Pic of Field-Applied Zimmerit

Keep that radiation out of Nanoose Bay, please (that's too close for comfort).

subfixer wrote:

Brews wrote: Well, guess what! Submarines have been coated with rubber tiles for over 15 years now. It's called anechoic tile but its primary function is to reduce noise, not magnetic fields. The magnetic field of a sub is also a good way to detect it, the MAD booms of anti-submarine aircraft is evidence of this technology.

Sure, but don't you think that sponge would be more sound-absorbent (an-echo-ic)? Drag would be higher, though, hence the need for a stronger adhesive, and field servicing (perhaps a sponge depot at the North Pole).

Brews wrote:

Rather than zimmerit, a more plausible means of surface-material-protection for a submarine would be a coating of sound-absorbant-material (e.g. sponge). It would be an exercise for 3M to find a suitable adhesive.

Well, guess what! Submarines have been coated with rubber tiles for over 15 years now. It's called anechoic tile but its primary function is to reduce noise, not magnetic fields. The magnetic field of a sub is also a good way to detect it, the MAD booms of anti-submarine aircraft is evidence of this technology.

renarts wrote:

jthurston wrote: Whoa - I just thought it was a funny picture. Imagine a frogman with a trowell and a bucket o-paste, trying to slather the stuff on while at sea. Just struck me funny Sir, Either the germans are trying that zimmerit on a sub idea again or we're behind a troop ship filled with seasick passengers......

Now that's funny right there...

I can't believe this thread is still going. Let's kill it before it really gets goofy.

jthurston wrote:

Whoa - I just thought it was a funny picture. Imagine a frogman with a trowell and a bucket o-paste, trying to slather the stuff on while at sea. Just struck me funny

Sir,

Either the germans are trying that zimmerit on a sub idea again or we're behind a troop ship filled with seasick passengers......

Brews wrote:

Rather than zimmerit, a more plausible means of surface-material-protection for a submarine would be a coating of sound-absorbant-material (e.g. sponge). It would be an exercise for 3M to find a suitable adhesive.

...post-it notes might work...

Wasn't the so-called "Philadelphia experiment" some kind of de-gaussing try?  Didn't really even try to send the ship back in time though -- just an attempt to anti-magnetize it.

Brews wrote:

Brumbles wrote: We should debate why U-boots were not Zimmeritted, since magnetic mines were an actual and frequent danger in the oceans!  The flaw in that particular argument is that magnetic mines did not need to stick to a hull to sink a vessel. They detonated when the magnetic field around them varied above a certain threshold. As such, they were a proximity weapon, similar to what a depth charge could be considered (though these were not detonated by proximity, they were not intended to detonate by contact). A more effective measure would have been to de-gauss the submarine in some way. Exactly how, I don't know.

...I could use a good de-gaussing...just had a big lunch...

Brumbles wrote:

We should debate why U-boots were not Zimmeritted, since magnetic mines were an actual and frequent danger in the oceans!

The flaw in that particular argument is that magnetic mines did not need to stick to a hull to sink a vessel. They detonated when the magnetic field around them varied above a certain threshold. As such, they were a proximity weapon, similar to what a depth charge could be considered (though these were not detonated by proximity, they were not intended to detonate by contact).

A more effective measure would have been to de-gauss the submarine in some way. Exactly how, I don't know.

Hey, if they can rebuild Yorktown in 72 hours in drydock, they can field-apply a couple of inches-worth of Zimmerit to a pressure hull! 

I bet it would crack and fall off below about 10 meters, though.

Brumbles wrote:

We should debate why U-boots were not Zimmeritted, since magnetic mines were an actual and frequent danger in the oceans!

If they had, we can be fairly certain it wouldn't have been field-applied...

Brumbles wrote:

We should lobby to get a separate Forum just for Zimmerit.   We love Zimmerittalk!

...two Zimmerit Forums: 1) Factory-applied   2) Field-applied 

renarts wrote:

Now, I accept that somewhere in a rear area, maintenace depot, allied (country not Allied as in the winners of WW2) factory area being used as a retrofit facility etc. they aplied zimmerit paste.

