So it's possible that some Dunkelgelb Tigers were delivered new to s.Pz.Abt. 504 on 28 February; but one of that batch is now at Bovington and isn't Dunkelgelb.
Two more Tigers went to s.Pz.Abt. 501 on 5 March, they could have been Dunkelgelb.
No more Tigers went to Africa.
David
He also goes on to say the following (Ignore #1)
I'm jumping back into this thread because more research has been done in the last year. So we can clarify some things;
1. There were no "DAK" Tigers. Rommel never had command of Tigers. They were assigned to the 5th Panzer Army under von Arnim, whose task was to hold back the Allies approaching Tunisia from the west. Meanwhile the Afrikakorps was far away in Libya.
Some Tigers (1 company s.Pz.Abt. 501) were lent to the Afrikakorps for the Sidi bou Zid battle. But when Rommel asked to borrow them for his follow-up attack through the Kasserine Pass, he didn't get them.
After Rommel's departure, when the Afrikakorps got pushed back into Tunisia, a few Tigers were attached to them again. But they never owned the Tigers officially, and the Afrikakorps palm tree was never painted on a Tiger as far as we can see.
2. The Tiger factory (and there was only one factory) apparently decided to keep using their RAL8000 and RAL7008 paints until they ran out. Probably every Tiger sent to Africa (and southern Russia) was painted like the Bovington one when it was new, up to the spring of 1943. It's even possible that the second tropical scheme (designed for the desert) was used on Tigers for certain theaters, until the end of Tiger production! Research is ongoing.
3. Literally hundreds of photos of s.Pz.Abt. 501 have been studied and associated with dates and places. We can follow some individual tanks from the time they arrive in Africa to the time when the British forces see them and report "green Tigers".
At no point in this timeline is there any evidence of a repaint. The "green Tigers" therefore looked like the Bovington Tiger, finished in RAL 7008/8000. The color pictures posted in this thread support this (where the Tiger is relatively clean).
4. The captions currently on those color photos, at Time-Life and Getty, are wrong. They say "desert" when you can actually see fields of green crops in the photos. The real landscape has been identified by visitors to Tunisia and by satellite photos. There were no Tigers at El Guettar according to deployment records.
David
