Armada Soviet Jeeps

Paul Gillan

I recently received the Armada "Soviet Jeeps" book from NKR Models. This 64 page book is presented in the familiar Squadron Signal landscape format.  With 130 B&W photos and 5 1/2 pages of excellent line drawings of GAZ jeeps and light armoured cars this book is essential reference for any modeller with an interest in things Soviet.

The book opens with several shots of early Soviet staff cars before delving into the world of the GAZ 64 jeep. This section of the book contains many "in action" shots and a beautiful set of plans for the vehicle. The book then progresses to the GAZ 67 with mainly production shots of the vehicle.  Funnily, considering the vehicles high production rate and use in the Great Patriotic War, most of the images are from peacetime. There is even a nice left hand side shot of a GAZ 67 B restored in Australia. Again there are plans for this vehicle.

The AR-NATI is the next subject to be examined. This little vehicle receives quite decent coverage in the book, though no plans are included.

The reason I bought this book in the first place was that I just bought the AER Moldova BA-64B kit. After a lot of searching I had managed to find four photos of BA-64's in my library. I had heard that there were a couple of shots of this little beast in the new Armada book. The book had a little more than expected on this vehicle. The Armada book contains 30 pages of photos and 2 pages of detailed plans including cutaway scrap views of the interior and turret. This publication is a literal mother lode of information on this vehicle and it's variants.

Covering early production types the book then extensively covers the major production type with plenty of wartime and posed shots of the vehicle and it's crews. Finally the author has included a section of images of BA-64 variants including a railway car, DShK and SG-43 equipped vehicles, a personnel carrier variant and a weird / cool semi tracked ski version.

For those of you that actually read the books you buy, unlike those of us that just look at the pretty pictures, you'd best be taking a crash course in Russian. Those folks have a different word and letter for everything. Fortunately, the captions for the photos are in English and Russian.

At A$10 this book is highly recommended. Armada also offer other books on war time vehicle including the Panther and JS 2. The books can be obtained in Australia through Earl Martell at NKR Models in Ballarat or visit Earl's site at http://www.ballarat.net.au/nkrmodels/