AFRIKA KORPS COLORS 1941-43

The sand that changed the palette

When the first German units landed at Tripoli in February 1941, their tanks and armored cars still wore the dark gray finish intended for the European battlefield. In the harsh African light it turned them into a conspicuous dark patch, and the crews helped themselves as best they could, with dust, oil and improvised mixtures. Only the order of the spring of 1941 introduced an official pair for the tropics, a brown-yellow and a gray-green, and a year later a lighter pair took its place, keyed to brown and gray.

Six bottles in one box

The package is made up of six bottles of third-generation acrylic paint, each with a volume of seventeen milliliters. Beside the gray in which the equipment arrived in Africa, there are both tropical pairs and the cream ivory used to paint crosses, turret numbers and tactical markings. Each shade is listed under its own number to the RAL standard, so it can be tracked down separately once a bottle runs out.

How to work with them

This is a water-thinnable acrylic with a flat finish, which can be applied with a brush and with an airbrush. For an airbrush it is thinned to roughly the consistency of milk; for a brush it is enough to mix it on a palette in small amounts. Before spraying it pays to degrease the surface and lay down a primer, because desert shades have low covering power and lighten only gradually over dark plastic. A modeler building the equipment of the North African campaign gets the whole development of the finishes in one package, from the arrival at Tripoli to the withdrawal into Tunisia.