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OSPREY NEW VANGUARD No83
Armoured Units of the Russian Civil War (White & Allied)
Authors: David Bullock and Alexander Deryabin
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This is another interesting title from Osprey, building on their productive links with Eastern European authors. The trouble is, the title is rather more interesting than the book itself and this reader found himself somewhat disappointed at the lack of new material to be found within its covers.
The book is sensibly organised, with separate chapters covering armoured cars (9 pages), tanks (10 pages) and armoured trains (11 pages), together with 7 coloured plates and a short section (3 pages) on colours and markings.
A reader with any knowledge of First World War tanks will find much that is familiar - over a third of the photographic material comes from the UK (Imperial War Museum and the Tank Museum) and a cutaway drawing of a Mk V tank (the cover illustration) is hardly revealing to a western audience. Equally, someone with any acquaintance with the main works in English on the Russian Civil War will have to search hard to find a great deal of new material in the narrative.
There are some snippets of information about the tactical use of armour in the RCW, including an account of a duel between a MkV tank and an armoured train and another describing how four Whippets were camouflaged as haystacks, emerging to machine-gun charging Red Cavalry!
Details of the amount of Allied armour present in Russia are, perhaps, rather surprising. There were over 70 tanks (MkVs and Whippets) on the Southern Front in November 1919, while Medium Bs and Renault FT17s ("Renos" to the Russians) saw combat elsewhere. Even J. F.C. Fuller visited on a tour of inspection, (perhaps dreaming of a Russian version of his "Plan 1919"?). Certainly there were "green fields beyond" aplenty, but that was part of the problem. With the technology and reliability of 1919 the tanks were still effectively bound to the railways, so it was hardly surprising that the armoured train found so much favour in Russia.
This part of the book is quite well covered, with information on the organisation and operation of armoured trains on all fronts. I suspect modellers would have liked rather more illustrative material - the coloured plates do not really add much to the black and white photographs and it would have been interesting to see more of the splendid titles of these trains (eg "St George, Bringer of Victory" and "Victorious Thunder") rendered into Cyrillic script.
It may be that the available material on RCW armour is, in fact, rather "thin". If so, it is surprising that this is only the first of a two-part work - the second will cover Red Armour, so it will be interesting to see what it adds. Overall, this is an interesting idea for a book on a new subject but, rather like the efforts at Anglo-Russian collaboration described within its pages, I believe it promised rather more than it delivered.
Armoured Units of the Russian Civil War (White & Allied) D. Bullock & A. Deryabin. Osprey New Vanguard no83. ISBN 1 84176 544 9 £8.99
Andy Callan
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