Small but Perfectly Formed

 Did you know that when first set up the Home Guard was called the LDV - Local Defence Volunteers, although my Grandfather called the organisation "Look, Duck and Vanish"!  He served with the LDV and Home Guard as he was too old for the main forces in 1939 at 43 years old.  He'd done his stint in the latter years of the Great War.  I'm not sure if any of the vehicles below would have been familiar to him or whether they were more likely to be seen on and near the South coast.

Home Guard platoon.  I can see Pike's scarf in there!

A Beaverette.  Slap some steel plate onto a saloon car and call it done!

An Armadillo.  Watch out for grenades lads!

A pair of Bisons

Now for something a little more main stream and which could give the invaders a moments pause.  An Infantry Tank mark 2 (A12) 'Matilda 2'.  The 2pdr gun was effective against anything the Germans had although it lacked an HE round.  The only way to be certain of stopping these was with 105mm artillery or Flak 88mm in a direct fire AT role.

My first foray into proper wargaming was World War Two using Airfix soldiers and models as recommended by Charles Grant in his rules 'Battle'. I still have one or two of the figures I used in the spares box somewhere. At university a couple of people were gaming WW2 using 1/300th micro armour and the WRG rules. These games always seemed to end up with a German 'super tank' chasing a lone Sherman around a terrain feature trying to get a kill shot. Clearly we ignored any difficult concepts like morale! The Grant rules especially left an indelible impression as they didn't so much say what you should do under the rules but rather why the rules worked the way they did so the player knew why they should do things the way the rules wanted (or how to change them to allow other outcomes). Over the intervening 40 plus years I have dabbled with WW2 from time to time, but never as a primary project.

A few years ago I had one of those bursts of enthusiasm and obtained an early war German tank battalion made up of 1/300th Heroics and Ros models.  This was supported by a couple of infantry companies and various support vehicles and units.  I also made a start on some British stuff (I have a soft spot for those early war cruiser tanks with all those A numbers) .  So with the WW3 project shelved it's time to bring the 1940 kit out of hibernation.  As a taster here is a sample of the Nasty side!

Sample of the kit the Wehrmacht will bring to table!

In the above photo are single examples of SIG33 self propelled artillery, Panzerjaeger I, STuG IIIB and Panzer III and IV.  The infantry are based as platoons (I forget the German term) of two rifle sections and two LMG sections.  At the rear is a 50mm mortar team and the Platoon HQ.  As with my Altar of Freedom figures I'm probably going to rebase these at some point.  I know that many people dislike basing 6mm vehicles but it prevents the wheel hub to wheel hub deployment seen with some rules and protects the models by giving something to pick the thing up by.

I will post some more images of the German forces in the next few days.  The British are coming (as the man said) but at present I only have Home Guard stuff painted and based.  There are some oddball vehicles in that collection so you have something to look forward to.

1. The finished base effect

 As promised here is my basing technique for the Oddizial Osmy (which incidentally means Eighth Division in Polish) 1/600th models.  The first thing to realise is that these are small really small and even though they are cast in a hard white metal they lack heft so I am basing vehicles on UK 1p coins to add weight and make them easier to handle.  Yes I really did throw money at this project! Pennies are cheaper than washers and still easy to get hold of and of course they are a uniform size and thickness.  Out of some half remembered childhood memory of some old law about debasing coinage I always use the 'tails' side so as not to desecrate the Queen's face on the other side.

The first step is to create a smooth surface to place the model upon.  I use Milliput for this as it sticks to the coin really well.  It also has the advantage that as a two part epoxy putty it will harden even if wet so I can smooth it over using a damp finger tip.  I recommend a small dish of water for that rather than licking the finger as Milliput has an interesting after taste!  A piece about the size of a garden pea seems about right to cover a penny.  I smooth that all over the surface of the coin making sure to get all the way to the edge and even a little over.  I trim off the excess around the rim with a piece of card.  I just use whatever I have to hand.  Use cardboard to trim the edge as some of the wet Milliput will stay stuck to the card an harden rendering the card useless after a while so it has to be changed.  The idea is that the Milliput is only slightly higher than the rim of the coin and doesn't extend beyond the edge.  For larger vehicles I make to grooves to represent the track marks behind the AFV.  Once that is done put the base aside to harden.  The trick is to make up batches of about 20 - 30 bases at a time ready for the next stages.

