Nuenen House #3 Finished?

I thought that I had finished this first house in my Band of Brothers project, but after looking at it on my painting table for the last few days, I'm not sure it is finished. I think that I have put my finger on the source of the problem: the roof tiles are too clean and don't match the rest of the building, so probably need a bit of weathering to blend them in. I might also paint a few more of the individual bricks too; the two ends of the house are a bit plain whereas I think the two long sides look better with a higher proportion of darker bricks.

Rather than just taking photos of the buildings, I thought that having some figures next to them, to indicate the size and scale, would help set them off.  So, I've bought a platoon's worth of the 82nd Airborne.

These are the first American Airborne that I have painted, so I painted up the two Pathfinder figures first and tried out some colour schemes on them to work out how I would paint the rest. If they didn't work out, then I probably wouldn't use them in a game anyway. My issue with the Pathfinder figures is that they all have mohawks! Is this just a WWII myth? Was there a photo of just a couple of guys from the Pathfinders with crazy haircuts, which has influenced everyone's perception of them ever since, or was this actually really common?

I've also been trying out a new painting technique, which I think looks OK so far. It doesn't involve slapping loads of Agrax Earthshade over the whole model!

I plan to paint up 16 figures and then get back onto designing, architecting, cutting and building the next building in Nuenen.

Progress on Nuenen House #3

This is the first house from my Band of Brothers Nuenen project, but I've called it House #3 based on its map location. I realise that this is nowhere near as exciting for anyone other than me - it's just another MDF kit building - but for me it has grown from an idea into something that is almost ready to place on the wargaming table.

Progress is being made! The roofers need to fit the tiles :-) but all the walls are up and in the process of being finished off. Once I have added the mortar to the bricks on the chimney, I will then affix the pre-cut tiles. Here is one elevation with the base colour painted on and mortar added to the brickwork.

It has taken several weeks to get to this point and I have learned many more lessons on the way, so the next building will inevitably be better and take less time to complete. This was the first piece off the laser cutter, about a week ago; I painted the edges of the internal window frames prior to assembling it just to make it a bit easier.

Here is the interior view of the same piece with the "glazing" added.

And the same piece from the outside.

This shot shows the window cills; it also shows where I forgot to switch on the air assist for the laser cutter when it was engraving the brick courses: it has left a burnt residue!

One lesson: I didn't account for the extra 2mm required for the base, so there are some small gaps where the walls are supposed to slot into place.

Starting to take shape; this is the four internal walls glued to the base.

The first of the exterior walls glued onto the interior face.

And another external wall in place.

Once all the walls had dried, I attached the gable ends and started to paint the base colour. It is quite a bright yellow ("Chueca" from B&Q) when it first goes on, but it does dull down once the "mortar" is applied.

Really starting to look like a house now, with the roof, chimneys, dormer window and decorative brickwork added, plus the base colour painted all over. I've also affixed thin card, again cut to near perfection by the laser, to the bottom of the house beneath the line of the windows. I need to allow for an extra millimetre when cutting due to the thickness of the "kerf".

A close-up shot of one wall. Note that the base colour is not uniformly applied, which is by design because it makes the final brickwork look more natural and weathered.

Once the "mortar" has been applied, it looks a lot more faded ,weathered and irregular.

The last bit of laser cutting I have done for this house was to cut (and then paint) some brick arches to fit above the windows and doors. The mortar needs to be applied to these too, which will lighten the brick colour.

The end is in sight for this building, so I've ordered up some Artizan US paratroopers from Great Escape Games, so that I can take some photos with Easy Company in the foreground.

Band of Brothers - Nuenen House #3

For my Band of Brothers Nuenen project, I now have made a decent start on drawing each building. I've completed an elevation view and an "architectural" drawing (with measurements) for each side of three buildings so far. 

