I will confess I have a real love of all things flammpanzer! They are such a threat to infantry that they force your opponent to deal with them (also to TA:0 vehicles too) so it can help give you the initiative.
Having done them twice as panzer 3‘s, now it’s EW flame time.
First up the Flammpanzer 2, these are great little blighters, with two, two shot flame attacks. They also have FA2 so are not too shabby when shot at either. The only real downside is being half tracked; barbed wire can ruin them!
Now if these are, for some reason, not exciting your inner pyro, the next entry will – captured Char B1 flame tanks! These are still some of the greatest looking tanks out there, with the tracks reminiscent of WW1 tanks, and big flat sides – perfect for painting!
The models were not in great shape, with lots of putting and casting lines (which I missed as the seller was someone I did trust to clean simple bits…) but after painting they just look like battle-damage, so work pretty well. I followed the BF article about adding a more German cupola- though mine was salvaged from a T34 – think it works well for the platoon commander. The other screw up was the crosses, I didn’t stick the stencil down properly/over thinned the paint, so it looked pretty poor, hence the weathering/numbers hiding my sins (stowage hides the worst lines). But, in the end though, I’m very happy with how they turned out.
So there you have it; the burning boys.
Next up; there’s no smoke without fire – sorry that should be the other way around!
The French Flamethrower tanks were used in Normandy and Holland so although based on an EW French heavy tank I am not sure they are actually EW tanks. They definitely didn’t see action in 1940 or 1941 or 1942 or 1943 so June 1944 and then September 1944 would have me classify them as LW.
I wonder why they got included in barbarossa then? I’m not a history expert so i’ll assume the writers have some evidence.