This first volume of Assault Gun III: Backbone of the German Infantry
puts the weapon in its historical context and provides information about
the production and use of the Sturmgeschütz III in combat. Volume II
will provide information for identification of variants and their
production months. Both volumes together will give the readers a full
survey of the technical development of assault guns and assault
howitzers.
For this publication there were about 400 historical documents and
document series processed, selected from the many which were available.
These chosen documents form the basis for a new historical perspective
on this important Wehrmacht weapon system. The documentation is
illustrated by some 125 photographs, some of them hitherto unpublished,
70 graphs and plans about the Assault Gun and some 500 source
references.
To make navigation easy, documents and illustrations are arranged in
chapters that follow the historic timeline: technical development of the
Sturmgeschütz, series production, the variants of the assault guns and
their deployment with Heer, Luftwaffe and Waffen-SS.
Rounding off the publication is a section giving details of production,
acceptance and delivery of the Sturmgeschütz. For the first time it is
possible to research the production numbers accurately and to express
them in a way the reader can understand. A list of references, covering
four pages, closes the appendix of the documentation. The list of the
used sources is, because of its size, not printed in the book but is
available for download on the publisher's homepage.