Yeah, buddy! That's pretty much the argument being made. Looks like we've finally all agreed on it.

Now I'm off to start a thread about whether or not that U-boat was actually a Volkswagen.

We should lobby to get a separate Forum just for Zimmerit.

We love Zimmerittalk! 

renarts wrote:

Excellent points all. Mansteins revenge: ...well, there is your "war veteran" account, renarts...case closed as far as I'm concerned..."FIELD-APPLIED DID EXIST" Maybe for you, but still not for me. I can appreciate the logic of this and I will admit that my choice of words was wrong as I tend to term field applied to mean front line not rear area or occupied factory area as RL explained. But until there is definitive proof and not assumptive logic I will reiterate my position that I will err to the conservative and wait for the proof. I'm not saying that your position is wrong, I reserve my own judgement. Too often what we take from authority is not always the case of being authoritative. A good example would be the discovery of U869 off the coast of NJ in 1991. Both the German Admirality and the US Navy denied any possibility of there being a german U-Boat sunk there. All of their records showed it impossible. German orders showed that it had been ordered to Gibralter and that by their records was sunk off of Gibralter. The US Navy the American destoyer escort Fowler and the Fench Submarine chaser L'Indiscret conducted a depth charge attack on a submerged contact in the Atlantic near Rabat and reported a kill. For years the records showed (via first hand accounts, reports, etc. US Naval Intelligence reports) that this is where U869 was sunk. It was also discovered that US Naval surveys of sunk German U-boats were im some cases assumptive, possibly to put a quick end to the war and allow people to move on, and has since been revealed that this expediency has caused the misindentification of some of these wrecks. Again, we see the faltering of the application of "hard facts" to assumption proven wrong. But not until actual artefacts were extracted from the wreck off the NJ coast, giving the divers solid proof like a knife with a crewmans name on it, serial numbers off of artefacts etc. that a positive ID could be made. Mind you this was a wreck that the US navy and the German Navy catagoricly denied could have existed. So I feel very comfortable in my opinion that until someone can come up with some actual, hard nosed facts that I would consider to be reliable and directly accountable for those actions, I reserve my acceptance of assumptive logic to one of life's mysterys. Now, I accept that somewhere in a rear area, maintenace depot, allied (country not Allied as in the winners of WW2) factory area being used as a retrofit facility etc. they aplied zimmerit paste. It was undoubtedly done in that from necessity as has been stated that there are reports of batches being sent out. In the front areas, I do not accept as the process is not conducive to successful application in these areas. (Neither is an standing order that Hitler had to approve or issue all movement and deployment orders to Panzer reserves in Normandy and we know how that worked out for him...) I would still like to see the holy grail of all photos of a factory worker/maintence tech troweling on some of the magic butter. Something I find very hard to believe does not exist as the Germans were very anal about recording everything. It helped convict many of them at Nuremberg. If they had pictures of the the final solution, woman dressed up in coveralls in the commander cuppola of Tiger Tanks, and Hitler dancing a jig at the capitualtion of France then somewhere there is a picture of some guy making a Tiger zimmerit mud pie. As for logical assumption, well I've never been a proponent of that. They had gunpowder technology, gear mechanisms, the understanding of gasses and relatively complex machinery, enough to argue that someone could have built a gattling type gun to be used at Towton in 1465, yet nowhere does one show up on the battlefield in Europe in the Renaissance. The reason we have more definitive information and someone goes looking for these elusive tid bits of history is that there are stubborn old cusses like me that refuse to use a single source that state what to some may seem obvious and accepted wisdom. But we know that the deeper we dig and research and find documentation and good supporting documentation the more reliable that history becomes.

"Now, I accept that somewhere in a rear area, maintenace depot, allied (country not Allied as in the winners of WW2) factory area being used as a retrofit facility etc. they aplied zimmerit paste." ...case closed as far as I'm concerned, as this is all I was suggesting took place.

Excellent points all.

