Stash Update - More Bad Guys!

Continuing on with my 1/100 'Battle of Kursk' project for my forthcoming GF9 'TANKS!' game, I have added more 'bad guys' to the collection. These are the German's canon fodder for the battle, the venerable Panzer IV F2 - in this case, in model form by Zvezda...

Now, that may sound disparaging, but that's only because the main focus of anyone's attention when talking about the Battle of Kursk is always inevitably the 'new' German big cats - the Tiger and the Panther. It seems that the poor old Panzer IV gets a wee bit overlooked, and yet it was still the backbone of panzer formations at the time and was still a pretty good tank.

In fact, due to the Soviet's muddling about with the - by then - obviously outmoded 'KV' heavy tank line the Pzr. IV could still hold it's own with practically anything the Red Army could throw at it. It had no problem dealing with either of the Soviet's two main battle tanks, the sluggish KV-1S or even it's nippier little cousin, the T-34/76. [In fact, I have heard many people say that had the Germans churned out more Pzr. IVs instead of relying on the new heavy tank 'super cats' - which turned out to have a lot of technical and reliability problems - the outcome of the battle *might* have been different. But that's an easy thing to say and I'm sure it's not that simple.]

But, hypothetical meanderings aside, a German panzer force of 1943 still requires a base of Panzer IVs in it's mix, so I bought two. Once again, I have gone with the budget option and plumped for Zvezda kits. At £3.50 each they fit the bill as 'canon fodder' for my game and I can easily get the GF9 TANKS!' data cards offline.

The Zvezda model is specifically the F2 variant of the tank, which was really seeing it's last hurrah at the the Battle of Kursk (the 'G' variant beginning to come into prominence). But despite this, with it's KwK 40 L/43 75mm gun, the F2 was still superior to the KV-1 and T-34 in terms of ballistics.

As with Zvezda's T-34s - which I am just working on - both PSC and Battlefront do offer more options and the ability to model more variants of the tank with their Pzr. IV kits. But I just don't need this flexibility, so the cost savings was of the greatest importance to me.

Here's a rather nice YouTube review of the Zvezda Pzr. IV F2 by Modeldads...