2. Milliput layer and painting done

3. Side view showing the depth of Milliput used.

Next I paint the base, for this I use Vallejo Green Brown (Model Color 70.879) for this.  At some point I need to get this colour matched at a DIY store and get some acrylic house paint in the same shade as I do seem to use this for a lot scenic work.  I paint the Milliput surface and all around the rim of the coin.  This actually needs two steps as there is a small part masked by my finger tip where I hold the penny.  Painting in batches allows the first bases to have dried ready for me to paint the uncovered part by the time I have dome the last base.  I could tack the bases onto  a roof nail or similar I suppose but it would take longer to tack the base to a nail than going back to paint the masked bit of the edge.  A stripe of a dark brown (Vallejo Model Colour  70.872 Chocolate Brown in my case) in the track marks helps bring them out.  Again leave to dry before going to the next step.

4. A darker brown in the wheel ruts helps them to stand out.

The next thing to do is glue the vehicle to the painted base.  I do this after painting as a lot of clear glues dry to such a high gloss finish that it's hard to get paint to take on it.  Again, yes you guessed it, set aside to dry.

5. With vehicles glued on things are starting to come together

The last step is to texture the base.  There are a number of ways to do this.  Over the years I have settled on a couple of variations on the theme of sand and flock.   I apply some random areas of neat PVA glue to the base and sprinkle a fine sand over the base.  The sand sinks into the PVA and leaves a slightly raised area.  I knock off the loose sand and leave it for the PVA to dry.  I then do the same again on the bits that didn't get a sand covering but sprinkle flock onto those areas.  My flock isn't actually pure flock its a mix of a summer (or it might be spring) meadow flock (which has coloured bits to act as flowers) and a short static grass.  I sprinkle this by taking a pinch between my fingers and rubbing the finger tips together like sprinkling salt on a meal.  This seems to create a bit of a static charge which helps the grass part stand upright.  Once done I turn the base upside down and give the underside a sharp tap as a further incentive for the grass to stay upright.  And that, as the man said, is that!  It isn't necessary to cover every bit of the base in sand and flock as the base green-brown colour blends in really well.

6.  You can see how the sand sits 'proud' of the bases here.

If you need to ID the models, which I do for Fistful of Tows, then a small patch of colour on the edge of the coin identifies the vehicle type and by default the regiment and a dot of contrasting colour (or two or three) shows which battalion they belong to.  For FFT models have to stay within a set cohesion distance of other members of their parent formation.  For Soviets the cohesion unit is the Battalion and for NATO it is Companies which requires a little more complexity using two colours of dot one for Battalion and one for company.  There is no real need to track formations beyond that.  I place this mark at the rear of the base as hopefully my troops will be advancing away from me!

7. Unit ID.  Green for T-72, left stripe is regiment 1 second is battalion 1 and 2.

The last part of this post deals with storage.  I'm a big fan of the Really Useful Box range of plastic storage containers.  I use the 4 litre size with two of their hobby trays in each for most of my DBA armies.  However, those trays wouldn't do the job for these models as the spaces in each division of the tray would be too big and too deep to hold 3mm models securely, so I looked at using foam insert trays instead. 

8.  The foam trays in use.

A quick trawl around Google lead me to a business called Just Lasered.  I contacted the owner via Face Book and explained what I needed and he designed the trays, checked back with me to be sure it was what I wanted and had them with me within a week!  Each tray has 80 x 2.1 cm diameter holes and  each tray has an offset so that by reversing the direction I place each one the holes do not line up.  Pennies are slightly over 2cm in diameter so the bases drop neatly into the hole with just enough space around so that when I lift the tray the model stays behind making it easy for my fat fingers to pick them up.  Better yet the trays are designed to fit exactly into the 4 litre Really Useful Box. I can get four 1.25cm thick trays plus a 1 cm topper into each box.  Great price too at £1.50 per tray, although postage hiked that up by another £4.50.  If I had ordered more at the same time the impact of postage would not have been so great I suppose.  So that is storage for 320 models in each 4 litre box.  More than enough for this project.

The Soviet war machine.  Not complete by a long way!

I have been busily painting and basing the Oddizial Osmy cold war models ready for the full version of A Fistful of TOWs 3 (FFT3 hereafter) arriving.   They were delivered a couple of days ago and I have spent my spare time since going through the rules to see where the differences to the introductory versions lie.  My first impression is that rules are well thought out and do create a very fast and deadly game exactly as I found in the test play through with the free introductory rules.

