Flak 36 88mm
2nd Battery, 12th SS Flak Abteilung
12.SS Panzer Division “Hitlerjugend”
Between St. Mauvieu-Bessin and Authie, near Carpiquet
Normandy front, France
June 8/9 1944
Elements of the heavy Flak Abteilung of the 12th SS Division “Hitlerjugend” fill the gap between elements of the PzGren25 and I./ SS-PzGren Rgt 26 as they prepare for an attack on Norrey and Bretteville-l’Orgeilleuse on June 8th and 9th 1944. Severely overextended, the various elements of the Hitlerjugend Division are all “up on the line”, trying to pushback the Canadian attacks, northwest of Caen, in the early days after the invasion in June of 1944.
This 88mm gun is not a new model, but my old “8,8” repainted in three color camo. It was one of my first “gun and crew” models in 1/6 with an early DAK Heer crew and then later used it as a LW Flak in Normandy to represent the famous von Luck incident at Cagny, Normandy.
The gun was the contraption produced by the infamous OSB Jason many many years ago. It came in a large box, supposedly assembled, but as it was just dropped in the big box, so when it arrived it arrived in kit form!
It represents one of the four “8,8” Flak 36 anti aircraft/anti tank guns of second battery of the flak detachment organic to the Hitlerjugend Division. As it often happened these guns, originally made for anti aircraft duties, were outstanging anti tank and a wonderful gun in any capacity.
The rounds and the fancier “wicker” round cases are from Mike Stannard. There are also some filler cases from DML and some that came with the gun. The rounds are amazing little models by themselves. My favorites are the HE rounds, which look like they can actually be fired! These of course will serve double duty for my recent Tiger I. I got some of these rounds way back when and initially these came with some odd copper casings, wich later were replaced by brass ones from Mike. All the copper ones I accumulated I then painted to represent used shells. The figures are all almost three years old and are part of my generic SS artillerymen. Some have the red waffenfarbe, but most are generic and can be used in many different settings. The figures in shirtsleeves and suspenders have camo caps and helmets as head dress options. Here they are close to the front, so they are wearing their helmets and have all their other equipment and weapons nearby.
Here is the same 88mm gun in its previous two showings, with an early DAK crew and with a LW crew in Normandy. These are images from maybe 8 years ago, when I took images with a pre-historic Sony Mavica digital camera!:
If you could possibly want to see MORE images plenty more in this link where I have all the images(90) in the order I took them. The images shown in this post are a group of 30 images somewhat re-arranged
http://www.picturetrail.com/sfx/album/view/23866469
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