On January 11, 1934, following specifications laid down by Heinz Guderian, the Army Weapons Department drew up plans for a medium tank with a maximum weight of 24,000 kilograms (53,000 lb) and a top speed of 35 kilometres per hour (21.75 mph). It was intended as the main tank of the German Panzer divisions, capable of engaging and destroying opposing tank forces.

Daimler-Benz, Krupp, MAN, and Rheinmetall all produced prototypes. Testing of these took place in 1936 and 1937, leading to the Daimler-Benz design being chosen for production. The first model of the Panzer III, the Ausf. A, came off the assembly line in May 1937, and a total of ten, two of which were unarmed, were produced in that year. Mass production of the Ausf. F version began in 1939. Much of the early development work on the Panzer III was a quest for a suitable suspension. Several varieties of leaf-spring suspensions were tried on Ausf. A through A u  sf. D before the torsion-bar suspension of the Ausf. E was standardized. The Panzer III, along with the Soviet KV heavy tank, was one of the first tanks to use this suspension design. 

A distinct feature of Panzer III, influenced by British Vickers tanks, was a three-man turret. This meant that commander was not distracted with either loader's or gunner's tasks and could fully concentrate on maintaining situational awareness. Most tanks of the time did not have this capability, providing the Panzer III with a potential combat advantage. For example the French Somua S-35, had only one-man turret crew, and the Soviet T-34 (originally) had two-men. The practical importance of this feature is signified by the fact that not only all the further German tank designs inherited it, but also later into the war, most of the Allied tanks' designs either quickly switched to the three-man turret.

The Panzer III was intended as the primary battle tank of the German forces. However, when it initially met the KV and T-34 tanks it proved to be inferior in both  armor and gun power. To meet the growing need to counter these tanks, the Panzer III was up-gunned with a longer, more powerful 50-millimetre (1.97 in) cannon and received more armor although this failed to effectively address the problem caused by the KV tank designs. As a result, production of self-propelled guns, as well as the up-gunning of the Panzer IV was initiated.

In 1942, the final version of the Panzer III, the Ausf. N, was created with a 75-millimetre (2.95 in) KwK 37 L/24 cannon, a low-velocity gun designed for anti-infantry and close-support work. For defensive purposes, the Ausf. N was equipped with rounds of hollow charge ammunition which could penetrate 70 to 100 millimetres (2.76 to 3.94 in) of armor depending on the round's varia nt but these were strictly used for self-defen  se.

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Naming a company after a brand of shoes is a strange way to start a business, but that is exactly what Charles A. Tilt did, when in 1905, he built his first car and the Diamond T Motor Company of  Chicago made its debut.  Tilt's father was a shoemaker, whose imprint was a diamond outlined in gold, standing for quality, with a "T" in the center standing for Tilt.  It was only natural that the young Charles would follow his dad's footsteps with a similar logo for his vehicles.  Automobile production took place until around 1911 when one of his customers asked Tilt to build a truck.  The rest, as they say…is history.

With the onset of WWI, the government appointed Diamond T to make 1,500 3-5 ton "liberty" trucks in a time span of only ten months – and the challenge was met.  In the 1920's Diamond T was on a roll with orders coming in from both government and patrons.  The 1940's brought several success and changes to the company.  During WWII Diamond T produced over 50,000 vehicles of various sizes for the military.

It was in the late 1950's that both Diamond T and Reo Motor Car Company were bought by the White Motor Company which ultimately resulted in a new truck called the Diamond Reo.  All seemed to be going well for Diamond Reo, but financial problems eventually led to bankruptcy in 1975.  Two years later, Diamond Reo was bought by Osterlund Inc. of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, who produced Diamond Reo's into the late 1980's.  

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Over this past weekend I went out and purchased an inexpensive rail car produced by Branchline to use as a painting subject.  The intent of the weekend's exercise was simple; to get familiar with some new paints and techniques – and to have some quality FUN time.

Mid-day on a Saturday I headed to one of the local train dealers and purchase a car.  My original intent was to simply weather an existing "pre-painted" train car.

On the way home, after the purchase, I decided that it might be best if I went ahead and repainted the entire thing, but that would involve recreating the logo and markings and I didn't really feel like going to that much trouble.  I took a chance by swinging into another local shop near my house (yes, it does seem like there are a lot of train stores in Portland) where I cruised through their limited supply of HO train decals.  Much to my surprise I found a wonderful OPE decal set….Perfect!!!

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During the second world war the Soviets relied heavily on the use of tractors for their heavy artillery and mortars to make their way across the battlefield. The most ominous of these was the ChTZ S-65 “Stalinez” tractor which was built in the Chelyabinskiy Traktornyy Zavod (ChTZ in short) , founded in 1933 in the city of Chelyabinsk. The core business from 1933 of the company was producing tractors initially for agricultural use and the first series, the S-60, was a copy of the Caterpillar 60. However the war effort demanded vehicles to be used as heavy tractors in the field, so most of the 37,626 Sons of Stalin (Stalinez) S-60’s, and the improved diesel powered version S-65, found their way to the military. They were put to use hauling around the big guns such as the 152 mm M1937 ML-20 Howitzer and the B4 M1931 203mm Howitzer.

From 1940 onwards the ChTZ plant almost completely switched over to producing tanks such as the T34 and the SU series. The plant also was renamed to Chelyabinsk Kirov Narkomtankprom Zavod. The rate of production was so incredibly high the city of Chelyabinsk literally earned the nickname of “Tankograd” (Tank city).

The S-65 tractor, although strong, would pretty much only outrun Continental drift . It ran at a maximum speed of 7 miles per hour (11 Km/H) and the Germans managed to get hold of thousands during the first year of the invasion of Russia in 1941. They were put into use as a means of recovery vehicle and pulling stuck vehicles from the heavy Russian mud during the fall period known as Rasputitsa, but more often than not in their original role as artillery tractor pulling the sFH 18 and the like.

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Regular readers of MMI may recognize the name of Mike Stevenson.  Mike is a  good, prolific builder whose work is featured quite regularly on the pages of this magazine.  Behind the scenes Mike and David Grummitt (MMI editor) maintain a robust email conversation as  they discuss upcoming projects.  As a courtesy, there are times that I am included by email copy and invited to join into the conversations.  During one recent exchange Mike casually mentioned that he would be building a model for David to paint.   Hey, wait a minute!  Mike builds and David paints?   That sounded like a pretty sweet deal to me.  Seeing an opportunity to skip directly to the “fun” part of modeling I joined the conversation and asked how I might snag one of these painting gigs.  As it turns out, Mike was just putting the finishing touches on the Bronco Bishop and graciously offered it to me for the painting.   A couple of weeks later the model arrived at my doorstep.

As the Bishop’s primary area of service was in North Africa and Italy it quickly became apparent that my painting choices might be somewhat limited; bronze green or desert tan were pretty much the only games in town.   But wait!   As fate would have it during a search though the Imperial War Museum archives I happened across a photo showing a Bishop serving in Italy with hastily applied “mud camo”.   Perfect!  Well, not really.  The problem is that mud camouflage is an incredibly tough finish to pull off convincingly.  Balancing the rough and hasty nature of the applied mud versus the real modeling requirements for a cohesive and athletically pleasing presentation seems to be at permanently odds.  Never mind the fact that I had long ago promised myself that I would never even attempt this type of finish because of the inherent difficulties.  But as is generally the case one thing led to another; I shared the photo with Mike, he sent me a few additional photos from his collection, David was brought into the conversation and then before I knew it I was going to be attempting a mud camo finish.  How did that happen?   I guess there’s no turning back now.  

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Modeling, specifically military modeling is generally content on building all of the various machines and weapons of war.  We take great care in our quest to build accurate, small scale representations of the tools of the trade and in some cases we combine these with figures to create small scenes.   These vignettes and dioramas often portray a certain historical event – a roadside meeting or front line engagement.  However, if we are honest with ourselves we must come to the realization that even our most accurate depictions of the tools of war only tell a limited part of a greater story that is warfare.  Rarely do we touch upon scenes which depict the horror, tragedy and loss that war causes on the human level.

Is there a reason for this?  Probably, but this is not the time or place for such a conversation.  Rather, I am simply a modeler who has chosen as his subject the portrayal of a human tragedy of epic proportions.

The genesis of this idea took hold while visiting the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C.  This was my second visit to the museum, but the first time that I had taken advantage of the full tour.  My tour began by being personally shown some of the museum artifacts by a Holocaust Survivor, his narrative intertwined with the descriptions of the museum pieces.  His Story – Their Story; had a profound impact. 

