Impression
Panzer vor!
It’s been so long since I’ve watched the oddly popular Girls und Panzer that I had completely forgotten they promised us a proper retelling of the match against Anzio – thankfully, this OVA ended up making an otherwise banal Friday quite entertaining! I’m glad they didn’t start off immediately with the match, and spent a bit of time on several slice-of-life and training scenes first – sometimes I think Girls und Panzer would have done just fine as an iyashikei. I mustn’t forget that technically, this could be classified as a show about cute girls doing cute things. If “cute” can be defined as live combat with armoured war vehicles, that is. They set aside a quick introduction for Anchovy and the rest of Anzio too – and as expected of this show, they’ve stayed true to history and formed a whole new Cult of the Duce with the feisty Anchovy at its core. I’d take her over Mussolini any day though – Anzio joins Pravda and Kuromorimine in being schools who represent countries with historical dictators around the WWII period! One thing I didn’t get was why they all loved to party and snack – to the point that by reducing the amount of snacks they buy, they suddenly have the funds needed to get a new tank o.O They even used it to close the plot hole of why Anzio never came to cheer on Ooarai in the final – they were all too wasted!
While I was once again reminded of my woeful lack of technical knowledge on anything to do with tanks, at least I now know that the Carro Veloce and P40 exist – and as ever, the actual tankery combat continues to surprise me with how fluid and exciting things can get. Unlike Ooarai’s previous and future battles though, they managed to smash out a complete victory over Anzio despite being the perpetual underdogs – after Anzio’s little trick with the cardboard tanks was revealed, things seemed to go fairly smoothly in Ooarai’s favour, with Miho’s expertise and decisions proving to be as impressive as ever. And even the Volleyball Club alone was enough to take out four CVs all in an instant! Perhaps Ooarai’s later struggles were predominantly because their opponents were just that good – while it’s not like Anzio were slouches, Pravda and Kuromorimine were on a whole other level. They still lost pretty badly though, to the point that it was probably Ooarai’s easiest victory in the tournament. I can see why it was skipped when time constraints became an issue.
Well, at least they were up against Italy and not Brazil, right? Now that would have been awkward.
Anzio never really had a chance without surprise or a lucky hit on the flag. I’ll give them credit for their cardboard tank trick, but they were outgunned from the start (which is, admittedly, unique for an Oarai opponent). Their tankettes were nothing more than chaff, really: the fact that an entire swarm of them couldn’t take out the Type 89, a tank that can be taken down by shooting it with an anti-personnel rifle, is proof of their uselessness. They swarmed around alot, but they couldn’t actually DO anything, and the Type 89, which would be completely incapable of actually damaging any ordinary tank, was able to wipe them out.
Similarly, Anchovy was really proud of her P40, but it it isn’t really that impressive a tank compared to what she was up against. If the Panzer IV had been shooting it from the same elevation that final shot might not have been enough to disable it, due to the sloped armor design, but shooting from above like that it meant it was pretty much like hitting a straight horizontal surface: rather than allowing the round to skip off it impacted stright on, and blew through the armor.
Really, Anchovy was just underequipped for this fight, and her team was… well… not very smart. She gets major props for being a graceful loser, though.
Was it just me, or did Miho almost look bored when the P40’s last-ditch shot sailed past the Panzer IV?
Anchovy was indeed a wonderful sport, though somehow I felt like that was because they weren’t too concerned about winning as opposed to having festivals and eating lots of food. They were going to throw that banquet either way, weren’t they…