This is a truck you won’t see anywhere else, a Chevrolet 8440/CGT in its unique Danish configuration.
As the Danish army was reestablished through the forties and fifties we received many WW2 vehicles through the MDAP program. In the beginning it was English vehicles but later American and Canadian became the bulk of vehicles received. Among these were these Chevrolet. The Danish Army already had an artillery tractor however, the Morris Commercial C8, so another tractor was not needed – nor wanted. But at the time thoughts of a mechanized infantry as part of an infantry battalion to fight alongside tanks had become a plan for the future. To test this in practice, as a kind of a stop gap solution, it was decided to convert these trucks to a Gruppevogn – a squad vehicle. To do this the cabin was closed behind the driver and it was rebodied with a Danish manufactured truck body. An unknown part of these vehicles were given a .50 cal gun mount too.
My model consists of three major parts. The cabin form an Italeri CMP 15CWT, the main frame, axels, wheels etc from a Tamiya Quad gun tractor and a scratch build truck bode and canvas. The cabin fits surprisingly well to the Tamiya main frame (??) – and so the first part of the build was no sweat at all, even though I had to make a rear part to close the cabin off, of course. Construction of the truck body did take some time (and I had to do it twice as I meshed up my measurement at first) but was really not that troublesome. Time-consuming however was all the small parts like indicators, lights and especially the lines for the canvas. The ring mount was a pain in the-you-know-what; it was nothing but trial and error here. The math for this is way out of my league. But in the end the truck had materialized. The truck is painted in Tamiya XF 51 olive drab as this is pretty close to the green used in the Danish Army at the time. I use conventional techniques to weather my models, washes, filters, dots of oil colors and so on. I would like to mention though, that the canvas has had no brush at all! It’s a 100% air brush job.