Mansteins revenge:

...well, there is your "war veteran" account, renarts...case closed as far as I'm concerned..."FIELD-APPLIED DID EXIST"

Maybe for you, but still not for me. I can appreciate the logic of this and I will admit that my choice of words was wrong as I tend to term field applied to mean front line not rear area or occupied factory area as RL explained. But until there is definitive proof and not assumptive logic I will reiterate my position that I will err to the conservative and wait for the proof. I'm not saying that your position is wrong, I reserve my own judgement. Too often what we take from authority is not always the case of being authoritative. A good example would be the discovery of U869 off the coast of NJ in 1991. Both the German Admirality and the US Navy denied any possibility of there being a german U-Boat sunk there. All of their records showed it impossible. German orders showed that it had been ordered to Gibralter and that by their records was sunk off of Gibralter. The US Navy the American destoyer escort Fowler and the Fench Submarine chaser L'Indiscret conducted a depth charge attack on a submerged contact in the Atlantic near Rabat and reported a kill. For years the records showed (via first hand accounts, reports, etc. US Naval Intelligence reports) that this is where U869 was sunk. It was also discovered that US Naval surveys of sunk German U-boats were im some cases assumptive, possibly to put a quick end to the war and allow people to move on, and has since been revealed that this expediency has caused the misindentification of some of these wrecks. Again, we see the faltering of the application of "hard facts" to assumption proven wrong. But not until actual artefacts were extracted from the wreck off the NJ coast, giving the divers solid proof like a knife with a crewmans name on it, serial numbers off of artefacts etc. that a positive ID could be made. Mind you this was a wreck that the US navy and the German Navy catagoricly denied could have existed. So I feel very comfortable in my opinion that until someone can come up with some actual, hard nosed facts that I would consider to be reliable and directly accountable for those actions, I reserve my acceptance of assumptive logic to one of life's mysterys.

Now, I accept that somewhere in a rear area, maintenace depot, allied (country not Allied as in the winners of WW2) factory area being used as a retrofit facility etc. they aplied zimmerit paste. It was undoubtedly done in that from necessity as has been stated that there are reports of batches being sent out. In the front areas, I do not accept as the process is not conducive to successful application in these areas. (Neither is an standing order that Hitler had to approve or issue all movement and deployment orders to Panzer reserves in Normandy and we know how that worked out for him...) I would still like to see the holy grail of all photos of a factory worker/maintence tech troweling on some of the magic butter. Something I find very hard to believe does not exist as the Germans were very anal about recording everything. It helped convict many of them at Nuremberg. If they had pictures of the the final solution, woman dressed up in coveralls in the commander cuppola of Tiger Tanks, and Hitler dancing a jig at the capitualtion of France then somewhere there is a picture of some guy making a Tiger zimmerit mud pie.

As for logical assumption, well I've never been a proponent of that. They had gunpowder technology, gear mechanisms, the understanding of gasses and relatively complex machinery, enough to argue that someone could have built a gattling type gun to be used at Towton in 1465, yet nowhere does one show up on the battlefield in Europe in the Renaissance.

The reason we have more definitive information and someone goes looking for these elusive tid bits of history is that there are stubborn old cusses like me that refuse to use a single source that state what to some may seem obvious and accepted wisdom. But we know that the deeper we dig and research and find documentation and good supporting documentation the more reliable that history becomes.

Thank you Robert.
I think you are right on the spot.
The vocabulary used is slightly missleading, field applied would not mean sloppy
We are talking about skilled maintenance engineers performing decided upgrades on a regular basis.

Not Lt. Schulze parking his Sd.Kfz.181 in Mr. Ivan's garden to smeer on some stuff using the neighbors garden showell.

