German Panzer Colours in Europe, WWII - A Rough Guide.

When it comes to Panzer colours, in the past I tended to be guided by what I remember reading in Bruce Culvers 'Panzer Colors' books, first published in the 1970s. The information in these is now superseded by new data.

Thomas Jentz and Hillary Doyle's Panzer Tracts books provide good info, Panzer Tracks 1-2 provides a guide to panzer camos up to 1942. Thomas Jentz's book 'Germany's Panther Tank - The Quest For Combat Supremacy' gives some more information for the years after that. Also he is said to be working on a new book on the subject - can't wait!

To help my monkey brain absorb this new information I made a spreadsheet, just to broadly encompass the subject in a simplified way. This is just a rough guide, but feel free to copy it.



Sorry about the blurriness of the image, I'm blaming the conversion to jpg process. If anyone wants a bitmap or excel file, let me know and I'll email it.

Cheers
JT

Thats pretty interesting JT, thanks. So if I read it correctly, zimmerit was only applied over a 12 month period, and my much loved (though forever vexing to paint well) ambush scheme for only 1 month? You live and learn.

Hi Roy, the time periods have been rounded off to the nearest month, so as I say this is a rough guide only. I think the ambush scheme may have also been done after that short period noted, but I’m not sure.

Cheers
JT

Right gotcha JT. Even so, it still means both of them were quite short-lived, more so than I had previously thought considering the amount of photographic evidence, especially of zimmerit. Ive seen almost no pix, on the other hand, of the Dunlekbraun over Dunkelgrau cam scheme you mention for the early war period. I suppose it could just be that it doesnt show up very well, but Ive also not seen any peoples models in this scheme. Not that I can recall anyway.