Building #1 was the first on the map, so I started with that, but in retrospect, I should have probably started with an easier building first. The challenge with building #1 is that it adjoins building #2 and several aspects of it were not particularly clear, or even visible from watching the episode, even watching it frame-by frame. Building #1 (and #2) is in the background when the British tanks move into the village and stop prior to being shot up by the Tiger. Another reason for perhaps not choosing to start with buildings #1 and 2 was the complexity of some of the features. Anyway, it is done now and I learnt some lessons along the way, which meant that I managed to complete all the drawings for house #3 in about 2 hours. Building #1 and #2 probably took about 12 hours of work!

Here is what the eastern facing elevation (aspect J) of building #1 and the northern-facing side of building #2 (aspect H) looks like. Aspect H was a complete fabrication on my part because it does not feature in any of the shots in Band of Brothers. I think that aspect J is a reasonable representation of what is in BoB; more surface detailing will be added when I make the actual model though.

And here is the more accurately proportioned architectural drawing, which shows the major features.

The process I followed for getting to that point above was to watch the battle scene from episode 4 in slow motion, even going so far as to slow it down and viewing a frame at a time, so that I could capture some screen shots. I then created a "mood board" of all the various views of each building, like these two for building #3.

Putting all these screen shots together next to each other also allowed me to piece together the route of each squad through the town and thus create the map. That process was probably 8-10 hours work of watching, noting down, re-watching, correcting etc!

Here are the four graphical representation and architectural drawings for House #3.

The next thing I will do, probably before I have finished drawing all the buildings, is to start making some of them. I've started researching whether it will be worth it to buy a laser cutting machine and creating my own MDF buildings. 

There are three companies which already manufacture some excellent buildings in MDF: 4Ground, Sarissa and Warbases, all of which look good. The problem is that none of their buildings are similar enough to the BoB Nuenen set to be useful. I'm sure that I will end up buying several of their buildings though to flesh out the town; the BoB set only contains nine buildings, which isn't much of a town, so it might look better with a few more in the periphery of my "film set" buildings.

My other option is to scratch build each one, but I quite like the idea, now that I have gone to the effort of visualising and drafting plans for each building, to be able to make several of each. I quite enjoy scratch building (check out my cereal packet Mediterranean shepherd's hut or my Cretan church, for example), but making the buildings using a laser cutter would be a new challenge. The model I have been looking at is the Atomstack A5 Pro. There are some other challenges which come with using a laser cutter, such as getting the design software, building a fume extraction hood and learning how to design the buildings.  Sounds like it's going to be lots of fun!

Band of Brothers: Re-building Nuenen

It is the 25th anniversary year of the HBO mini-series, Band of Brothers, which followed the men of Easy Company, 2nd Battalion, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division from their training camp in Toccoa, Georgia to the end of the war in Germany in 1945, via several major battles of the Second World War in Europe.

I caught the first episode entirely by accident whilst in a hotel in Boston, Massachusetts. I was due to catch a flight early next morning (10th September 2001) down to Florida, so was getting an early night and staying in my hotel. I must have flicked over to HBO within a minute or two of the first episode starting and was immediately hooked. The tragic events of the next day (9/11) overshadowed the launch of BoB, but I was hooked right from the first few minutes and have been a huge fan ever since. Over the years, I have watched the series many times on DVD, though had not seen any of the episodes within the last few years due to a new TV being incompatible with my DVD player. The Band of Brothers box set has been gathering dust for the last few years as a result.

Something I started doing during the pandemic is listening to podcasts and having avidly consumed all of the incomparable We Have Ways of Making You Talk podcast from James Holland and Al Murray, I looked around for something else to listen to and discovered across the official HBO Band of Brothers podcast, which is hosted by Roger Bennett.

The BoB podcast features in-depth interviews with significant contributors to the show, such as Tom Hanks and John Orloff, but also features discussions with some of the actors. If you're a fan of the Second World War and/or BoB, then I highly recommend it. Listening to the podcast re-stoked my interest, so I found an older TV, which had a SCART socket, so that I could plug my DVD player into it and start re-watching the series again.

