Hungarian panzer crew

Used kit:

Manufacturer: The Bodi (H)

Scale: 1:35

Catalogue number: 35039

Material: resin

Number of parts: 4

Decals:-

Internet: www.thebodi.eu

Author: Kovács Olivér

Photos by: Bódi Krisztián

In my opinion, WWII Hungarian uniforms are very interesting and unusual, thanks to the experiments and developments of different arms of the Hungarian Armed Forces, but also to necessary field modifications applied.

The subject figure of this article is a real rarity, as so far no Hungarian panzer crew was released which was wearing German type uniform, this gap was filled by Black Army Modells’ a The Body’s kits, I’m presenting the figure of the latter.

Upon setting up pazner units, a need emerged for special utility uniforms. These first units received officially issued garments which become known as  1936M leather uniform, consisting of ¾ length leather jacket and the belonging leather pants. The crews wore the jackets tucked in, making the uniform very uncomfortible, also difficult to move on and around the vehicles and made it nearly impossible to get through the small access hatches. In 1942, during the establishment of a new panzer division of the Magyar Királyi Honvéd Páncélos Lőiskola (Hungarian Royal Panzer School?) with german aid, issuance of new garment was considered, aiming to provide more confortible, more suitable uniform for front conditions and mass produceable from available materials. The leadership of the school suggested to use the German pattern with minor changes, such as changing the black colour to grey or dark khaki, finding black too visible in terrain. In accordance with readily available materials, for the first production poppy-seed grey material was used, designated to repair crews originally, which worked very well, however a winter variant was also needed, the grey material was suitable only for warm conditions. The solution was a widely available material in so called police-grey colour, the cut of the uniform almost exclusively copied the german cut, with differently shaped and coloured collar-insignia according to the Army standards.

However, copying the uniforms also had it’s drawbacks, during the fightings in Hungary, Soviet soldiers often mistook Hungarian crews with Germans... Unfortunately there are no surviving examples of this uniform, in all ascpects we can only use survived documentation, drawings and descriptions.

The figure is the usual top quality of  The Body, with minimal flash. It is cast with torso, head and hands separated, the pose is very simple, yet attractive and very suitable for dioramas.

After the grey basecoat, first up were the eyes and the face painted, I used the same colours as on my previous figures, Vallejo Brown sand 876, Basic Skintone 815, Burnt Cadmium Red 814.

The soldier wears ’ushanka’ type, sheep fur ear-hat, which also determines the era where we can place him. Besides trying to represent the texture of the material, I paid attention to paint the stamp of the Központi Ruhatár (kind of Quartermaster Corps for clothing) to one of the flaps of the hat. These stamps were of black or purplish colour, marking officially issued garment. The ear-hat got Khaki 70.988, mixed with a small amount of brown 70.941 and yellow 70.882, as base colour, highlighted with white.

A real challange was mixing the ’police-grey’ colour of the uniform, for which I needed and appropriate blue, respectively blue-grey and a dark grey. Fortunately I found the right colours in the Panzer Aces series of Vallejo, getting the basecolour by mixing German Tankcrew 70.333 and Russian Tankcrew 70.325, resulting in a realatively dark, blue-greyish colour. This was highlighted in a number of layers with Russian Tankcrew colour, paying attention to get the lower parts generally darker and the upper ones, around the shoulders to a lighter shade. Boots were painted dark brown, highlighted by orange, also serving to represent some were on them.

Once the figure was ready, I moved on to create the base. Starting-up from the figure’s pose, I went for an idea to depict the preparations for fording a river with, let’s say by a Turán or a Pz III, our man checking the current or looking for a bridge nearby to ease the crossing. For this I tried to form the groundwork from putty to look like a stream bank, painted various browns and yellows. The water is by Vallejo, with some plants added into it.

As a final step, the pinned figure was glued to the base.

References:

dr. László Tóth - A Magyar Királyi Honvédség Egyenruhái (Uniforms of the Royal Hungarian Armed Forces) 1926-1945 - ISBN: 978 963 06 3136 5 – www.huniform.com