laststandonzombieisland

WWII After WWII has a great piece up on the use of German panzers as late as the 1960s by Syria in their wars against Israel. Acquired from Spain, Czechoslovakia and other sources, the Six Day War saw U.S.-made M50 Super Shermans and British Centurions in the hands of IDF tankers smoking Syrian Panzer IVs and StuG IIIs (some still with fading German balkenkreuzs)

“The last appearance by WWII German tanks on the world’s battlefields came in 1967, when Syria’s panzer force faced off against modern Israeli armor. Quite improbably, Syria had assembled it’s collection of ex-Wehrmacht vehicles from a half-dozen sources over a decade and a half timeframe.”

Some were kept in operation even years later…

“Syria had six Jagdpanzer IVs operational on 6 June 1967. One was destroyed by an Israeli tank. Surprisingly, the remaining five were retained by the Syrian army. They made no appearance during the 1973 Yom Kippur War. During the Desert Shield / Desert Storm period in 1990-1991, when Syria and the USA were briefly allies, the remaining five Jagdpanzer IVs were listed as “arsenal-level (long-term warehoused) assets” at al-Zabadani army base north of Damascus. In the mid-1990s, the late King Hussein of Jordan (an avid tank history fan) attempted to buy one or all of them for his army’s museum collection, apparently without success. During the 2014-onwards Syrian Civil War, they were likewise not seen, so apparently they had either been scrapped around the turn of the millennium, or destroyed in the warehouse during the civil war.”

Which leads me to these pictures, taken in the recent fighting in Syria: