A Pause for Research - World War II Project

A bit of a rant before I go much further with this post. I'm typically have multiple posts in process as I work through various projects on the workbench. The other day I discovered that with the advent of the new blogpost format the publication date and its order of appearance on the blog don't match. This has resulted in a number of my posts being out of order, like the M32B1 ARV build with part 3 appearing between parts 1 and 2. I certainly find this a bit confusing, in fact I started writing this particular post last Friday (Sept 18, 2020), at this point I have no idea what date blogger is going to use as the publication date or where its going to end up in the post order. [Edit: the last day I worked on this was 9/22, that's the day I last added information to the post and that's the day blogger used to publish it which puts it before Cartoon Wednesday. Looks like if I add something and save it will update the date. Now I have to pay more attention as since I wanted this one to post on 9/24/2020)]

I'm doing my best to stay focused on the World War II Project, difficult in the best of times. Fortunately there is enough stuff involved that I can go back and forth between little projects and still accomplish the final goal.

Every now and then its good to pause and rethink things a little bit. The vehicles for the 21st Panzer Division let me do a little research (and still allow me to indulge in thoughts of North Africa). I'm starting to close in on the end of the French vehicle conversions and how knew the direction I want to take, mostly, with the rest of the German tanks that I have on hand. That leaves the Americans which have provided a distraction in the form of the M32. As we all know its much better to have multiple vehicles that are, more or less, the same to paint it just makes things a bit more efficient when going through the various steps especially when time is precious.

For a long time I have figured that the M4s would all be marked for one of the tank battalions from the 4th Armored Division. That would make sense if my sole goal was to game out actions involving the 4th Armored. While I certainly realize that gamers don't really care if the unit markings are correct or the right version of the M4 is on the table it makes a bit of difference to me. By modeling  one of the three tank Battalions (8th, 35th or 37th) I would really be limiting myself as the armored division tank battalions tended to always get the newest equipment and finding a old model M4 in the same column as the newest model M4 would become increasingly rare as you through 1944 to 1945.

I was reading something a few days ago that I knew about but I had stuffed into the back recesses of my mind (pretty easy to do actually); the separate or independent tank battalions. One of these would be almost perfect from a modeling perspective and for a game like Chain of Command which is infantry oriented with armor support its the ideal solution. The separate tank battalions were assigned to an "armor group" which was really just organizational but the tank battalions would be assigned directly to the infantry divisions where they would get parceled out to infantry regiments, battalions and even companies. They rarely worked as a battalion instead companies and platoons would be assigned where needed by the infantry division. There are a lot of these battalions, in fact there are more separate tank battalions in just the ETO than were part of the actual armored divisions. In the PTO there were no US Army armored divisions present all of them were separate tank battalions.

I have three main requirements for modeling such a unit.

1. I can field multiple versions of the M4 on the table and still be historically "correct"

2. The unit had the Summerfeld matting on their tanks (the wire mesh used to hold foliage)

3. The unit had at least one M4A3E2 assigned to them at some point.

Optional; some kind of interesting marking that could be considered unique to the unit.

Time to pull out the books. Immediately at hand I have:

Armored Strike Force by  Charles C Roberts Jr

Armored Thunderbolt by Steven Zaloga

Armored Attack by Steven Zaloga

Armored Victory by Steven Zaloga

The first book on the history of the 70th Tank battalion and features a lot of pictures from members of the unit. The other three by Zaloga are essentially picture books but are well indexed. The book on the 70th is the most interesting of the bunch at this point as its focus is on an separate tank battalion and right on the cover what appears to be an M4A3E2 (with a 76mm gun) with the Summerfeld matting attached (this same picture appears on page 224 and does identify it as an M4A3E2). Two out three right out of the gate. Throughout the book are plenty of individual shots of various M4s including M4 Composite hull variation. The big bonus picture is on page 235 taken in about March 1945, showing a column of M4s moving off road. In the lead is an M4A3 76mm gun early turret, followed by an M4A3E8, following that is an M4A1 with the M34 gun mount, after that is an M4 with the three piece differential housing and the M34 gun mount. There are at least 4 other M4s in the shot which aren't identified but in addition to those there is a dozer tank and a deuce and a half at the top of the hill. Another picture on page 253 shows a column of parked M4s in the summer of 1945 after the VE day. This column consists of an; M4A3 76, an M4A1 76 and and M4A3E8, there are a number of other M4s in the column that can't quite be identified from the picture. In addition three out of the first four tanks have Summerfeld matting attached to them. Those two pictures alone make this a very attractive unit to model. The 70th even has a emblem that does appear on some of its tanks and soft vehicles. Its a turtle nicknamed Joe Peckerwood.

There are a couple of other unit histories out there about other separate tank battalions that I'll try and acquire and see if any of them make good candidates but right now the 70th is fitting the bill pretty good.

The Zaloga books I'm just going to use to see if there are any additional pictures of the various separate battalions that might be useful. Finding unit markings is the first priority which, again, makes the 70th very attractive. For now I'm going to limit my search to the following; the 70th, the 740th (because it has a cool nickname; Daredevils), the 741st and the 781st (this one because it was involved in the action around Wingen during the Germand Nordwind offensive).

This won't actually keep me from painting any M4s, it will just stop me at the decal step.