A TALE OF LOST AND FOUND
One of Tamiya’s early 1:48 scale releases was kit number 37 the M26 Pershing. At the time it wasn’t on my want list and as a result I never purchased it. Around 10 years ago I attended a swap and sell meet at a local modelling club. It was a drop in visit as I was going somewhere else at the time so I didn’t have a lot of time. As luck would have it, the kit was on a vendor table for the princely sum of $25, which was certainly a motivator! The seller told me it was part of a job lot he had purchased from another modeller and he had no interest in it as he didn’t build armour.
The kit box was sealed with Sellotape and as I was in a rush, I didn’t bother to check the contents, being in the throes of a home renovation at the time. On my return home, I quickly put the box in the stash under the house and promptly forgot about it.
Around four years ago I moved house to a property in the country and I had to pack all my kits in preparation for the move. My new house has a huge shed, and the kit stash was intended to be stored there. The previous owner had erected a large number of shelves to store his machine tools. My stash was taking up a fair bit of room at the time as they were all packed in moving boxes and in an effort to free up more space in the shed, I elected to remove them from the moving boxes and pack them on one wall full of shelves.
While unpacking the stash I came across this kit again and decided to open it. To my utter delight the kit contained a very old super Pershing conversion from Steve Faxon and a set of old WWII Production tracks together with some photocopied photos of the Super Pershing to round it off. Obviously the original purchaser had this in mind when placing all these extras in the kit.
The kit had some parts off the sprues but everything seemed to be there. I put this in the “to-do” pile and promptly forgot about it again.
My last three build have been 3d prints and I wanted to get back to something a little more familiar by just building a plastic kit straight out of the box as a bit of a painting exercise. I went down to the shed and found this kit again, opened it up and thought to myself, you know what, this looks easy, why not?
Well, as it turned out it was a little more complex and a little harder than I first imagined.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE SUPER PERSHING AND ITS GUN
The M26 Pershing was the first America tank design that would define the shape of its tank development during the post-World War Two period. It embodied a lot of the design elements that would evolve into the M46, M48 and finally cumulate in the M60. To my eye it looks modern from its deployment in Europe in March 1945. In an effort to counter the heaviest German and Russian armour, the US Army developed the T15E1 high velocity 90mm tank gun.
The gun was designed to be America’s answer to the deadly 88 mm 3.46 in KwK 43 wielded by Tiger II.
In January 1945 this gun was mounted on a T26E1, causing the vehicle to be redesignated the T26E4 Pilot Prototype No.1. The T15E1 gun was 73 calibres in length, almost twice the length of the 90 mm 3.54 in M3 Gun of the standard Pershing. The breach was also longer, with a much higher capacity chamber. Elevation ranged from -10 to +20 degrees.
The Chief of Tank Repair Service of the 3rd Armoured Division, did not want to lose the vehicles in their first deployment and as such, approached Lieutenant Belton Cooper, who would later go on to publish the book ‘Death Traps’, to look into the possible up-armouring of the vehicles. The M26 Pershing was designed to fight the heaviest armour the Germans fielded, be it Tiger or Panther.
However, the M26 did suffer from a very weak mantlet, with an 88 mm shell from a Tiger I’s KwK 36 able to go straight through. It would be even less of a match for the Tiger II’s KwK 43.
Lt. Cooper chose a crude, but effective method of up armouring the tank. Engineers salvaged an 80 mm 3.15 in CHF Cemented Hard Face frontal plate from a destroyed German Panther and welded it straight on to the mantlet. Holes were cut on the left and right of the gun so the gun sight and coaxial .30 cal machine gun could still be used. In addition, overlapping plates were also welded to the forward hull of the tank, creating a crude spaced armour.
The tank was tested but it was noted in fire trials that even with the turret mounted springs and huge counterweight at the back, aiming the gun was problematic. It was discovered that more counterweight was required at the front of the turret and as a result the so-called bat wing armour plates were attached to the mantlet plate. My rendition is the one before these counterweights were added.
LET’S GET THIS PARTY STARTED AND A GIFT FROM A FELLOW MODELLER