For some years after the Second World War, the village of Westkapelle in the Netherlands was littered with wrecked and abandoned military vehicles, including tanks, amphibious vehicles and armoured bulldozers. This is a model of a derelict Sherman Crab Mk. I that stood in the main street for years — and is the only survivor to the present day.
Awesome model and very interesting history.
I second the comment. 
Excellent article and a masterpiece model. The amount of research and work that went into this is just outstanding. Beautiful detailing and a fantastic job overall.
Thanks 
It helped to have easy access to both the real thing and the archives of the museum it stands next to, of course
For those who want to know more (a lot more!) about this particular tank and pretty much everything else in terms of wrecks and derelict vehicles in the immediate area, I put together a PDF some years ago.
Just a few words. Impressive like the build.
Outstanding Jakko.Some serious bespoke Scratchbuilding work.Another great Sherman.
Rich
Cheers
Excellent work! I am puzzled that we still have no Sherman turret interior for 75mm turret?! I had to scratchbuilt some, and i used manual for “Hard to find” CMK sherman turret interior. Other than that, you can’t find it on the market, and the need is there.
Best regards,
Marko
Thanks
I considered the Resicast interior (well, actually for another model of a different derelict tank nearby), but at about twice the price of the Asuka kit, I immediately discarded that idea. I only got their 75 mm gun because that’s the hardest part to scratchbuild, the guard for it anyway
That’s master modeling at its best.
Thanks for the compliment, but I assure you there are far better modellers than me 
Amazing work Jakko!
When you say derelict, does that mean the vehicle was abandoned because it was knocked out or was it simply left behind?
It was left behind in the village because it (and two other Crabs) drowned in the first night after the landings, when the tide came in. This because the dykes in four places around the island had been bombed into oblivion four weeks earlier:
(source)
This photo was taken on 3 October 1944, right after the first attack on the dyke that blasted the first gap (it was later enlarged in a second attack, two weeks later). The ruins at the top of the photo are the village of Westkapelle; north is approximately to the upper right. The street running left-right that’s visible just above (in the photo) the water is the one where the tank stood after the war, just inside the area shown. It actually drowned further to the east, outside the photo.
These tanks took no further part in the fighting, because of having been flooded with sea water. Four other tanks (two Sherman Vs and two Churchill AVREs Mk. IV) did soldier on for another week along the northern side of the island, though one AVRE was lost in the fighting. The remaining three tanks returned to Westkapelle and were parked in the same street, near to where the three drowned Crabs were also towed to.
The intention was for these vehicles to be evacuated by sea, but the Royal Navy claimed it had no landing craft available until January 1945, and by the looks of it, in the end that was simply never followed up on. Thus, the tanks[1] were left in the street, as were several others[2] on the landing “beach” plus a number of armoured bulldozers and a literal boatload of Weasels and LVTs all over the place. All of these stood around for up to three years or so while the gap in the dyke was closed and the village rebuilt around them (and, for some LVTs and Weasels, the dyke went over them).
Thanks for that informative reply. I’ve read about a lot of vehicles left behind in France and all over the North African desert too. I guess with everyone hurting economically and these countries struggling to rebuild there were bigger fish fry than removing vehicles that were so heavy and required specialized equipment to move. Plus where were they supposed to take them and who was going to pay for all of that? I suppose the locals assumed for a time that at some point the rightful owners would take responsibility for them and come and pick them up?
Exactly. If three-quarters of the village has disappeared and the rest is uninhabitable, priority is making the place livable again. So you get scenes like:—
People just going about their business between derelict tanks. Also notice the Weasel hull on the right.
Slightly later than that, with new houses built on the right and the damaged ones on the left torn down, replaced by temporary buildings:
The tank on the left is the same one as the rear tank in the other picture. The one on the right was shuffled back and forth along the street a few times, which is why it’s in approximately the same spot here as the Weasel hull was, but isn’t in the other photo.
Or probably my favourite photo of daily life among wrecked tanks:
Funny story about the AVRE: that was in front of one of the village’s bakeries, and the baker’s son (now in his 80s) told me that his father gave a bottle of wine to a bulldozer driver to tow the tank away. So he put a cable between them and began towing, only to find himself pulling the paving bricks out of the street and the tank not budging a millimetre … He soon gave up and went back to his actual work. They discovered later that the AVRE’s handbrake was on
The Dutch government set up an Office for Surplus War Materials, one of whose responsibilities appears to have been disposing of wrecks. It sold all the wrecks in Westkapelle to a rag dealer from the nearby town of Middelburg, whose men then set about cutting them up for scrap metal. T148656 only survived in a very convoluted way involving multiple disputes of ownership, but it has the scars of being partly cut up. There’s a large L-shaped cut through the glacis, for example, that’s been filled in again but has been visible once more since the tank’s restoration in 2021.
If you want to read a lot more about all of this, may I suggest a PDF I put together?
