American Tanks & AFVs of World War II, Michael Green, Osprey Publishing, 2014, 376 pp, £30.00. ISBN: 978 1 78200 931 3.

No better author could have been found for this book.  Michael Green has written or co-written over 100 books on military subjects and is an expert on US armour.  He takes us from 1920, when the US disbanded its Tank Corps, to the years 1939 - 1946, when it would be able to build 88,000 tanks, twice as many as Britain and Germany combined and more than the 77,000 built by the USSR.

In the largest section of the book (medium tanks) Green leads us through the stages in the production of the Allied workhorse in World War 2, the M4 Sherman tank.  Development rarely stands still, especially in wartime, and the book also details the changes in the Sherman until the end of the war.  It was provided to armies all over the world and in service until the late 20^th century; in the Indo-Pakistani War of 1965 it was used by both sides.  There are also chapters in the book on the development of light and heavy tanks.

Definitions are fluid.  For the purpose of this book anything that was armoured, but not a tank, is defined as an armoured fighting vehicle (AFV).  It has chapters covering tank destroyers (a concept that fell out of favour in most armies after WW2), armoured cars, armoured half-tracks, self-propelled artillery and tracked landing vehicles for the US Marine Corps.

Tank design is a constant interplay between firepower, mobility and protection.  The author covers all these subjects but I would have liked to see more information on the trade-offs that were necessary and how they were achieved.   Green does make the point in his brief conclusion that the Sherman often outfought the technically more advanced German Panther and Tiger tanks, usually because of superior numbers, but he goes on to say that the Americans abandoned mass production after the war and went for a smaller number of high-tech vehicles.  This was exactly the opposite of the USSR, which followed up the highly successful T34 and T34/85 models with the T54/55, the most numerous tank ever.

Inevitably there is lots of technical detail in this book but Michael Green tells his story well, backed up by excellent colour photographs, and it should entrance any reader with an interest in 20^th century warfare.