Das Reich Panther D

[DCG]

I started happening upon photos of 2 SS-Pz.Div. Das Reich Panther Ds in Russia online a while ago and was immediately attracted by their camouflage scheme of wide bands of green and red-brown sparated by thin stripes of dark yellow. Some of these online sources featured photos of Ernst Barkmann's mount '401' when he was still a gunner, so I decided to try this subject out.

http://www.fototime.com/%7BDCDEF5C6-1270-4870-8DF3-646A6109CB84%7D/picture.JPG

Problem is, I couldn't discern any real zimmerit pattern in the photos - it always seemed to have been very sloppily applied, almost as if by hand or with a broom. The green stuff you see in this photo is Tamiya green polyester putty, which I was surprised to discover is basically Bondo (or at least that's what it smells like!) I applied this with a cut-down Testors vinyl paintbrush (see - they've got like a million uses) and did some very minimal sanding down.

OF COURSE, what then happened is literally the day after I applied the zimmerit I saw a photo in a book of Barkmann's Panther D and sure enough it had a very subtle ridge pattern to it. For an example, check out the Panther Ds in Dai Nippon Kaiga's Der Deutsch Panzer und Militarfahrzeuge on pp.102-107 incl., attributed to Pz.Regt. 39.

Another stumbling block was that '401' didn't have one of those armoured covers for the deep fording equipment either, and I'd already gone through the trouble of correcting the one that came with the DML kit per the sketches in Panzer Tracts 5-1:

http://www.fototime.com/%7B1F35DD72-BE14-41A2-8AC7-180A498911BC%7D/picture.JPG

OK, the photo's not the greatest, but you can see I rebuilt the hinge mechanism, hollowed the aperture out and added some PE screen and rebuilt the flange with styrene tubing. Anyway, the upshot of this is I'm still doing a Das Reich Panther D c. autumn 1943, just not Barkmann's '401'... I'm pretty sure there were Panthers out there with the zimmerit applied as per my model (I hope).

[Stuke Sowle]

Looks like a good start Darren. Do you have any closer shots of the zimm you applied?

I have always been intrigued by the first examples of zimm seen on D's in Russia and Italy and am looking forward to trying this out on my DML kit sometime in the future.

[DCG]

Hi Stuke,

To start off, this is a crop of the photo that's the culprit - a Panther D of Das Reich in late summer 1943:

http://www.fototime.com/%7BFE865C2C-AB65-4041-908C-33B5BC02988C%7D/picture.JPG

As DR got their Panthers before zimmerit was applied at the factories, I used the sloppy application on the fender to base a reasonable guess that the zimmerit was field-applied on. In the photo you can see a pattern of horizontal ridges on the driver's visor and on the mantlet, but they're not as apparent all over the glacis plate as I'd expect, so I guessed (again) that the pattern would have followed more closely what the fender looks like.

Anyway, here's the right turret side:

http://www.fototime.com/%7B3BB5161E-92A1-43EF-99FF-6C1665DC8F77%7D/picture.JPG

And here's the mantlet:

http://www.fototime.com/%7BA818C7D0-9BA7-4B45-9CC0-21C0FBA4749C%7D/picture.JPG

At the same time I was trying this out it occurred to me that to just add a scribed checkerboard pattern would also be a good representation of the pattern applied by MNH as well, which I've used on my DML Panther A early kit.