Wednesday Workbench and Reading 26 June

And everything is primed! I've decided that tomorrow I will make a start on the tank and Jeeps, then paint up the crew figures. That's mostly just to get them out of the way and to allow me to test the paint scheme for the Paras (apart from the maroon berets - all the Jeep crew figures are in helmets). Once they are done, the SYW Russians will hit the table.


A very well packaged book arrived today from Paul Meekins. So well packaged that you could have driven a tank over it and the book wouldn't have been damaged*. This is it:

I've had a quick flick through and it should be a very interesting read. Although the title suggests that it only covers the Arnhem campaign, it also covers the squadrons earlier and later operations.

Over the last fortnight or so I have built up quite a stack of books to read:

Ermm, yes, that is quite a large stack relating to Operation Market Garden. The other two books are about the Aussies in the Pacific campaigns. "Jungle Cavalry" is about the Independent Companies/Commando Squadrons.

Just to break the monotony of all that factual stuff, I also have these:

The one by "Anonymous" is that 8th and (currently) final book in the Bourbon Kid/Red Mohawk series.

That should be enough to keep me going for a little while.



* some hyperbole may be involved in that statement.

New Stuffs!

No Army Review tonight - some shinies came in the post today and I have some other purchases to show off.

A couple of weeks ago, while I was on leave I ordered some reinforcements for my SYW Russian cavalry from Essex. They were sent out for delivery by UK Mail. Who messed me around royally. I eventually (after speaking to Essex) asked them to return to sender. Anyway, Essex kindly agreed to send them out by Royal Mail when they came back and this evening the package was waiting for me when I got home from work. It seems that Royal Mail had no difficultly putting the padded envelope through my letterbox on their first delivery attempt. So, shiny piccies time!

Two hussar regiments plus a hussar command group

Four regiments of dragoons or horse grenadiers

Two 4-horse wagons

I'll be prepping these in batches over the next few weeks. I'm taking the second week in August off work, so I'm hoping to get at least some of them painted up during that time - maybe the dragoons and horse grenadiers if they're prepped and primed in time. At this point I'm still debating what mix of dragoons and horse grenadiers to do. I'll probably go two and two - that way all the dragoon regiments that fought in the SYW will be done and there will only be two more regiments of horse grenadiers that I need to paint in the future.

If things go well, I may get the hussars (Gruzinskiy and Moldavskiy) done and the hussar uniformed general plus staff - possibly with a flag (I usually snip them into sabre shape as hussars didn't carry flags in the field).

The wagons have no role in King of the Battlefield rules, but could be used as objective markers or for scenarios using Honours of War. I might need to get a couple more and some covers and supplies to go in them. I'll also need some long bases to put them on, so those will be the last to get painted.


My other purchases were all books. You may recall me talking about my thought of doing Brandy Station in 2 or 3mm. Well, the books are research for that idea.

"Hang on, one of those is about Gettysburg!"

Yep, well spotted that reader. An alternative idea to doing Brandy Station is to look at the cavalry actions around Gettysburg which are generally overlooked. Hence this book. I do have one more book about Brandy Station on pre-order which gets published/re-issued tomorrow although it may not come in to the shop for a few days.

More Smoke Markers and Finds from Home

This evening, I finally got round to gluing the "smoke" I stained a few weeks ago onto bases. That gives me another ten markers for Car Wars. Considering how little of the stuffing I've used so far, if I were to stain all the stuffing in that one cushion, I could probably make enough markers to completely cover a 6 x 4 table, maybe larger.

Don't worry - I'm not (quite) mad enough to actually do that!


At the weekend, I headed down to Sussex to see my dad on Fathers' Day. It was also a good excuse to see whether any of my old Car Wars stuff from teenage years was still there. I was pretty sure that a few years ago, before I got back into gaming, I'd said to chuck it out as I 'd never have any use for it in the future, but there was always a chance I was wrong.



Sadly I wasn't wrong and it had all been chucked out. Oh well, never mind.


However, while rooting around in the various boxes of my old things I did find these:

Rather dated now of course, but books I'm sure many a wargamer will remember with fondness.

Now that I've speed-read through them both, I suppose it's time to hit the paint table again.