Something a little more unusual with today’s post – we have a little group of Borgward Demolition Carriers, officially designated Schwerer Ladungsträger Borgward B IV (heavy explosive carrier Borgward B IV), as used by the Wehrmacht in 1943. I’ll admit, I’d never heard of these things before I saw an inexpensive listing for them (with no picture) which I then googled and then found in the Ghost Panzers book. I did know of the Goliath, though not the Borgward.
I went with a simple camo pattern on these – insignificant models like this are a good place to test this sort of thing on – and turns out I’m pretty happy with the result, so this may well end up being my Mid War Eastern Front look for the Germans, though I do also like look of “classic” German Grey Panzers – perhaps I’ll do a mix. No drivers on these, as they represent the “final” segment of their use in combat – remote controlled rather then manually driven.
And to finish off, here’s a pic showing just how teeny-tiny these models are – that’s a Plastic Soldier Company Panzer III next to it, as well as a battlefront Panther.
They look cool man and I’d never heard of them either.
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Yeah, a nice little surprise. There’s another late war variant of these things I’m going to grab next payday as well. 🙂
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Great work mate, and the test camo came out great.
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Thanks Dave! I’m looking forward to finishing the desert stuff (it’s started to become a slog), so I’m really looking forward to moving to the next armies and doing more stuff like this.
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Very nice! 🙂 A vehicle I’ve never, ever had a model of!
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Except for the half-dozen of them (including Kleinpanzer Wanze variants) that you scratch-built which look more accurate than these ones… 😀
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No, honestly, I have never had a model of any of these, or their variants and your models look really good! 🙂 I do recall scratchbuilding a couple of Goliaths in my teens, which probably made them the smallest tanks I’ve ever scratchbuilt (a very long time ago indeed)!
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Haha I could absolutely imagine you scratchbuilding tiny, accurate looking goliaths! 😀
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Nice! Little RC bombs I’m guessing??
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Exactamundo!
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Those are great- quite an interesting idea that the Germans came up with. I’d still contend that the series of ‘funnies’ on the Churchill chassis wasa better soloution to the same sort of battlefield problem.
Cheers,
Pete.
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I’m hoping I can get hold of models of a bunch of Hobart’s Funnies (for) when I get to the late-war stuff. I’m sure that Battlefront (and others) have producded them at different times. Just getting hold of stuff is the hard part these days!
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These are interesting vehicles and I don’t entirely understand how they worked or what their use was but that’s my own fault because Google exists! 🙂 I think they look great and I liked the size comparison to see just how small these are as well.
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That’s how I got most of my info about them! Basically these were transport vehicles that the Germans decided at some point to fill the cargo containers with explosives, drive them to the front, and then Stug crews (and others) used them as remote-controlled bombs to drive into the enemy…
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Yikes. That is war for you. I would guess it shows a bit of their desperation to win too…
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Germany basically had one condition for almost everything they made – if it was not a giant slow land-fortress: Give it tracks, as back then it was thought, that tracks would solve all terrain-problems. Turns out sand, road, frost, mud are really not that suited for tracks. (if it was, it also had to have very bad over-complicated wheels.)
I’m always impressed with the work behind camo-patterns and your’s is looking really good.
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Haha – “if you can’t over-engineer it, it’s not worth engineering” – worked well compared to the Soviet attitude, didn’t it?
Thank you on the camo as well – I’m looking forward to having some fun with German camo schemes once I finish off the DAK, 8th and possibly Torch, Continuation and Grau-Barbarossa…
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