battle of the Somme. Presumed First Doubleday & Company Edition, First printing.…