German recovery/ engineer (berg) tanks

Having recently (finally) finished the Wargames South (now Arrowhead) Berg Panther I thought I would do a post on the various German Berg vehicles I have. Took me ages to do the Berg Panther, nothing to do with the model which I built soon after buying, but because of my first pot of Vallejo Midstone which did not cover well (same reason my Merc Maultiers were not done until a couple months back). My new pot covers a treat so decided it was about time I finished the model.

So I have for the Germans:

• a Berg Panther with the works in terms of engineering equipment etc. Model from Arrowhead;
• an early Berg Panther which did not have much more than a removed turret I built from a Takara model;
• a Berg Tiger from the Panzer Korps kit (but the hull is a Takara Tiger 1);
• a Berg Panzer IV I made by converting a Pithead body;
• 2 versions of a Elefant Berg tank from CanDo.

(by the way, the buildings are 6mm Timecast from their Stalingrad range - I got them when you could still buy them painted)

The 2 CanDo ones first. They are as they come from the pre-painted Elefant series. Unlike Takara the paint job is a bit more precise and there is more variation in the paint tones etc. so I don't generally put a wash on or tidy up any of the painting.

The Berg Tiger is a Panzer Korp kit for the turret but I find the hulls for Panzer Korp (and CanDo too) a bit low on the Tiger 1 and the Takara model looks more the part so I just drilled out the hole for the turret on a Takara versus model so the Panzer Korp turret fit and then repainted along with the turret to match. Looks very effective

The Arrowhead Berg Panther. Nice model - although with all the bits on it and being all made of metal it is quite heavy compared to most other models in this scale. I added a few of the plastic extras from Takara versus sets into the wooden structure to add a bit of flavour - a couple of crates and an oil barrel. If you don't have access to Takara bits then Perfect Six have brought out a range of 6mm crates of varying sizes which are also ideal for 10mm WW2 vehicles as you can see in my recent post (Russian truck near the bottom of the article). The model I got was a while ago and it may have had a redesign now but it is always going to be a good model from Arrowhead.

I did not realise there were different versions of Berg Panthers until I was looking through Henk of Holland - a great site to see different versions of the main vehicle types and I often use it to check odd variants. The link goes to the Panther page and the various Berg Panther variants are about three quarters or so of the way down the page. This was a Takara versus set Panther without the turret and a cap put on the turret ring (a sanded down tiddly wink counter) and then a circle cut out of thin card and cut into 'planks' to mimic a wooden boarded cover. Some bits cut from pins on the back and the ends flatted with a hammer and some length of slightly different sizes cut from pins and glued on the side. Then repainted.

I bought some Pithead Wirbelwind but I wanted them to match my Panzer IVs which are all Takara and CanDo and as I had some spare Panzer Korps kits I used the Panzer IV hulls from them. That left me with unneeded Panzer IV bodies so I converted to be Berg Panzer IVs (again using Henk of Holland and other sites to check out the layout).  Card again for the wooden cover over the turret ring, some pins cut for the pieces of the winch structure (in travel mode in bits on the side), a barrel and crate from Takara spare bits and a piece of a modelling match stick for the large lump of wood.

Finally another important German vehicle used for recovery of tanks - the Sdkfz 7 Half-track prime mover (these are 1/144 from New Millennium Toys, pre-painted and just given a dry brush and some mud on the wheels). This replicated a picture I have seen of two of them pulling a Tiger 1 up a hill (might have been 3?).

For an easy way to see all my WW2 posts check out the WW2 Summary page.