Among the symbols of the associated with the Holocaust, the German Rail Transport car, G-10, came to symbolize the forced "relocation" of millions of people during the Nazi reign.  Until recently, 1/35th scale rail stock has been nearly non-existent.  Fortunately a new entry into the model community, L.Z.Models, has filled this void with absolutely stunning rail car kits.  The kit contains superbly cast resin parts, along with 180 photo etched bits and an extensive decal sheet. 

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Croatia gained autonomy in 1939 and in 1941 Croatia joined World War II on the side of the Axis Powers and staged a military coup that made Ustashe leader Ante Pavelic leader of Croatia. This left Croatia as essentially a Nazi puppet state that allowed Germany to invade Yugoslavia. As part of Nazi efforts to re-draw the borders, Bosnia and Herzegovina were awarded to Croatia. With the Ustashe in control, atrocities occurred on a massive scale as thousands of Serbs were killed in concentration camps.

The Nazis withdrew from the area in October 1944 and Croatia was reconstituted as part of the new Yugoslavia, now a socialist republic under Tito's leadership. Croatia became one of the six constituent republics of Yugoslavia (the others being Bosnia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Slovenia, and Serbia). During Tito's reign nationalist sentiments were repressed, especially among the Croats. A decentralization program went into effect in 1970 but it did little to pacify Croats. With Tito's death in 1980, Croat demands for independence only increased but it was not until the fall of the Berlin Wall that things began to come apart.

The fall of communism brought uncertainty to Yugoslavia in 1990. It encouraged nationalist sentiments in all of its republics. In Croatia, the elections produced a massive victory for Franjo Tudjman and his nationalist Croatian Democratic Union party. This group had proclaimed its aversion to both the ethnic Serbs living in Croatia and those living in Serbia. The move was spurred largely by the election of Serb nationalist Slobodan Milosevic as Serbian Communist Party leader. Milosevic's rhetoric and repression of the Albanian population in Kosovo frightened the other republics.

The nationalist fervor in Croatia led to great tension among Croats and Serb ethnic groups, who still held centuries-old prejudices against each other despite living together under communism. Ethnic Croatian Serbs, in particular, feared the reincarnation of a pro-Nazi Independent State of Croatia. Similarly, Tudjman and other Croats believed that the Serbs held designs on incorporating Croatian territory, particularly the region of Krajina, into a "Greater Serbia."

The tension and bickering between the two republics eventually led to sporadic fighting in Croatia. In 1991, Serbian separatists in Croatia began a series of attacks on Croatian police units, killing more than 20 by in the first four months. That May, Serbia upped the ante by blocking the installation of Stipe Mesic, a Croat scheduled to be the chairman of the rotating presidency in Yugoslavia. This maneuver technically left the Yugoslavia without a leader. In June 1991, Croatia struck back declaring their independence from Yugoslavia.

Full-scale fighting between Croats and Serbs occurred almost immediately, with Yugoslavia's mostly ethnic Serb military backing the Serbian separatists that were fighting in Krajina. Serbian expansion came quickly, as Yugoslav planes strafed and rocketed Croatian villages while insurgents overtook Kostajnica. By the end of 1991, the Serbs had gained control of nearly one-third of the country.

In January 1992, the United Nations was able to administer a truce between the two sides and sent in a peacekeeping force, UNPROFOR. At the time the agreement went into place, the Serbs held roughly 30% of the former Yugoslav Republic of Croatia, and the UN agreement froze this status quo, which also left many Croatians as refugees from their homes in the Republic of Serbian Krajina as part of Serbian ethnic cleansing. There were reports of homes being looted and burned, as well as other atrocities committed against Croat civilians. Ancillary to the agreement the United Nations and European Community recognized Croatia as an independent state in January of 1992. United Nations peacekeepers, had difficulty disarming combatants inside the internationally protected areas set up under the agreement.

As tensions continued to smolder in Croatia in mid-1992, an all-out war broke out in neighboring Bosnia between the republic's ethnic Serbs, Muslims and Croats. The Bosnian conflict drew in participants from all sides, including Croatia, which backed the Bosnian Croats in their fight mainly with Bosnian Serbs but also in sporadic conflicts with its supposed ally, the Bosnian Muslims. In late 1992, Croatian army forces began attacking Bosnian Serb communities in southeastern Bosnia Herzegovina, unraveling a Bosnian-declared cease-fire. Croatian army forces would later break Croatia's one-year-old cease-fire as well in January 1993, crossing a U.N. dividing line and attacking Serb-occupied territory in Krajina.

