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- Jakko
True, they’re not overly sexy vehicles to most war photographers, I guess.
It’s a common mistake, because they do look very much like
The British and Canadian Armies used two armoured bulldozers types: the Caterpillar D6A and D7A, which look very similar at first glance; there was no armoured D8, except in US Navy service in the Pacific. The one in the photo you posted is a D7A: it has the air intake pipe on the sloping armour in front of the “turret” and the exhaust pipes for the starting motor (thin) and main engine (thick) on the left side of the engine deck, and a fairly steeply sloped rear to the cab.This is a picture of a D6A at the front, with a row of D7As behind it:
The MiniArt 1:35 scale kits represent American armoured D7s, one with an “armored cab M2” and one with open-topped, improvised armour.
It does
I have that kit (not built it yet), and it’s not bad. It’s a D7A, or at least, aims to be one — the base tractor is a D7, but the armour is slightly problematic — it has vertical sides to the cab when that’s a D6A feature, and the D7A had sloping ones instead, as shown in the boxtop illustration and the photo you posted. It also has the standard D7 bench and fuel tank inside the cab (like the Resicast model), when both the D6A and D7A had a single, elevating seat and totally different fuel and hydraulic tanks:
This is a photo of that area from the last known surviving D6A with original features (I happen to know its owner
).(Oh, and I only now noticed your model has sloping sides to the armour, so I guess that, as per usual, it’s a mixture of features resulting from the maker confusing the two types.)