Episode 4 ("Replacements") particularly caught my imagination. When fighting with toy soldiers on the tabletop (i.e. playing Iron Cross) the battle scene from that episode is the sort of thing I see in my head when playing. Iron Cross allows for the fast-developing attack, but with a huge amount of uncertainty about which way it could work out, which I had not found when playing other games. I'm not a big fan of having to learn lots of rules, so the simplicity of Iron Cross suits me perfectly, but it still allows for lots of decision-making during the game and therefore fun. Iron Cross plug over! ;-)

A machine that had completely passed me by until watching Ep.4 was the Jagdpanther, which emerges from behind a barn and starts to systematically destroy the British Sherman and Cromwell tanks. I built a Rubicon kit of a Jagdpanther a few weeks ago, which set me thinking about gaming the Easy Company attack on Nuenen. 

I've done a lot more reading about the subject in the last couple of weeks and it turns out that whilst the 101st Airborne did fight in the town of Nuenen, the battle depicted in BoB is partly fictional, obviously for the purposes of dramatic effect and creative licence, though it is rooted in reality. For example, the Jagdpanthers, which destroyed the British 44th Royal Tank Regiment, were not situated in Nuenen, but a battle did take place not too far away in Koevering. The layout of the town in that episode is also not strictly factual, though the buildings featured are based on real buildings in Nuenen. None of this detracts from enjoying BoB though.

So... onto my next big project, which has got me quite excited, though with a little trepidation regarding the scale. I have created much bigger gaming tables before: below are a few photos of a demo table (a collaboration between Great Escape Games and 4Ground for Salute 2014), which featured 111 separate buildings and was very loosely modelled the town of Villers Bocage. Here are a few photos of the Villers Bocage table. For Salute 2015, I helped to create a new demo table which measured 18 feet long by 6 feet wide.  I played a game on that table again recently - see photos here.

The trepidation about this project stems from the fact that I want to accurately recreate the town of Nuenen as faithfully as possible to its depiction in BoB. Why?  Because it is a challenge and I enjoy a challenge. The difficulty with that goal stems from the fact that, whilst the battle is captured on film, there is really a huge lack of detail to refer to. The TV drama is focused on the advance of the men of Easy Company into the outskirts of the town and their subsequent retreat; it is not focused on the buildings themselves, which only form the backdrop to the action.

I mentioned my plan to someone and they asked why I would want to build a fictional town to re-fight a fictional battle, which I suppose is a reasonable question. I think that many (most?) tabletop wargaming battles are not really accurate representations of a real battle, but the clincher for me is that I think most wargamers get into the hobby, or certainly have their interest (re)ignited from seeing TV or film, such as Band of Brothers, and are able to picture a specific scene when playing. 

The real attack on Nuenen by the 101st Airborne is documented to some degree and there are some historical records about the town, but can anyone accurately piece that together and picture it in their head? I hope that rebuilding the BoB version of Nuenen in 1/56th scale will capture the imagination far more because we can all watch the battle scene on Youtube at any time and compare it to what I'm building.

Anyway, what I have managed to do so far (after re-watching Ep.4 frame by frame several times over) is map out what I think is the layout of the fictional Nuenen. I am reasonably confident that I have got the overall layout correct, though the map I have sketched needs a little bit more refinement on the scale/size and relative positions of the buildings. I've sketched a map - the key makes perfect sense to me, but if you've got questions or comments, please post a note in the comments section of the blog. I have now started on "designing" each building and will post up some progress shots soon.

In the episode, the tanks are slowly rolling left to right along the road at the top of the map. The black cloud shape at the top-right is the burning German half-track. Lt Brewer walks out in front of the lead Sherman, raises his binoculars to his eyes, and then gets shot at the position marked with the red cross. The blue arrow shows the subsequent advance of Sgt "Bull" Randleman and his squad. The Germans are located to the right of the map. It will all start to make more sense as I start sharing pictures of the buildings!

