Some New German Armour: StuG IIIs

 

For the last couple of months or so I have been making a real effort to get my WWII collection moving in the right direction. After publishing the Seelow Heights volume a few years back, I sold off most of the vehicles and many of the figures that I had used to illustrate the book, intending to do something different for the next project. Now that "Bagration to Berlin" is well underway, I needed to get cracking on all the new stuff that I will need to illustrate the book. As well as new terrain boards and buildings, this has included a large number of new vehicles and here are some of the first off the production line.

Here is the StuH42 105mm howitzer version. I believe around 1,200 of this version were produced intended primarily for use against soft targets having a much more effective HE round.

All are the excellent Plastic Soldier Company StuGs with the crew figures coming from a variety of sources. I have gone fairly heavy on the stowage on these which really helps to make them stand out. In many of the photos I have seen, assault gun crews seemed quite willing to load their vehicles with such stuff, whereas it seemed to be far less common with panzer crews. The basic colours were done with an airbrush and everything else painted by hand. 

I must have nearly 100 German vehicles alone to do as I can't seem to stop buying the damn things, so a long way to go. Lucky that Rome wasn't built in a day!