Ozzie Shop Builds Japanese Tanks

The first behind the scenes images of the replica Japanese tanks used in the 2005 film "The Great Raid" showed up in Dave Gile's now defunct website  "The FV432 Armored Personal Carrier Home Page."  In the photo gallery section of the website were several pictures of the fabrication of the Japanese tanks. An Australian company company called FX Illusions in Queensland converted two surplus FV434s to recreate Japanese Type 97 Chi-Ha medium tanks. This same Australian shop rebuilt a M3 Grant chassis into a M4 Sherman.  The Sherman never made it to the screen, as the scene it was in was cut from the film, but it has been sold and did appear in the Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman TV mini series "The Pacific."

Update: 9 August 2008 - Dead links address and text revised.  Thanks again Andy for the additional information.

More work to follow on these "Great Raid" tanks.

Update: 20 July 2008 - FX Illusions built all the tank props for "The Great Raid", not Collectors Armoury & Mlilitaria - sorry for the misinformation. I have revised the origional post to give proper credit where credit is due.

Comments

[Andy]

I believe that two of these conversions were made by the Company "Collectors Armoury & Militaria" in Queensland.

http://www.collectorsarmoury.com.au/Collectors%20Armoury/default.html

Recently, at least one of these tanks has been painted to look like a German Tank. God knows why! You can see a picture of it in German Colours here.

http://www.historyalive.org.au/

[Chris]

Thanks Andy for the additional information. I have seen pictures of the "Panzer" conversion. "The Great Raid" tanks have to be the best looking Japanese tanks built for the film industry. So I am at a loss for words as to why someone would have painted one panzer gray.