A late-War armored car saw service from 1943 to the end.

Let’s take a quick look at the Wehrmacht’s ultimate Armored Car.

I’ve mentioned here before that Germany seemed to lavish the most attention of any World War II combatant on their armored cars. This may have been another unintended consequence of the Treaty of Versailles. Germany was technically not allowed any armored force under the treaty, but they seem to have concluded early that armored cars could be prototyped with only a modicum of secrecy. The Allied powers were all too happy to be done with war, and apparently weren’t too worried as long as it wasn’t tanks.
No surprise, Germany entered the Second World War with some pretty advanced armored cars, that means fast and dangerous recon forces.

The biggest of these was the Sd.Kfz.231 family, the 8-rad versions having 8 wheel drive and 8 wheel steering. The Sd.Kfz. prefix identifies the armored car as a “Special Purpose Vehicle”.
The actual start of War made several design shortcomings apparent. In 1940 design work started on an all new replacement. This was tagged Sd.Kfz.234. It was to be built by several different companies; chassis, armored shell, turret, all separately sourced. The first prototype was ready in July 1942, two particular deficiencies were noted, both related to the engine. It was too loud and ran too hot. This would take another year to sort out, the final engine being an air cooled V-12 Diesel by the Czech company Tatra.

There would be four variants of the Sd.Kfz.234 built. The 234/1 used an open top turret with a 20 mm cannon, this was similar what was used in other German armored cars. Although the first version built came to be the 234/2, which used surplus 50 mm anti-tank guns left over from a discontinued light tank program. About 100 were built until the inventory was exhausted and production switched to the 234/1.
A 234/3 entered production during the /1 run. This used a 75 mm howitzer in an open compartment. Then at the end of 1944 production switched to the 234/4, with a 75 mm anti-tank gun in an armored turret.

I’m not seeing superlatives listed in any of the write-ups I have, but this is clearly the biggest armored car I know of from the War. It gave German recon units serious anti-armor capability. Of course the typical German limitation applies, total production was under 500 examples. Wehrmacht recon forces were never homogenous forces, they would have operated mixed forces of whatever they could get ahold of.

This particular vehicle fought in Normandy, Summer 1944, with the 2nd Panzer Division.

This is the Italeri kit, in a Tamiya box. It maybe lacks the finesse I’m used to with Tamiya being the main provider of vehicle kits in this scale; but it built up fine with no particular problems. Really, overall a nice kit.