Review: Armored Champion: The Top Tanks of World War II, by Steven J. Zaloga

Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 2016, pp. 336.

Armored Champion is Steven J. Zaloga's recent assessment of the "best" tanks of World War II, or more precisely, the 1918-1945 period (since the interwar era gets pretty fair coverage). Still, the volume affords much more than a mere "best of" list. Zaloga opens the book with an extraordinary overview of the key characteristics of tanks from the standpoint of conference in the period with which he is concerned, between 1918 and 1945--the properties that make for the combination of firepower, protection and mobility. He discusses not just the importance of the caliber of a gun, for example, but its length of barrel, the merits and demerits of various kinds of ammunition (with regard not only to individual performance in specific situations, but availability), steel penetration at given ranges, and fire control systems; not just the millimeter thickness of a piece of armor plate, but discussion of its sloping and hardening, and the distribution of such plate around the tank; not just the horsepower ratings of engines, and top road speeds, but details of power trains and suspension systems. He also looks beyond all these to such less noted but still essential matters as communications and layout.

Proceeding beyond the assessment of individual vehicles in the narrow sense he also affords the reader a fair grounding in the realities of tank combat (engagement ranges in different terrain, on the proportion of hits scored to shots fired, on where those hits strike the tank, on the odds of their doing damage); and the ways in which the assessment varies by level (what may seem best to an individual tanker not necessarily so from the standpoint of a whole army forced to compromise between quantity and quality). All of this is supported with numerous concrete examples, diagrams and statistical tables. He gets into the ways in which single tank designs have been inconsistent--the excellent T-34 suffering from qualitative problems amid the chaos of the early, disastrous phase of the Soviet-German war before the tank factories got their house in order, raised their productivity and upgraded the product. And all the way through he is mindful of the way the state of the art continuously changed, the "world-beater" of 1939 hopeless on the battlefield by the war's end.

Impressive as Zaloga's broader discussion is, he carries over the same meticulousness into the period-by-period and theater-by-theater assessments that comprise the bulk of the book, not only in the level and variety of detailing in his discussion of different tanks, but the disparity between the tanker's view and the commander's view according to the swiftly evolving state of the art. Admittedly the coverage of the really fine points of the subject is not equal throughout, some tanks getting deeper coverage than others (with the T-34 an obvious and very understandable example given its lengthy and critical role). Still, let me put it this way: if someone were planning to design a World War II-themed strategy game, and they needed to work out formulas for calculating the results of engagements among different kinds of armored forces, this book would offer an excellent start. Yet, precisely because of his comprehensive yet extremely accessible explanation of so many of the basics, the book is not just a useful resource for those interested in the minutiae of the subject, but an excellent introduction to the subject of tank warfare generally.