British-built Panthers

[Hobbes]

the REME completed a small number of Panther tanks that were on the assembly lines at the end of the war:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lssU69QJZk4

[Steel Penguin]

thank you for the pointer Hobbes    an interesting few minutes

[NARSES2]

Fascinating. Thanks H 

[Weaver]

Cheers for that. Mark Ferlton's channel's a good one to follow  - all sorts of interesting stuff.

What If idea (unlikely, but when has that ever been a barrier?):

The French managed to scavenge enough panther bits to run a 50-tank unit for two years after the war. The British had managed to get a small production line going, and presumably knew the ins and outs of the supply chain, even if they hadn't got anything like all of it back in business.

What if a buyer was found for all this stuff? A country that needed 50 tanks plus a potential support/manufacturing system, and that couldn't/wouldn't buy surplus Shermans for whatever reason? Who might it be?

Syria used a force of Panzer IVs and StuG IIIs right through to the 1970s, their last action (and the last between WWII types) being the Yom Kippur war in 1973. These tanks came from a variety of sources in several batches, and were obviously more suitable than Panthers since they were simpler and built in larger numbers. Significantly, the Red Army used Pz.IVs and StuGs indefinitely during WWII, since spares were plentiful and they were easy to repiar, but only used Panthers and Tiger until they broke down and then abandoned them.

But what if Syria was more ambitious, seeing the Panther stuff as the start of it's own tank industry, and what if a little more of the supply chain had survived?

An alternative what if: I have a sketchy background story where the Soviets get some setbacks right at the end of the war, and several Eastern European states end up as treaty-limited neutrals (a bit like Austria or Finland) rather than in the Warsaw Pact. With strict limits on overseas arms buying, but ex-German production facilities in their countries, some of these states choose to keep the German stuff in production and service as the basis of their post-war militaries. You might imagine one of them inheriting a Panther plant, using the tanks itself into the 1950s, then selling/donating the line to somewhere like Syria when they're ready to replace it.