The differences other than all the extra rules such as chemical and tactical nuclear attacks, airborne assaults, and helicopter and airstrikes are the extra detail in the combat rules.  These cover things like the effect of stabilised guns, ( move and shoot and engaging multiple targets per turn), shoot and scoot attacks.  In other sections are a really well thought out set of guidelines for interpreting rules and disputes.  The full rules add chrome and make the use fire and manoeuvre tactics achievable.   They are pitched at the sweet spot between detail and playability (at least in what is the sweet spot for me).  The rules include data on a lot of weapons and combat formation TOEs (expressed in FFT3 bases).  Players still need to know their period as some of the fine detail isn't there in the lists and not all of the armies and formations you might want are not there (no Warsaw pact formations other than Russians for example) but there is enough to get started with.  FFT3 works at the one base is a platoon level but once playing my head switches to a tank is a tank and a stand of infantry is a section or fire team and it makes no difference to the fun.  For those who want it there are suggestions for changes to run the rules at 1:1 ratios but I really don't see the need.

For the Soviets 6 tank bases makes a battalion (edited from 9 so if you read this once already you are not going nuts it did have different numbers in this sentence) so I have the equivalent of 12 battalions ready to roll with 15 T-80s ready to have base work done.

(L-R) T-55, T-62, T-64, T-72 and last T-80 with unfinished base

On the painting front  there are more BTRs and BMPs plus their infantry passengers to complete plus a raft of support kit ZSU and BRDM support and recon plus Hinds and SU-25 Frogfoots.  The BAOR need some more FV432s and FV438s and crews plus their air support to work on. Sounds like a huge task but it really isn't at 1/600.

I have thrown money at this project, literally I ran out 1p coins to base stuff on and had to convert a £5 into pennies to ensure I have enough for the project and follow ons! I will explain the basing and ID system in the next post.

 As mentioned in the last post I have created a campaign map which should cover the first 24 hours of a Warsaw Pact attack, give or take a couple of hours.  Apologies for the slightly washed out reproduction I need to play around with the scanner settings to get a bit more colour saturation. 

The campaign map for the initial fighting

Soviet Forces will enter at the right hand side and try to exit from the left. I will be covering this frontage with BAOR forces.  Recon units will cover the area in the first two rows of rectangles (each one of which is a game table measuring 6' by 4').  Heavier formations will be to the west.  I will probably deploy a brigade sized battlegroup to cover the area consisting of a Chieftain regiment, one or possibly two mechanised infantry battalions plus a couple of Milan platoons, A Striker detachment (mounting Swingfire ATGM) and a Blowpipe AAGM detachment.  Artillery will be offboard.  Soviets will have (initially) three Motorised Rifle Regiments backed up with a T-62 Regiment. Stacked up behind that will be a T-64 Tank Regiment.  Which means that I need to get on with the painting and basing!  15 T-64As are painted and will be based by later today.

Based upon my initial test game it took the Soviets 36 game minutes to achieve their initial objectives on a 6' x 4' table and they would perhaps probably needed another 24 minutes (two turns) to get forces off the table excluding time for the second echelon to come up.  I intend throwing WarPac lines of assault open to input both through this blog and elsewhere on Face Book and through real life (TM pending) contacts.  So it is probably worth mentioning that WarPac forces may enter the map on any of the roads marked with a red arrow and the rules require battalions to be kept together.  Other than that express your opinions on the best WarPac operational plan for day one in the comments.  I will throw the actual table tactics open in due course.

Soviet paint schemes in the early 1980's seem to have been a single shade of green rather than the multi colour camo schemes which came into use later in the decade. Should be an easy paint job then, right? But no, it isn't that easy. We live on a green world and as a result the human eye is particularly good at distinguishing between shades of green, so it needs to be the right shade. Which begs the question what is the right shade of green for Soviet vehicles. They seem to have used a dark gloss green for parades but a lighter shade in combat environments. Colour photos of early 1980s Soviet vehicles show a range of greens but part of the difference may be the film used, plus the processing of the negatives could impact on the depiction of colour as well! Even the colour settings of my monitor could be having an impact. On top of which with 1/600th models I need to use paint as a fast way of determining which side is which so it can't be the same shade I used for the BAOR vehicles.


In general the photographs show a green similar to a medium olive green but sometimes with a hint of blue in the shade. It's a warmer hue that NATO Olive drab schemes from the 1960s so that helped give me some inspiration.

