Weald Foundation is pleased to announce they will be attending Tankfest 2019 with their Jagpanther. The event takes place at the Tank Museum in Bovington, England.
The Jagdpanther is a tank destroyer built by Nazi Germany during World War II based on the chassis of the Panther tank. It entered service in 1944 during the later stages of the war on the Eastern and Western Fronts.
The Tankfest is one of the world’s best displays of historic armoured vehicles, held every June 28th/30th 2019. The event attracts more than 30,000 people from across the country and the globe flock to the Museum.
Michael Charles Gibb, Director:
There are only three working Jagpanther tanks in the world, and the UK has one. We are very proud to have spent so much time energy building this tank back to its war footing condition.
As we all know, we are all celebrating the D-Day landing, and this would have been a formidable tank to go up against, luckily, the Nazis built quality machines but not large quantities, only 415 were produced. So today we are showing off this tank as a highly engineering war machine, but not a winning machine.
Richard Smith, Director of The Tank Museum.
“We are very pleased to welcome the Weald Foundation and their Jagdpanther back to TANKFEST. We are all looking forward to seeing this beautifully restored vehicle in action again and running alongside an impressive lineup of tanks from World War Two.
This will include the Panther tank from Le Musée des Blindés in France – and the opportunity to see these two vehicles running together is something we know our visitors will be very excited about.”
February 1945. Germany was in ruins. Even in the final stages of defeat, somehow, the assembly plants continued to function. At MNH (Maschinenfabrik Niedersachsen-Hannover) one of the last batches of Jagdpanthers was loaded onto a train and dispatched to the front. Among them was chassis number 303086, soon to be lost from sight in the maelstrom of the final days of the Third Reich.
The Weald Foundation purchased two wrecked Jagdpanthers from a collector in Germany in 2000. Both tanks where being used as range targets, both were riddled with holes and missing substantial parts of their armour.
The first Jagdpanther (No.1) had been recovered from the Pirbright ranges in the 1970s in exchange for an artillery piece and shipped back to Germany. The second Jagdpanther (No.2) had been salvaged from a British army range in northern Germany and was in by the far the worse condition.
About Weald
The Weald Foundation was established to preserve, and maintain historic tanks and related military vehicles and equipment, principally from the First and Second World War and to educate the public about their history. Our mission is to be the World leader restoration based on accurate research and location of the maximum number of original components.
Established as a Charitable Trust in 2003, the Foundation oversees a rare and unique collection of important tanks, armoured and soft skin military vehicles. It is one of the finest working collections in the World.
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