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This vehicle, the A7V Sturmpanzerwagen - A7V being an abbreviation of the department in the German War Ministry that were responsible for it's creation - was not without some merit. It's armour was thick: in places it was triple the maximum thickness found in tanks like the Schneider CA 1. It's engine was also relatively powerful, making it almost twice as fast as corresponding British tanks, if moving on dry, flat and hard ground. And as mentioned: it was very heavily armed: beside one 57 mm, the A7V also had no less than six heavy MG:s. A moving fortress indeed. However, it's lack of cross-country mobility proved to be a big problem. Due to the large transmission housing, the vehicle had a ground clearance of only 20cm (!), which meant that it could get stuck almost anywhere. The height of the vehicle meant that it had a very high center of gravity, making it prone to toppling over. And technically there were many weak points in the vehicle, and it broke down often. |
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The A7V was first used in combat outside St. Quentin on the 21 March 1918, at the opening of the German spring offensive. Five tanks was slated to attack, one broke down during the nightly move to the starting point. At 04:30 the german started a 5 hour barrage, and at 09:30 the four tanks started forward together with the storm troopers. Fog and smoke made driving very hazardous, even much so as the driver of the A7V, sitting in the cupola on top of the vehicle, could not see anything that was closer to the tank than som 10-11 meters. One tank got stuck in the masses of barbed wire, the other ones stopped. This made the remaining three tanks halt until 11:30, when the visibility improved somewhat. Just before starting up again, the tanks were attacked by gas grenades, which made the situation for the crews even worse. Shortly after that, another tank, no 507, broke down. The remaining two A7V:s, no 501 and 506, pressed on, and when the opposing British infantry saw their menacing shapes rumbling towards them, they panicked and ran. About an hour later, the advance of the infantry was checked by heavy fire from some British strongpoints in a quarry. The two tanks attacked, pounding the quarry with shrapnel and then finishing the work by crushing some of the MG:s under their tracks. German storm troopers joined in, and some 150 British soldiers were made prisoners. The A7V had made it's debut. |
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is, I almost said of course, built out of EMHAR:s *splendid* 1/72 kit. The modifications worth mentioning were few: the teeth were removed from the front sprocket (i.e. the one near the Gun: it should be smooth, as it was the idler), door handles in copper wire was added, the foot steps removed - the vehicle I was modelling did not have them -, and finally the sighting aperture in the gun mantlet was remodeled slightly. I finished the model as the A7V "507" "Cyclops", as she looked during in March 1918, when the A7V was first used in combat - see above. At this early stage she sported neither numbers nor nickname, only crosses. (And the front cross had a peculiar design, that I have tried to duplicate.) The camo scheme was Feldgrau overall - yes, it is Feldgrau, it's my camera that doesn't get it - with a sort of Pale Green flames painted on all vertical faces. If you make multi-colour schemes I think it is important that the top colours are blended into each other, to avoid the "toy tank effect", but in this case I maybe took the blending too far. It was then drybrushed with acrylics - the new Humbrols don't drybrush so well - and then a black wash was carefully applied. Click on the thumbnail below for more views of this kit.
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In contrast with both the British and the French, the Germans were slow in developing tanks of their own. Their own tank programme came off to a flying start, after being at the receiving end of the British tanksat the Somme in 1916. Their hasty efforts met with limited sucess. One of their problems were that they, like the French, decided to use the inadequate Drive train from the civilian Holt tractor, giving the vehicle very poor climbing and trench-crossing capacity. The Germans were not too bothered about that, as they obviously saw the new weapon as nothing more than a sort of mobile pill-box. Accordingly, they built a huge thing, bristling with both weapons and with men.
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