Clankety, Clank, I Am a Tank!

 

My good wargaming buddy Lord Sterling and I, in response to a fellow gamer's request, are running a large Memoir 44 game using 15mm miniatures on Saturday.  The scenario is the tank battle at Prokhorovka (Kursk, July 1943) pitting the German SS Panzer Korps against the Soviet 5th Guards Tank Army.

Then we realized we didn't have enough German armor for the scenario so we ordered two boxes of Flames of War 15mm German tanks (one of Pz-IV H and one of Pz-VIa) from Noble Knight Games.  They had them in the post to us very quickly and they arrived on Tuesday at my house.  I immediately started putting the tanks together.  This was the first time in decades that I've assembled a plastic kit (except for some buildings) so my first two, even following the instructions on the Flames of War web site, were rather slap-dash.  But I quickly got the hang of it, assembling three Pz-IVs and all five Pz-VIs.  I left the other two Pz-IVs to Lord Sterling.

My first (and partially painted) Pz-IV H

Not having the "right" paint colors, I was forced to improvise, assisted by a Vallejo to Craft Paints conversion chart I had run across several years ago.

The first Pz-IV H and three unpainted PZ-VIs

Hand painting was too slow as we needed a quick turn-around so I went to a spray paint - Krylon flat camouflage tan.  That seemed to do the trick in representing the elusive German dunkelgelb (dark yellow) basic paint scheme from the factory.

And here are my results.

Three Pz-IV H tanks.
One handpainted with a mix of craft paint (desert sand and butter pecan), one sprayed with an almost empty can of flat tan, and one with the Krylon flat tan.

And the five Pz-VI Tigers, all painted with the Krylon flat tan.

In addition, I did some detailed painting of the bow machineguns, tracks, and a few other items.  With time being short I did not attempt any camouflage paint addition (a combination of dark olive green and red brown) that the German fieldtroops applied.  My thought was these tanks had just arrived fresh off the train from the factory in Germany and were rushed into the field.  That sounded good to me.

Of course I found out after we had already committed ourselves that the requesting gamer would not be able to come to the game.  Oh well, his loss!

So with this quick diversion from the Franco-German War (1870-1871) to the "Russo-German" War (1943) done, I will gratefully return to the 19th Century to complete several more batteries of Prussian artillery for the IX Armeekorps in 1871.