New book by a leading historian of armored vehicles! The first domestic study of the phenomenon of Panzerwaffe aces. Michael Wittmann, Otto Carius, Kurt Knispel, Ernst Barkmann - the combat score of each of them exceeded a hundred, each was worth an entire battalion. Well trained, armed with first-class equipment, they considered themselves smarter, stronger, tougher than all their opponents. They still did not understand how these “Ivans” in their “thirty-fours”, pierced through with shells from “tigers” and “panthers”, were able to stop their iron onslaught. We were able to. The Kostroma and Rostovites turned out to be stronger than the guys from Thuringia and the Upper Palatinate... So why do we write about German tank aces again and again? Why do we analyze the battles they won and count the tanks they destroyed? Yes, because it was a strong enemy who forced himself to be respected, who beat us for two long and terrible years, who taught us how to fight! This book is more than a simple retelling of the biographies of famous tank crews of the Third Reich. Having checked the lists of their victories according to documents of both sides, separating fact from fiction, real successes from “hunting stories” and Goebbels propaganda, the author provides an in-depth analysis of the phenomenon of German tank aces and the reasons for their high performance.