Using the phrase "Portal Pic" is an other example of bad vocabulary, what I ment to say was that the picture that jthurston posted at the beginning of this thread still makes a great dio.
From a modelling point of view we are all good to go and smear on some mud 

Again, thank you for posting jthurston, I have learnt something today.
That must be a good thing

Pax Vobiscum
Johan 

wbill76 wrote:

Only a small thing to throw into the mix on top of what Foster mentioned...the field-depot level type of application is one that has always seemed plausible and I've never taken the position that it coul "only" happen at the factory level. The time and effort involved in applying a zimmerit coat, along with the materials and resource committment, was one of the contributing reasons as to why it was discontinued. Having a valuable piece of equipment sitting for a couple extra days so the zim can dry adds up pretty quick from a production schedule stand-point. Same thing for a stressed field-depot level maintenance troop. I don' think you'll ever find evidence of "true" field-level in-the-trenches application for the same reasons that you see chipped/damaged zim on units in the field...it wasn't a critical maintenance function and it required an extended down-time for it to be applied and dried. Field-depot application, entirely possible with certain units, trench-level application virtually impossible. The info on 26th PD is very very interesting and goes far to explain many anomalies that have surfaced on this and other forums.

...agree, and I don't think anyone argued ever that it was "applied while under fire"...another poster put it more elegantly in differentiating what the word, "field" implies...for everyone I have spoken with they mean it to mean exactly what you said: applied outside of the production facility, most probably in a forward depot or maint. section...many units had ample time to make such improvements on vehicles when their areas were quite; Normandy, for example...even on the Ostfront there were lulls between offenses and campaigns...

...there was some excellent info on the 26PD in the thread, but I am sure that was not the only PD that indulged in what is now termed "field applied zimm"... 

...still, it will take an actual photo of a soldier with "trowel in hand" and a background of trees to convince them that this could ever happen, and even if that pic did surface the material being applied would be called into question...

...I challenge anyone to post a pic of it being applied IN A FACTORY...and I don't mean a pic of a tank in a factory with a coat of it already on...I have that pic...I mean a factory worker with "trowel in hand"...my point is: not everything was photographed...

Only a small thing to throw into the mix on top of what Foster mentioned...the field-depot level type of application is one that has always seemed plausible and I've never taken the position that it coul "only" happen at the factory level. The time and effort involved in applying a zimmerit coat, along with the materials and resource committment, was one of the contributing reasons as to why it was discontinued. Having a valuable piece of equipment sitting for a couple extra days so the zim can dry adds up pretty quick from a production schedule stand-point. Same thing for a stressed field-depot level maintenance troop. I don' think you'll ever find evidence of "true" field-level in-the-trenches application for the same reasons that you see chipped/damaged zim on units in the field...it wasn't a critical maintenance function and it required an extended down-time for it to be applied and dried. Field-depot application, entirely possible with certain units, trench-level application virtually impossible.

The info on 26th PD is very very interesting and goes far to explain many anomalies that have surfaced on this and other forums.

So we have this pretty well figured out then, in my estimation.

Photos, historian accounts, written orders and veteran tesitmony. So here's my hypothesis:

As the Germans occupied large parts of Europe, they captured extant factories and maintenance facilities, and converted them for Panzer repair and reclamation use. It was in these facilities that "field applied" Zimmerit was applied.

Field-applied Zimmerit, in the sense that the individual crew could trowel it on under maneover conditions, did not happen, but field-applied mud did (more for camo purposes than for anti-mine purposes).

Now, my hypothesis could still be wrong, of course. We still don't have, oh I don't know, 35mm film of Fritz trowelling Zimmerit onto a tank, under a sign that reads "This is a captured facility". However, from what you good folks have shared so far on this thread, this is how I believe it went down.

Manny, MC202zipper, JohanT, Brumbles, Doog, and all the rest of you who've contributed to this discussion, I very much appreciate your input and assistance. Thank you!

renarts wrote:

You could argue the assumption that it is anything applied to the vehicle and still only assert that it is the application of something on the vehicle. Until someone produces either a clear, definitive photo of a german crewman or maintenance tech "field applying zim", secondary documentation to confirm that it was field applied in the form of field order or other photo documetation or other photos of similar operations, the primary documentation of the first hand account of a german tank crewman or field maint. tech in a journal, letter home, field report, communique etc. or the discovery of a survivng german tank crewman that you could ask and have him say "yup, we applied it in the field" then I tend to still err to the conservatve side and say its still not found.   Thanks though for the picture and the very thought provoking discussion.

Hello Renart!

