Forgotten Archives 1: The Lost Signal Corps Photos Hardcover – March 16, 2016

Filled with superb, high quality photographs printed on glossy paper. Great, atmospheric action shots (the winter '44 - spring '45), with the American soldiers in the combat zone, maintaining their vehicles, examining and finally posing on the knocked out German armour.The book doesn't only contain wrecks of German AFVs, but also a GREAT number of destroyed "G.I. tanks". This includes a picture of a M4 that has received 88mm shot, penetrating clean through the turret sides. Then there are M4s that received some nasty shot groupings, one "ironically" on the reinforced side armour plate with a Allied star insignia used as an aiming point.Pictures tell how much the Americans tried to improve the protection on their vehicles - from sandbags to applying concrete rebar and tracks on all the surfaces and even experimenting with the spaced armour. These never really worked against the cheapest and the most effective German anti-tank weapon, Panzerfaust. But then again, destroyed M4 was easy to patch up and put back in action and there was much more of them, when the German forces were desperate to find anything that could shoot.If you are a fan of the "Panzerwrecks" series and wish to see KO-ed Allied armour as well, then you won't be disappointed with the Forgotten Archives.

These are some of the best pictures from WW2 that I've ever seen. Why, one might ask? Firstly, many of the pictures are of scenes that are tailor made for dioramas (there is a burnt our He 111 bomber that has to become a diorama) and are in extremely high resolution. If you're a model maker this book will be a joy, even if you're not modelling WW2 US and German subjects the details of weathering are useful. In the 240 pages you get photos of M4's M10's, Panthers, Stugs, Jeeps, planes; all in action and in the ETO. There are three pages of text about the US Signal Corps and then captions with each photo. Impressively, most of the captions have details about where and when the photo was taken and many even have the names of the men in the photo. There are details of uparmored tank destroyers and also a M-18 with signs for troop recognition that were novel to me and in fact I have seen very few of these pictures before.So, a couple hundred unpublished photos from the ETO selected for clarity, resolution, and detail seems a very good deal to me. I look forward to many more books in this series.

The quality of the book is of high standard and the photos are great. I only found two errors in nomenclature (the M8 SPG has a 75mm howitzer, not a 77mm; and an M4A3 was misidentified as an M4A1) which is very good. I also liked that men in the photos were named where their identifications were known. The images run the gamut from guys sleeping in a field to wrecked aircraft. There a photos one often does not see, like the mechanic rebuilding a tank engine. I particularly liked the photo of the M18 Hellcat with signs on it pleading with US troops not to shoot at it (the M18 did not look like most US vehicles, so, there were some identification problems). Unfortunately, for me at least, a lot of the vehicles in this book are wrecks. I would have preferred less. I would have preferred more photos of tanks in action and a lot crew shots. A little more context for the pictures would have been a lovely touch. However, my largest complaint is the captions. The Signal Corps captions are in black and easy to read but the author's captions are in light gray. I had a hard time reading those. If you are a modeler or diorama builder looking for ideas, this would be a terrific source for you and you should probably give it 4 or 5 stars. Unfortunately, I am neither.

AMAZING BOOK!!!!! 240 PAGES OF WONDERFUL MOSTLY UNSEEN PHOTOS.I have dozens of world war 2 photo books and of all those only2 photos in this book appear in any of my other ones. My only complaint is one miss captioned photo of a soviet tank crew pointing to multiple penetrations on a German Tiger tank and laughing. The caption states the crew is laughing because they survived the battle despite the damage to their tank. They actually destroyed the tiger during the the Battle of Kursk and had their picture taken with it afterward.

One of the best wartime books I've seen. Excellent, rarely published photos of WWII. Not all about tanks, but contains many photos of them. This book contains photos of life on the front lines. An excellent source of inspiration and detail for scale modelers.

Excellent Book! Not more than 4 photos that I have seen before, and all of those were for context. Good coverage of American armor variants, and the conditions the GI's fought in. Recommended for any armor modeler.

Most of the photos I have never seen before, all are great quality. Panzer Wrecks Publishing did an outstanding job in this book.

One of the best books from this publisher. Great photos, on good paper, well laid out. I purchased this from an alternate seller for $34 free shipping.

Have all the Panzerwrecks books so good to see they are now starting to cover allied vehicles as well. The main difference between this book and the traditional Panzerwrecks books is that the people taking the photos in this book are trained photographers so the quality and composition of the photos is better. This is a great book, the subject matter is varied and it is interesting to compare the official captions with those of the authors to see how many times the official ones are wrong.If you like WW2 this is a good buy, if you like allied vehicles this is a better buy, if you like all vehicles this is a great buy (there are quite a few Axis vehicles photos as well). Really hope they bring some more of these out covering other parts of the war.Well done!

Informative, interesting ideal for dipping into, or for studying if a model diorama needs that bit of accuracy, recommended.

First volume in a series concerning armour and other AFV’s in World War II. The books are not just of interest to those interested in WWII, to modellers as well. The books are full of detailed images not usually shown in the usual history books. The same goes for volume 2.

excellent item, well packed, quick delivery. A+

a good book .loads of unseen pics.great for model makers