This Stug III was running at the Tank Museum’s Tankfest 26.
The ‘Black Sea’ Sturmgeschütz III (StuG III) Ausf. G refers to a historically significant MIAG-assembled assault gun (chassis number 95825) that boasts a unique and documented wartime provenance. Manufactured in October 1943, the vehicle was destined to bolster the 191st Sturmgeschütz Brigade on the Crimean Peninsula but never saw combat. In November 1943, while being transported across the Black Sea aboard the German cargo steamer Santa Fé, the ship was torpedoed by a Soviet submarine and sank off the coast of Sevastopol, taking its entire cargo of armoured vehicles to the seabed. Following its discovery and recovery by divers in the late 1990s, the vehicle was acquired and meticulously restored to operational condition by The Weald Foundation. Notably, despite being built at the MIAG factory, this survivor features a cast Topfblende (sow’s head) gun mantlet—a combination previously assumed to belong strictly to Alkett-built production runs. To preserve its exact historical state at the moment of its loss, the vehicle remains finished solely in its factory-applied Dunkelgelb base coat without any camouflage or unit insignia, standing as one of the rarest fully documented StuG III Ausf. G survivors in existence.