Soviet Motor Gunboats of World War II

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A compelling account of the heavily armed and highly mobile Soviet river gunboats which took on the Germans during World War II. Russia's enormous river system has long been its highway and, as early as 1908, the Tsar's armies were developing armoured, motor-driven river boats, bringing tank-like mobility, firepower and survivability to Russian battlefields. This book, the first history of these vessels in English, explains how this concept led to one of the most remarkable naval weapons of World War II, the Soviet 'river tank', or Armoured Motor Gun Boat (AMGB). Highly mobile, these armoured boats were fitted with T-26 or T-34 tank turrets, and had a fighting capacity that even the Germans were hard pushed to match. Nearly 300 AMGBs were built during World War II. Capable of carrying up to 20 infantrymen directly into action and providing immediate firepower, their military value was widely recognized. They were versatile enough to be used in naval landing operations off the Gulf of Finland, the Azov Sea and the Black Sea, and their capabilities were prized by local commanders. Using meticulous new colour profiles of different types of gun boats and their variants, a cutaway of the T-26-armed Project 1124, plus spectacular new artwork of the AMGBs in action at Stalingrad and in the Crimea, this book uncovers the history of river warfare on the Eastern Front, and the boats that played such a key part in the fighting.