Here are the Grants for my British 8th Army force. This time, I’ve skipped over including individual shots of each of the Tank Troops, and am just giving you the gist of them with these main pics. The only differences between all of them are the exact stowage I’ve glued down. These were the final models I painted in October, and as you can see above, I decided to paint both the Lee and Grant variant turrets for each of the models to give me further flexibility in how I use them. In my research, reading up and viewing videos on them, I found a note somewhere that talked about how while the majority of the lend-lease tanks had the Grant turret, some in British service did indeed still have the smaller Lee turret with the commander’s machinegun, though the British troops at the time tended to refer to them all as “Grant”. What this tells me is that much like all the “what exact shade is field grey/dunkelgelb/etc” discussions and arguments, the actual truth of the matter on the ground in the field at the time was much less perfectly uniform than we often tend to think about things today from our desks.
While looking for camouflague options to paint my tanks, I found the above boxcover for a model kit, which looked interesting and really piqued my interest.
A little more digging found the above colour plate, with some unit and date references. Looking at the placement of the brown blotches, it seems like they’re both based on the same photograph, which I wasn’t able to locate. I did adjust the unit markings from the photos – I originally tried using yellow circle decals, but the ones I was using (PSC) were almost invisible, so I carefully removed themn off the first couple of models before they were fully set and replaced them with blue squares.
After having completed these Lee/Grants, I actually found that the M3 Stuart at Bovington is painted in the same pattern. Seeing how different the shades are for the brown across the three images I’m not too upset about having chosen a more orangey shade – which was closer to a different image that I seem to not have forgotten to save into my reference folder…. but then again – what exact shade is field grey?
Yet again, a pic to show the four sides of the camouflage pattern applied…
…and the “aerial” shot.
And now we have all twelve completed Grants on the “Desert” flats, alongside their alternative Lee turrets. Yes, I decided to paint a full armoured Squadron of them. When will I use them all? I guess I’ll have to have a real big game sometime this coming summer! 😀
Azazel's Bitz Box. 