Oh bloody hell, here we go again.
I never doubted the color of turret number 332, that is well known because it is the one in the Patton museum, and it was tested and documented extensively. The Blue with yellow outline was the standard coloring of 3rd company tanks.
Here is a link to the original thread that you were looking for:
/forums/1/835828/ShowPost.aspx#835828
I’ll post a copy of what i wrote in that thread, i still stand by what i said then.
Ok lets clear this up. In late 1944 all Tiger battalions had converted to the standard turret numbering system. The turret number would consist of three digits. The first digit would indicate the company, second digit would indicate the platoon and third digit would indicate which vehicle it was within the platoon, so 222 would 2nd company, 2nd platoon and 2nd vehicle in 2nd platoon (Kurt Sowa’s tank) First company usually had black numbers with white outline, 2nd company usually had red numbers with white outline and 3rd company usually had blue numbers with yellow outline.
Now i say “usually” because especially within the SS units this standard was sometimes broken .
In s.SS.Pz.Abt 501 in the time leading up to the battle of the bulge all the tanks conformed to the numbering standard. The three battalion comand tanks had red with white outline and started with 00 (007, 008 and 009) the company comand tanks was 104 and 105 for first company, 204 and 205 for second company and 304 and 305 for third company. The rest of the tanks followed the numbering system that i have just described.
Most of the tanks also had the color of the numbers that i described but some didn’t- Some vehicles in 1st company had red numbers (134 for an example) and all of first platoon in second company is believed to have had black with white outline. But one thing that we do know for sure, and it is confirmed in almost every book there is about the Kingtiger, is that the 11 or so vehicles that were transfered in from s.Pz.Abt 509 all recieved solid yellow turret numbers, and they were the only ones who had them. The ones we know were 205, 221, 222, 223, 224 and 334. Now this is how Waldemar Trojca describes it in his new book about the Kingtiger, the authors of the various Kingtiger books disagree a bit about what color the different companies in s.SS.Pz.Abt 501 used for their turret numbers at this time … but they all agree about the yellow turret numbers … only the vehicles transfered in from 509 had these, and 222 is one of them.
Ergo, Patrick Stansell’s model in MMIR’s tiger modellling manual is not correct.
Obviously the bottom right pic is a post-war paint job…