A BTR-70 showing the final choice of green used

 Eventually I have settled on an undercoat of white with a slightly thinned Vallejo Medium Olive Green over that.  By thinning it the high spots on the castings show some of the white through so kind of pre-highlighting occurs.  I then hit the casting with a coat of satin varnish and firstly ink wash with good old GW Agrax Earthshade then dry brush with Vallejo Bonewhite to which I have added a little olive Green to create a very light green highlight.  It's not exactly the Soviet colour scheme but it is close I'm happy with the results although the KGB political officer may order me to repaint in a more socialist shade at some point.  Oh and in case JBM pops around I didn't paint in the red stars or the turret numbers although I did do the tracks in German grey front and rear!

A T-62 complete with commander manning the Turret MG

So Ivan now has a Company of T-62s at 1:1 ratio and a company of BTR-70s and dismounted infantry will follow very shortly.  For rules like FFOT3 where a single model represents a platoon that is the core of a Motor Rifle Battalion.  An order of T-64s and BMP 1s will give the start of a Tank Battalion from a tank regiment and I probably will not be able to resist some T-72s and T-80s.  Then it's onto support arms.  I have decided that artillery will be an 'off board' asset but some anti tank and anti aircraft vehicles plus close air support will be modelled as on board assets so I need to decide what I want to use for those items.

The assembled ranks of Soviet Armour

Lastly the astute observers will have noticed that the opening paragraphs of  a couple of earlier posts have formatted as centre aligned.  It seems to be something to do with placing an image and centre aligning it and I couldn't for the life of me seem to make it go back to what I actually wanted.  The same thing happened with this post but I solved the issue.  Highlighting the affected paragraphs and using the clear formatting icon seems to break the link to the image formatting and hey presto everything is back as I want it.  I can't claim any credit for this solution as I followed the age old primate methodology of pushing all the buttons until one did something.  Fortunately there were no big red ones marked do not push!

Way, way back in the middle years of the last century a young Elenderil's Father used to read the Meccano Magazine.  In that august tome were a series of articles by one Charles Grant.  They were on a new and potentially interesting topic that would allow him to play with his Airfix soldiers and tanks in a more structured way than rolling marbles at them to see who fell over.  Those articles were later gathered together and formed the book 'Battle! Practical Wargaming' a set of wargames rules for World War two games first published in 1970.  It was practical because it didn't just give a rule and say do it like that, instead it explained how each rule was formulated and the connections between the rules that went to make a coherent whole.  Back in 1968 that was a revelation.

You wouldn't get away with a cover like that nowadays - far too violent!

Those rules were not perfect by any means, for a start they only provided statistics for a handful of vehicles and only for 1944-45.  The defence values for AFV's were basic and while they worked it was difficult to see how the quoted values were calculated.  Equally well the attack value for anti-tank weapons was equally difficult to unravel, but (and it's a big but) they worked because the relationships between the vehicle armour and the AT guns killing power were about right.  There are obvious omissions but by and large Grant acknowledged those omissions and left it to the individual to add as much or as little extra as they wanted.  Probably the key one is the lack of any spotting rules.  A second issue is that fire fights don't pin or suppress targets, Infantrymen  are OK or they are not, I suppose the idea was that players themselves would become dubious of advancing into a hail of fire and would create a kind of player driven pinning.

Oh the simplicity of the early rule sets  These covered Ancients to ACW!

After Battle, I found John Tunstall's Discovering Wargaming which allowed me to put the rest of my Airfix collection to use. That was another primer that explained how the rules worked and it led on to bigger games with larger forces set in earlier periods of history.  The rules were a single set that covered everything up to the ACW......one set to rule them all!  Despite a growing interest in pre-gunpowder gaming I would still return to Grant's rules from time to time.  Over the years I don't think I ever found a set of World War 2 rules that provided as much fun, or were as easy to understand, although to be fair as a 14 year old my standards were probably easily met.

A couple or three years ago I had an urge to scratch the old World War Two itch again but couldn't find a set of rules I liked.  I tried the Battlegroup Kursk system which has some interesting ideas but just didn't do it for me.  I looked at some free to play stuff,  but nothing had the ease of use I was after and eventually I went back to Battle.  There is a framework there for a fast play easy to follow game it just lacked breadth of application as it focussed on Europe in the last year of the war .  So I decided to update them.  Great idea....didn't work!  The problem was that the factors given for tanks and AT guns were too limiting to easily allow for expanding the range of vehicles, especially back into the early war years.  However I did quite like the roll to hit and roll to see if you kill it system all it needed was a bit more chrome.

