I've always loved the Jagdpanther tank destroyer, and the
559. list from Bridge by Bridge is nice because you can round out the very expensive Jagdpanthers with less
costly Stug III assault guns. The
downside is, like most of the German Market Garden lists, there is no recon
option. However, you get enough tubes
and some decent artillery, infantry, and anti-aircraft options.
As always I'm keenly interested in the modeling aspects
of the unit. Research data on the 559.
is scarce, but as they were the second unit equipped with the Jagdpanther, the
few pictures show that they were all the early version with the monobloc gun
barrel. Unfortunately while
Battlefront's Jagdpanther does a good job of representing most aspects of the
early model, their gun barrel is the later two-part version. However, with the new plastic barrel removing
the sleeve and narrowing the barrel slightly is child's play, enabling an
accurate rendering of the unit's vehicles.
As for the rest of the plastic parts, so far it is a bit
of a mixed bag. The spare track links
are a bit larger than their metal equivalents. As I mentioned before, the tracks are
marvelous, but you generally have to sand down the plastic backing to get them
to fit on any panther hull designed for the white metal tracks. One interesting thing I found out recently is
that the GBX22 SKU is now provided with all plastic parts. Battlefront has also modified the hull
slightly to accept the plastic tracks.
The other downside is that the plastic hatches for the
Jagdpanther are way too small:
The old metal ones also gapped a bit, but they were
better:
I'll likely try and use metal hatches - and if all else
fails, I have punches the right size and can make them out of styrene.
I'm hoping to get these done in the next week or two and
off to the painting bench as the markings for this unit are fairly simple. I plan on dressing up the Stug III hulls with
zimmerit as well, but that will be a future blog entry.
