LemaireSoft's Encyclopedia of the Tanks of World War II

Encyclopedia of the Tanks of World War IIUpdated on January 25, 2003. Next update somewhere in the summer of 2003

One Record for each Vehicle

Each vehicle (there are more than 500) has an individual record, with an historical and technical overview, a photo and a guide how to differentiate it visually from others:

Table of Contents (only the main types, sorted by country)
Alphabetical index of Names (you can look up for any known designation and find the right vehicle).
Hiérarchical index (grouping by "lineages")

Comparisons

To understand what the tanks were really worth, compare them: we give you two comparative instruments.

One to One Comparisons
Diagrams for comparisons of all vehicles on one criterium:

Weight	Speed	Armor	Total Production
Specific Power	Autonomy	Caliber of the Main Weapon	Date of Appearance

Articles by countries

An introduction of the tanks used by the main warring countries.

United States	France	Great Britain	Russia
Germany	Italy	Japan

Interested by the aircraft of World War II ?

Same quality with wings

Links to other web sites.

An advancing bataillon of Tiger in the summer of 1943, probably in Sicily.

What's new on January 25, 2003

The renewal, started in the summer of 2002, is over. The outcome: about hundred more tanks, new comparative diagrams and new index to quicken your research. Dozens of new photos. For each vehicles where we had the information, we added a table showing graphically where and when the vehicle was used. There are now hundreds of links from within the texts, even in the legends of photos. The layout had been modified too: the grey background remains indispensable when multicolor silhouettes are drawn, otherwise they become unusable. For the other pages, we use a more attractive background pattern. The legends in the articles, which appeared previously when you put the mouse above the photo, are now visible underneath. We hope it makes them more interesting: you can judged on this very page.
Technical considerations forced us to change all URL of our pages: the old ones will remain where they were and as they were. They will send you as much as possible to the new table of contents and to this home page, from where you can access the new version.
The next step: the armored cars and the half-tracks. We have already started to gather the necessary documentation. It is far from over and it is much more difficult than with tanks. We hope to be in a position to add a first installment by the summer of 2003. We will probably add some of the most famous artillery pieces of the period.

Older News

Editorial

One more web site upon World War II ?
Well, ... yes !
Does it bring something new at least ?
We hope so. For six years, tanks crisscrossed the European continent and parts of Asia in all directions. We would like to be a reference for all people interested in the machines of that period. We try to provide information that we have not found elsewhere. For a more detailed treatment of specific questions, we proposed URL to web site dealing with it more in details.
For the tanks, we put the emphasis on comparison. A weapon has value only in comparison with other weapons. A model can be dreaded once and outclassed the next moment. To understand the flow and ebb of the various machines, you need to be able to compare them. So, for every model of armored vehicle we know of, we prepared two pages: the first one is very detailed, with comment and pictures. The second one is a summary with only the silhouette and the major technical data. Two of those cards can be displayed at the same time in one page, making easy a comparison.
For all its sufferings, horrors, crimes, World War II had at least one advantage: the enemy was clear. The objective was clear too: defeat on the battlefield a conventional army. Today's world is no more as transparent. Recent events sound like war acts, but perpetrators are too coward to take responsibility for their deeds. They attack innocents and then hide behind other innocents, hoping that those will pay for them.
Needless to say: our web site has only historical ambitions. We champion no ideological stance, be it nationalist, revisionist, militarist or whatever. If one or another URL we give refers to some ideologically tainted web site, it would be totally independent of our will and could not be deemed as a support for this stance.

Written by LemaireSoft © on September 21, 2001. Last updated on January 25, 2003