We are thankfully living in a free (quite) world, so my assumption can be rejected or accepted, but IMHO there are soo many thing in WW2 german AFV (and not only) that have no pic showing it applied in the factory, still we can believe our eyes and logical way of thinking.

To me, that in such a unit like PzRgt 26 we find so many oddly shaped Zimmerit patterns (and IS Zimmerit, pictures are available of those Pz IV in cleaner enviroment and second line or march conditions) should be enough to assume that that unit's workshop was applying it (unless we want to believe the  gentlemen that, on ML forum, said that it could be a very early Zimmerit pattern from factory.. LOL.. I was enjoing his hypotesis soo much that I didn't asked him an explaination of why and how those "rare" tanks, both H & J types, ended up to a single unit.. ;) ).

Then, again, my idea is as good as any other's, unless proved wrong by trial or logical path of thinking..

S!

MC202zipper wrote:

jthurston wrote: Okay, I realize this is a contentious issue, but I believe I've found a photo of field-applied Zimmerit. NOT a photo of it being applied in the field, but one that looks fairly obvious. So here goes, and let's all have a look and draw our own conclusions, yes? Unless, of course, we decide it's inconclusive.   slightly different light: caption: These are found in Panzer IV: The Panzerkampfwagen IV Medium Tank, 1939-1945 by Kevin Hjermstad (Squadron/Signal Publications). Here's the link to it on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Panzer-IV-Panzerkampfwagen-1939-1945-Specials/dp/0897474139/ref=sr_1_3/103-5576407-3581446?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1186490971&sr=8-3 So whaddaya think?     Hello gentlemen,   my first post here on FineScale, IIRC. I am actually following the forum since loong time, along with other forums, tough. A brief presentation; I am italian, 44yrs old, the hobby is.. of course, 1/35 german WW2 AFVs & vehicles modelling, I am in the hobby since the 70s (first TAMIYA boxes, MONOGRAM 1/32 tanks, etc..)  Pic of the same tank (representing a PzKpfw IV Ausf H from PzRgt 26 in 1944, Italy) is also contained, along many other tank pics, in the wonderful book from Mr Daniele Guglielmi "Panzer in Italy". The book it's well known (his author is an internationally know researcher), but probably the fact that the text and captions are in italian only, somewhat avoided it to be sold abroad as much as it deserves. "Panzer in Italy" is made from hundreds of crisp, half or full page pics, and there are many other pics of Pz Rgt 26 tanks (as the PzKpfw IV depicted in the photo), many of them have the strange Zimmerit pattern shown. The opinion of the author (I also discussed just about this with him) is that the Pz Rgt 26 had the Zimmerit applied in field-workshops (remember that they were in Italy, an ex-allied, and that the Panzer units there usually had top class italian workshop for their field repair units. In my town,Florence, sPzAbt 508 used for their Tiger I the FIAT workshop, many thousand of square meters with all the tools and repair facilities). I am aware of at least a dozen pics with PzKpfw IV with the strange texture and I believe that they, along with the famous French tanks pic (one is also here in the thread) are the "smoking gun" for the unit applied Zimmerit trial. There is also a well known SdKfz 251 with a strangely applied diagonal pattern Zimmerit texture,a nd guess what? it's still from PzRgt 26 in Italy 1944-45! AFAIK no other AFVs types have the strange Zimmerit texture, as PzRgt 26 had his Panther Abteilung originally attached from PzRgt 4, but there is a single Ausf D Panther with odd texture in a pic.. Some extra proof (IMHO) for the Zimmerit being applied outside factories are also the cited (from Jentz) document for field unit to stop appliyng zimmerit, and some Elefant tank destroyer pic that show patches of Zimmerit clearly added later and shaped in a quite rough pattern. I am contacting trough email Mr Guglielmi asking his permission to post the other pics from his book, but I am afraid it will take too long for thread purposes, as today is Aug 15...  HTH anyway, cheers!  Fabio

...well, there is your "war veteran" account, renarts...case closed as far as I'm concerned..."FIELD-APPLIED DID EXIST"

Good post, Fabio--and I don't think you have to get permission to post pics from his book as long as we use it for educational/research purposes, which we are...maybe some of the other guys can back me on that...