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Яusso-Soviэt Forum: Cold War Soviet Armor
For discussions related to cold war era Russo-Soviet armor.
Syrian T-55
MichaelSatin
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Posted: Saturday, May 08, 2010 - 08:42 AM UTC
I hope this is the correct place to post this. I have a Tamiya T-55A kit that I want to do as a Syrian tank on the Golan in '73. I know references are somewhat scarce, but can anyone tell me what option to use/not use and give me an idea of paint and marking schemes?

I have the Osprey Duel book on the Centurion and T-55 (yes, an IDF Centurion is coming!) and Zaloga's Arab-Israeli Wars books. The Osprey book seems to suggest that the T-55s did not have the Duska machine gun mounted (too bad, it looks great.) Does that seem right? Anything else would be a great help!

Michael

By the way, I think this is my 100th post on Kitmaker and I think I'm finally getting promoted! Whoo hoo, a round on me!
frogman_13
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Posted: Saturday, May 08, 2010 - 05:08 PM UTC
Hi Michael,

I may be able to help you with this. The Syrians used the 3 color scheme of Green/Grey/Sand in the 1973 Yom Kippur war and continued to use this scheme until at least the mid 80s. The patterns differed from tank to tank and were very random in application. The base color of Russian armor green was over-sprayed with bands of sand yellow color and then patches or in some instances stripes of grey were added. usually, (but not always), a large Arabic, 3 numeral tactical number appeared on the turret side. This was always painted in White and sometimes was surrounded by a segmented rectangular box. Apparently a large stencil was used for this marking.

Each tank also displayed a 5 digit vehicle registration number, also in Arabic and painted white. This smaller number appeared in two locations, front of vehicle down low on the glacis plate and also on the back plate of the hull. Next to this in Arabic the inscription; "Al-Gaish" which means "Army" in Arabic (I have read). The last common marking on Syrian T-54/55s for this timeframe is the division/brigade markings. Usually, for this series of tank there were 2 geometric symbols positioned together. One would be a segmented circle and the other a triangle or square. The most common marking was a circle divided in half horizontally with top half green and bottom yellow. The triangle was red. There were other markings of this type seen during the 73 war, but I describe one example that was common. Perhaps this particular unit lost a large amount of vehicles in the intial offensive of Oct. 06, 1973. These markings are also surrounded with a white rectangular segmented outline.

The photos I post here are of a Tamiya T-55A that I built last year It has all the markings and color scheme as I described above. On this model I intentionally did not weather the model to the point of obscuring the markings. Certainly Syrian tanks display a severe amount of paint chipping, dust, grime and all the rest that you would expect for a tank on the Golan Heights.


I hope this will help you with your project.

Ed Okun




MichaelSatin
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Posted: Sunday, May 09, 2010 - 03:32 AM UTC
Ed,

This is EXCELLENT information, thanks a ton!

Man, I love this site!

Michael
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