Model Detail Photo Monograph No 19: s.FH.18

by Rossagraph

ISBN 3-89717-20-4, 48 pages.

This is the first of the Rossagraph series that I have actually seen – I found it on a “sale price” shelf in fact and snapped it up. The 48 pages were a bargain! This book covers the 15 cm sFH18 in considerable detail, making it an ideal reference for anyone building the Precision kit.

The text is fully bilingual English/Polish, and so are the photograph captions. After a short historical introduction and a section of wartime photos of the gun in action the rest of the book is a detailed walkround of an sFH18 built in 1940 and preserved in Poland. This particular gun has the steel-rimmed, steel-spoked wheels of the horse-drawn weapon, but several of the wartime photos show the rubber-tyred motorised wheels. There’s a lot of closeup detail here, about the only things missing being the tool stowage and gunsight – both items that have rarely survived after 60 years. This walkround section is about evenly divided between colour and monochrome photos, and technical drawings from the original manual are sprinkled among them.

The photo captions are oddly distributed, being collected together on several of the photo pages so that one has to turn back to find the caption for the photo being examined; this is an inconvenience but not a major drawback to the book. I should also mention that the series number 19 and ISBN number that I quote above are those on the book’s cover – inside it is a different ISBN and series number! I think the latter are misprints, but if you order it be sure to quote the title.

Despite these oddities, highly recommended to anyone looking for a detailed photographic reference for this gun.

John Prigent