German Reinforcements

I love listening to audiobooks while I paint, and have mostly listened to books about WW2 recently, which always pushes me to paint more models from the period. Recenty I listened to “Killing the Bismark” by Ian Ballantyne, which was a fantastic account of the hunt for Bismark by the Royal Navy, mostly old from the perspective of that navy through accounts of those who were there. That definitely has me considering naval wargaming!

Following on from that, I’ve been listening to James Holland’s “Brothers in Arms”, an account of the Sherwood Rangers’ participation in the later years of the war, again told from a very personal level through accounts of men of the regiment. I’m not all the way through it yet (so far it has been excellent!), but the early chapters cover Normandy on and after D-Day which has motivated me to paint more of my Normandy armies (and also consider buying Shermans…).

So here is the next batch of Germans for the late war army I’ve been putting together, with first up an officer and forward observation officer

The officer model I found really fun, he looks right out of Indiana Jones or another pulpy movie with the round glasses and the luger.

Both models are from Warlord Games.

Next up are opponents that regularly show up in “Brothers in Arms”: the SS.

Last post on the army I made the comment about how I felt conflicted with painting an army of real world villains (thanks to everyone who commented by the way, I feel like some really positive and constructive discussions were had on the topic). If there was any unit to have misgivings about painting, here they are.

This camouflage pattern was a lot of work! I can see why display painters are drawn to it, and army painters dread it! My hands were cramping up after repeatedly dotting these 10 models. I used Vallejo German Camo Medium Brown, Vallejo German Camo Dark Green, and Vallejo Gobin Green for the pattern. As a reference I used an illustration in a very useful book I have on WW2 uniforms.

I plan on running these models in one of three ways: as a 10-man section, as two 5-man sections with an MG each, or two 5-man sections with MGs and assault rifles split up.

The MG models are some older Warlord Games metal models, which have one of the team members acting as a mobile tripod. I saw photos where this tripod-man was facing either way so I built the teams to have that man face both directions to add a bit of variation in what are otherwise identical poses. The rest of the models are from Warlord’s fairly new SS set.

This mostly leaves weapons teams to fill out the rest of the army as I currently plan on fielding it. Something like a couple of MG teams (with real tripods this time), an anti-tank gun, and a mortar team. I have quite a few more models in the collection, so most likely these plans will change, we will see!