The AMX 13 Light Tank

Book excerpt: The AMX 13 was originally designed in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. It represents French ambitions for national resurgence and withdrawal from wartime dependence on American military technology.Being a light tank it was an ambitious and far sighted departure from conventional tank design and it found a ready export market as well as being a critical part in the French Army arsenal. Its basic hull design lent itself to the development of a vast list of variants.French designers progressively modernized, and indeed reinvented, the AMX13 and enabled it to claim to be one of the most successful armored vehicle programs of the postwar period. It proved its worth in numerous small wars worldwide in the service of many countries.This, the first commercially published work on the AMX13 in English, examines in detail the technical industrial and tactical story of this remarkably successful armored fighting vehicle. The authoritative text is backed by an impressive selection of images