Tag: Germany

After typing up the last post, I did a quick tally of the points I’d painted for my Bolt Action army and found that I was pretty close to finishing 1000 points. All I needed was to paint up the Pak 40 and 120mm mortar teams. With that milestone so close, I decided to just go for it!

I really enjoyed painting both of these, the models are quite characterful and form this nice little vignette. The base for the Pak 40 was cut out of plasticard, as the round base provided was really too small.

After finishing these models, I realised that painting up another lieutenant model would let me fit in more of the tanks I’d painted a while back (In regular games of Bolt Action, you can add 1 tank per reinforced platoon, adding another lieutenant would let me split the infantry sections from my base list into two of these, giving me one more tank allowed). If I made these two tanks Tiger Is, the list would come really close to 2000pts (Tigers are veeery expensive, especially if crewed by veterans). I floated the idea of playing a game with these to some friends and they came back asking to play tomorrow! So I quickly painted up the second lieutenant this morning, ready for the game! He’s a little rough around the edges, but needs must!

Here’s the army at 2000pts:

As you can see, it’s not much bigger, just has larger cats!

I’m looking forward to this game, which will see this german army facing my 1000pts of 6th Airborne allied with 1000pts of late war russians! Might have to think a bit to make up a plausible explanation for how that scenario occurred!

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!

The WW2 bug is still very much around and I’ve now started painting the infantry in the German collection that was given to me. Starting with the Grenadiers, from Warlord Games’ plastic kit line.

I have 2 squads of these in the 1000pt list I’ve written up, both imaginatively armed in the exact same manner! 8 men, two as an MG team, one with Panzerfaust, and the rest with rifles.

I painted these using Duncan Rhodes’ guide, following the steps exactly up until some of the more detailed highlights that I skipped.

These were based with more base ready materials, this time the Scrublands mix. I think it looks quite nice, especially given the low amount of effort required!

I’ve been on a bit of a journey with these models, building and painting models that are evil in fantasy and sci-fi settings is one thing, but these are miniature representations of an organisation that caused harm in an unprecedented scaled to real people. I’ve had serious misgivings about painting and posting about this army, but at the end of the day I think historical wargaming can have a positive role in helping us and others keep in mind what happened in the past.

This is a bit more of a serious tone than usual on the blog, but I did want to address this as I think it’s important. I’ll probably talk some more about all this when I get to the troops of a more political nature…