This (KV2) has been been on my Barbarossa 1941 (1/200 scale) wish list for a long time. It is the eternal frightening tank (along with its sister KV1) that the Germans encountered in 1941 and was looked upon with a sense of awe and arcane wonder. It was usually photographed with a German Landser looking at or standing on a knocked out or abandoned example (see below, stage one "flash removal"):
It almost looks like a sensible tank in 1/200 - its insanity shows up more in 1/76. I remember I needed two of these for one of the Spearhead Scenarios. It was a "bunker buster" (a child of the 1940 Finnish War requirements for getting through the Mannerheim Line) rather than a true MBT, but it looked like a prehistoric monster.
Note: That closes off my 1/200 - 1941 Russian Tank wish list, but for 1942-43 opens up my need for T60, T70 and lease lend vehicles (M3 Stuart, Valentine, Matilda, M3 Lee, Churchill, Tetrarch - methinks I would need battalion batches of ten for each of these, apart from a singleton for the Tetrarch).
4 comments:
Nice KVs! I've never bothered with a KV2 and tend to substitute KV1 instead, but that is me. Wrt the Lend Lease tanks, while most of them were organised as normal Soviet medium or light tank battalions, the Churchill were only ever used in Heavy Tank Regiments, so I'm not sure you'd need ten of them unless doing 1:1 stuff.
Cheers Martin I will bear that in mind .. Kursk is certainly a long way off for me and the Churchills
Bob Mackenzie lists the actual organisation of a number of Tank Brigades equipped with LL vehicles in his book on WW2 Soviet organisations. They were very rarely fully equipped with LL vehicles, sometimes just single companies in the brigade. Typically they were the 1942/43 mixed Tank Brigade types with light and medium battalions. My favourite was the brigade with a battalion (21) of Matilda CS tanks!
My gawd, 21 Close Support Matildas all in one place, they would be begging for an AP tank to guard them!
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