After a bit of research I came across two things that really helped, the data charts from 'Firefly Outgunned' and armour data and armour penetration data for most of the AFVs and AT weapons used between 1939 and 1945.  With a bit of work I was able to come up with a set of armour penetration charts for a set of ranges from 0-250 meters out to over 2,000 meters.  These are based upon the 50% chance of penetration data used in US and UK weapon testing during the war and just afterwards.  Adding a pair of opposed D6 rolls gives the potential for plus or minus 0 - 5 so that can add up to 50% greater and 50% lower penetration depth.  I added some simple to spot and to hit tables based upon the data on relative target sizes from the Firefly data and with that the tank rules were about done.  I tried a very brief play test and I'm happy with the penetration rules but the spotting and to hit factors need to be smoother as currently they slow things down too much.

Infantry rules updates will come next which will be by squads/sections rather than individual figures.  I have the basics in my head but need to play test them and write them up.  It is going to use factors for each type of weapon to create a fire density for a given range so that a German squad with Mg34s will lay down more fire than say a British squad with only a bren as support.  Weight of fire will generate a chance to pin (can't move and fires with a restricted weight of fire), suppressed (can't move or fire) and neutralised (which is a polite way of saying KIA and WIA).  The rest will probably be lifted from Grant although Olicanalad over on Olicanalad on artillery has some interesting thoughts on the actual application of indirect artillery fire I may need to steal I mean borrow.

Watch this space for updates and playtests. 

Although my main interest has always been land warfare in Western Europe from the Romans up to around 1700 AD I do occasionally go off piste.  Two projects that have taken me a long way from my core area have been World War Two land combat and World War One air combat.

The WW2 thing comes from my first introduction to wargaming,  Charles Grant's 'Battle'.  Not from the book although I do have a copy, but from the articles in The Meccano Magazine which were pulled together to create the rules in Battle, except for the morale rules which oddly didn't make it into the book.  Those articles would have been published in the late 1960's when I was at secondary school!  In those days it was 20mm (well HO/OO scale) Airfix all the way for infantry and tanks.  For the WW1 dog fighting bug I blame Biggles and Airfix kits again.

A couple of years ago I decided to have a go at Early WW2 after reading a book set in East Yorkshire during 1940 it interested me because it was where I was then living.  The book is Seelowe Nord the middle of three connected books about WW2.  It is alternative history which looks at the double 'what ifs' of Operation Sealion both going ahead and having targeted the Yorkshire rather than the South coast.  German beach landings occurring between Scarborough and Filey with airborne landings at Spurn Point and Leconfield airfield .



Improbable I know but it was fun being able to stand on the ground being described and see where various things were meant to have happened.  Plus it wasn't a bad read.  The author's other two WW2 novels are set in France during the period running up to Dunkirk and one set in the days straight after D-Day.  Again both worth a read and all three available as ebooks for Kindle.

Of course I went 6mm for this and to date have a German armoured battalion (Pz 1, 2 3 and 4s) with the various attached support units (STuGs and SIG33s and recce elements) and a Panzergrenadier company as infantry support all from Heroics and Ros.  The Brits are a mix of Home Guard  and regulars supplied by GHQ and Irregular Miniatures.  Irregular miniatures have some of the improvised armoured vehicles used by the Home Guard and a mix of their WW1 and SCW infantry act as stand ins for the Home Guard's PBI.  GHQ have provided Bren Carriers, Matilda's, A9s, A10s and Regular Infantry.  I have their towed 25lbers as well and some towed AT guns.  Enough for a decent scrap.

German Armour pre-painting.

World War 1 in the air was supplied by Heroics and Ross plus a couple of Irregular miniature castings I already had in the bits box.  The H&R aircraft are lovely models but do require some assembly.  I replace the struts with copper wire as they are easier to use.  I even went to the lengths of creating my own lozenge camouflage transfers.  Five lozenge not seven I'm not completely mad!

Adding the lozenge camouflage

I now have a decent selection of aircraft and just need to complete the rules.

The assembled aeroplanes

The Eindeckers is a lovely little casting as are the Albatrii (Albatrosses?).  The Observation balloon is a scratch build and just needs a basket adding.  It's amazing what you can do with a toilet roll centre, two beer can widgets and some paper mache I will try to do some close ups in a follow up article at some point.