WWI GERMAN TANK COLORS

Finishes of German armored vehicles of 1917 and 1918

German tracked machines of the First World War are a narrow but rewarding modeling discipline. The domestic A7V design was built in a mere two dozen examples, and the rest of the units were made up of captured British tanks repainted by their new owners. Two worlds therefore meet on them: the sober field gray of the first months and the colorful pattern of the last year of the war.

The four paints in the package cover both. The field gray matches the single-color finish, while the ocher, the dark brown and the green make up the three-color camouflage of 1918, in which the individual fields were usually outlined with a dark line. The layout of the blotches differed from crew to crew, so period photographs will serve better than any general plan.

The shades are not tied exclusively to tanks. They find use on artillery tractors, armored cars and in the rear areas of trench warfare, including wooden crates and the beds of wagons.

Technically: four pots, a volume of 17 ml, a water-based acrylic binder, a flat finish, brush and airbrush alike. The period shades are a reconstruction from descriptions and surviving samples, so slight differences between individual paint makers are normal.

Get hold of the literature before you get hold of the brush. Few photographs of these machines survive and almost all of them are black and white, so the layout of the colored fields is disputed to this day. Anyone who goes through the available reconstructions beforehand and picks one particular machine, with its own name, will save a great deal of last-minute deciding while painting.