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Raupenschlepper Ost, literally "Caterpillar Tractor East", is more commonly abbreviated to RSO. This fully tracked, lightweight vehicle was conceived in response to the poor performance of wheeled and half-tracked vehicles in the mud and snow during the Wehrmacht's first winter on the Soviet Front.  Steyr responded by proposing a small fully-tracked vehicle based upon its 1.5 tonne truck (Steyr 1500A light truck) already in use in the army. The vehicle was introduced in 1942 as the Raupenschlepper Ost (RSO). It was initially designed as a prime mover and artillery supply vehicle but eventually served in a wide variety of roles.  By 1943, the complaints of the infantry anti-tank units at the front that it was almost impossible to move their guns using trucks at daylight under enemy fire, leading to enormous losses of equipment when an emergency relocation (at the time more of a euphemism for withdrawal) was necessary found their way to the top. This led OKW to consider an older proposition to fit the 7.5 cm PaK 40/1 anti-tank gun -by then the standard Pak- on top of a RSO chassis and Hitler after seeing the blueprints ordered a limited production run for combat testing even before the test vehicles were completed. 

The result was a lightweight, cheap to produce and highly mobile infantry anti-tank weapon though more exposed compared to the conventional panzerjagers. Despite that the vehicle was intended to be used by the infantry anti-tank units, all pre-production vehicles were issued to armored units (Panzer Jager Abteilungen 743 and 744, and 18th Panzergrenadier Division) due to the urgent need for replacements   The vehicle gave a good accounting of itself in action with Army Group South and plans were made for large scale production.   In the end, however, no production order was ever issued with only 60 of the pre-production vehicles ever seeing action.

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TD Battalions were organized separate from armored and infantry divisions.  They would then be assigned to divisions as dictated by Army or Crop Commanders. The original battalions were equipped and organized with armored personnel carriers mounted with flat trajectory artillery guns.  From inception to stand-down, the TD doctrine evolved and changed along with its primary weapon, the tank destroyer. The central concept remained the same however. TDs were lighter and faster while their guns were larger than the main battle guns on contemporary American tanks.  The mission:  Defeat  enemy armor with weapons specifically designed for long-range encounters.  While a TD could knock out the enemy, it lacked protection against accurate return fire from anything other than small arms fire.  For example to minimize weight, the TD turret lacked a top, exposing the crew to mortar fire and even a lobbed grenade.  Tree bursts were a constant threat to the exposed crew.  Stealth, by using the terrain, as well as its mobility was its protection.

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Generally considered to be the better supplied and equipped branch of the German fighting units it is not surprising to discover that upon Himmler’s directives the SS had a program to develop weapons intended for the exclusive use by their own formations.  One such weapon was the 8cm Raketensprenggranate (8cm RSprgr.) or 8cm rocket developed from a projectile originally intended for aircraft use. The fin-stabilized rockets were cheaper and easier to manufacture than the existing spin-stabilized designs and used cheap launch rails.  The delivery system itself bore a striking resemblance to the Russian ‘Katyusha’ rockets using a rail launching system which could fire up to 48 rockets in one salvo.  Maximum range of the 8 cm rocket was 5796 yards (5300 m) with a velocity of 950 f/sec. A smoke carrying version was also used.  Separate production lines were created for the production of these rockets under Party control as the army refused to convert any of its existing factories to the production.  Although effective, it appears that actual production was very limited.

After being destroyed in North Africa, the 21^st Panzer was reformed in June of 1943 in France. It remained stationed in France for the next year, being deemed unfit for service on the Eastern Front.  During this time the division was refit and equipped, primarily using captured French equipment.  Information is unclear on how or why the 21^st Panzer Division received them, but photographic evidence indicates that the 21^st converted as many as sixteen of their Somua MCL halftracks into these mobile rocket launchers using the 8cm rocket system.  The 21.Panzer was still in France when the Allies launched their invasion of Normandy in June of 1944, and the division was thrown into action against the Allied positions as the only Panzer unit to do so on the 1st day of the attack, June 6th.  

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