Wirbelwind colour schemes needed!!

[Spitfire 123]

Hi all, I have recently bought a tamiya 1/35 Wirbelwind and I am going to build a diorama for it in Germany, 1945 but I am having trouble finding a colour scheme for it. The tamiya one only has has one from france 1945. I would like to do it in typical german green, red brown and yellow and not in a winter scheme. I would prefer to have it without insignias so only numbers and roundels, but it doesn't matter too much. 

Thanks, Riley

[badger]

Italeri have put their painting schemes on their website which may help

https://www.italeri.com/en/product/2720

 

Ben

[Spitfire 123]

Thanks Ben, this is very helpful. 

Riley

[nheather]

Some information here too.

 

https://tanks-encyclopedia.com/ww2-germany-flakpanzer-iv-wirblewind/

 

A couple of the archive photos confirm the Italeri scheme with the camouflage only on the top surfaces, the lower all being dark yellow.

 

There are some interesting overall dark green/grey - a couple in museums (though a curator at Bovington tank museum once warned me never to trust how museum exhibits are painted) but one of the archive photos does appear to show an overall single dark colour.  Another of the archive photos appears to show overall dark yellow.

 

One archive photo also appears to show that although the outside is camouflaged, inside the gun compartment is plain dark yellow.

 

Cheers,

 

Nigel

[BringUpThePIAT]

On 10/3/2020 at 6:18 AM, Spitfire 123 said:

Hi all, I have recently bought a tamiya 1/35 Wirbelwind and I am going to build a diorama for it in Germany, 1945 but I am having trouble finding a colour scheme for it. The tamiya one only has has one from france 1945. I would like to do it in typical german green, red brown and yellow and not in a winter scheme. I would prefer to have it without insignias so only numbers and roundels, but it doesn't matter too much. 

Thanks, Riley

I’m finishing the Academy one as we speak, and have done some research.

 

What I have found is that few of the Wirbelwinds photographed had camo painted wheels and running gear and that the scheme seems to center around green vertical or diagonal lines moving upwards with some examples also having brown lines. Much of the box art I’ve found is of both brown snd green camo lines but I’m only doing green, and even then heavily filtered and weathered as I find the full shebang of filters and washes etc over both green and brown makes the model look a bit dark and overdone. 

[Kingsman]

Schemes were applied by crews in the field, so there was no standard.  Those in kit instructions will either be taken from photos or are conjectural.  As with many subjects, finding a photo and copying that makes sense. But multi-aspect photos of a single vehicle are unusual, so the unseen side(s) will be conjectural.

 

The nature of AA vehicles means that they tend to be parked in the open for a clear 360 degree field of fire.  So ideally a disruptive scheme should be large bold areas of contrast colour to break up the outline.  Fiddly schemes will tend to lose contrast at any distance.  Ground attack pilots found that static targets were often spotted by their shadows.  But were German AFV crews were instructed in this art?

[Graham Boak]

I suspect that by the time this entered service the Germans had stopped parking anything in the open.  They would certainly look for as clear a field of fire as possible, but would be operating as a small dispersed team in order to cover (ideally) all directions.

 

The British Army, or at least its camouflage experts, picked up early on avoiding shadows, and making use of them, by authorising very dark tops and lower sides of vehicles.  This no doubt was helped by German tactical air superiority, and was relaxed by the end of the war when German attacks were minimal.  The Germans however do not seem to have dedicated any great thought to camouflage designed to counter aircraft, even late in the war when it became much more important to them.