Inch-high-soldiers: Abteilung I, 8. Panzer-Regiment

(August 24th, 2012.)

Because I think it's a rather large venture to gather hundreds of thousands of men just to recreate an actual battle I turned to modelling. Still it would take ages to paint that amount of figures, so I decided to pick a single military formation: division-sized. A common WWII-division would number around 15.000 heads of military personnel. Fortunately it is divided into regiments, which in turn contain a handful of battalions. For every battalion in my division I would make a representing model.

I used to build military models being around ten years old, so they weren't that good. When in highschool I rediscovered the hobby and the first German model I bought was a Panzer III N. On the back of the box the possible decals were shown which you could stick on your model after painting it. Among them were the signs for a tank belonging to 15. Panzer-Division, set in the year 1943, the last year of the North Africa campagins. This is more or less the moment I settled on building Nazi-Germany's 15th armoured division, a unit sent to the desert under the banner of Erwin Rommel's Afrika Korps.
My Panzer III N represents the first Abteilung (battalion) of 8. Panzer-Regiment: the tank-regiment of the division. On the side and rear of the turret you can see it bears the number '3': this is the company it belongs to. First to fourth company made up the first battalion of the regiment, companies five to eight the second. This specific type of the Panzer III, 'N', was armed with a 75mm short-barreled, low velocity gun. It's not designed to destroy other tanks, but to take out enemy infantry and any entrenchments they had dug.