The Nuts & Bolts series of books offer a detailed look at specific vehicles, and are strongly geared towards the modeller researching a build. This particular volume takes a look at the Flakpanzer IV Wirbelwind and Oswind. This book is printed in both English and German with pages divided down the centre and one language on each side, or in the case of photo captions being in English first followed by the German translation.
The first fourteen pages deal with a brief history and development of the Flakpanzer. This isn’t a massively in-depth history but more an overview of the development, a look at camouflage schemes, a brief listing of available scale model kits, a list of known surviving vehicles, and technical data. This section is completed with a photo index and a list of aknowlegements.
From there we move onto the good stuff, with thirteen pages of black and white period photos, with three to four very good photos per page. These photos are all very clear and are all photos I’ve never seen anywhere alse. We then get three pages of 1/35 scale diagramatic line drawings of the Wirbelwind.
This is followed by eleven pages of reference photos of the restored vehicle in Camp Borden, Canada, and another in the German Army collection in Rendsburg. These include a lot of good detail photos of all the smaller parts and fittings. There is then a brief dalliance into four pages of colour profile drawings before getting back to the German and Canadian vehicles, with the emphasis more on the better restored German example. We get another thirty two pages of reference photos that cover the vehicle inside and out quite thoroughly, with a lot of particularly good photos of the interior and all aspects of the Flakvierling 38. These forty five pages of reference photos all have three, and sometimes four, photos per page for over 130 very nice, clear photos of every part of the vehicle.
The book concludes with nine pages devoted to the Ostwind, with a similar layout though with no museum example photos as none exist. So there is just a brief history, a set of 1/35 digramatic drawings, and several pages of period photos.
From a modelling perspective this book is an invaluable reference tool that should be on the workbench of anyone building a Wirbelwind. It brings together in one handy tome hundreds of useful photos that would either never be found, or possibly found only after months of scouring the net and libraries. I certainly hadn’t seen them elsewhere. If you’re looking for the definitive development history of the Wirbelwind then this isn’t it, but if you’re planning to build one then it’s a must have in my opinion.
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Author : Detlev Terlisten Publisher : Nuts & Bolts Pages : 88 containing B&W photos, line drawings and colour drawings Binding : Softcover Size : 211mm x 297mm.
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