COBI Sturmpanzerwagen A7V Nr. 563 Wotan Set 2983

COBI's Sturmpanzerwagen A7V No. 563 "Wotan" is built from 575 blocks, developed in cooperation with the Deutsches Panzermuseum in Munster. The armoured hull, sloped plates and side-mounted weapons of the original are reproduced, with movable parts and a brick carrying the vehicle's name. All markings are printed.

Twenty tanks, and every one had a name

Germany built twenty A7Vs. Britain built more than two thousand tanks in the same period and France around three and a half thousand.

When a country has twenty of something, it names them. Wotan, Hagen, Mephisto, Elfriede, Schnuck, Baden I — crews painted the names on the hulls, and because there were so few, individual machines have documented individual histories in a way that no Sherman ever will.

One of them still exists. Mephisto was captured by Australian troops in 1918, shipped to Brisbane, and is in the Queensland Museum — the only surviving A7V in the world.

What it was like inside

The crew was eighteen: a commander, a driver, two mechanics, a gunner and loader for the 57 mm gun, and twelve men working six machine guns. They were sealed inside a steel box over an unsilenced engine, in heat that regularly caused men to collapse, with no way to communicate except by touch and shouting.

It was also too tall and its tracks too short for the ground it was meant to cross. A7Vs repeatedly grounded on the trenches they had been built to cross.

In the COBI range

Set 3094 is the A7V at 1:72. Set 2995 is the British Mark V, its opponent at Villers-Bretonneux in the first tank-versus-tank action in history.

Specifications

Pieces: 575 · Developed with the Deutsches Panzermuseum Munster · Named brick included