Late war German vehicles

I've been working on a couple more late war German vehicles, a JagdPanther and a Wirbelwind, both kits from Rubicon, for my Iron Cross armies.

The Wirbelwind is based on the chassis of a Panzer IV, so in common with a lot of Rubicon kits, there were plenty of spare parts, so I also built the Panzer IV turret at the same time, so add to the other two Panzer IVs that I built a couple of weeks ago.

I've got a little bit more weathering to do; I've only added a small amount of wet mud so far and will be applying lighter coloured weathering powders over the top. I tried out a different technique for painting the camouflage on this vehicle and I'm not particularly happy with it, so will return to the same technique I used on the Jagdpanther below and most other vehicles that I have been painting over the last year. Unless you try, you don't learn though.

As with the Panzer/Wirbelwind, there is more weathering to done on the Jagdpanther, to which I have applied quite a bit of wet mud. I'm also much happier with how the camouflage turned out.

I had never really taken much notice of the Jagdpanther (preferring the more mainstream Panzer III and IV workhorses for my armies) until I re-watched episode 4 ("Replacements") of Band of Brothers. It's the scene where Easy Company are riding into a Dutch town called Nuenen on some British Shermans and then a Jagdpanther comes roaring out from its camouflaged ambush position.

I immediately thought that I had to get one of those, plus some Shermans for it to fight against. It has also inspired me to get back into making some more terrain loosely based on Nuenen, which is where the scene is (very loosely) based, so that I can recreate the scene on the tabletop. This chap has visited Nuenen and compares the actual town with the Band of Brothers set: Visiting Band of Brothers: The Battle of Nuenen? | WW2 Traveling #5 - YouTube  Obviously, it's a bit different, but I don't think it detracts at all from the BoB series.

Waiting on the production line is a bit of opposition: a platoon of Shermans and a Firefly.

As noted above, there are always spare bits in each Rubicon kit, so with the addition of a tiny bit of plasticard and a few odds and ends out of my Rubicon bits box, I have created a second Jagdpanther in a hull down position. Before I make a start on the Sherman platoon and any Dutch buildings for my fictional recreation of Nuenen, I'll get this painted up.

Plenty to do!

AAR - Operation Weserübung

I've had a great afternoon's gaming versus Stuart playing an Iron Cross scenario loosely based on Operation Weserübung, the German invasion of Denmark on 9th April, 1940, which lasted approximately 6 hours before the Danes capitulated. I was attacking with 400 points of a fully motorised Aufklarungsabteilung of the 198th Infantry Division.  Stuart was defending with 200 points of partly mobile Danish infantry - he fielded a mixture of motorcycle and bicycle troops, plus a couple of units of foot-sloggers.

The order of battle for the Germans was:

• Infantry HQ
• 7 x Infantry
• Heavy machine gun
• Mortar
• All of the above infantry and support units were mounted in either trucks, half tracks or on motorcycles
• 2 x Panzer 38(t)
• 2 x SdKfz.222 scout cars

The order of battle for the Danish was:

• Infantry HQ
• 2 x infantry on bicycles
• 2 x infantry on foot
• Autocannon mounted on a motorcycle
• Heavy machine gun

We played the Capture scenario, which meant that the Danes were hidden at the start of the game and could benefit from the new Ambush rule. It also meant that, as defender, Stuart rolled for additional command tokens at the start of each new turn, something he excelled at! The mission objective for the attacking Germans was to capture the white house (and gate across the road) to the bottom-right of the photo below; the start line was the table edge at the top of the photo.

Please excuse the un-Danish looking terrain...we only decided the night prior to the game that we were going to give Stuart's Danes a run-out, otherwise I would have prepared something a bit better than French buildings on a Mediterranean table. Having said that, I don't think it looked too bad. The Danish troops looked absolutely ace though.

In the first turn, the majority of the German forces deployed onto the table and moved forward, leaving one-third in reserve. On the left flank, astride the road, the two Panzers and two units of infantry in half-tracks advanced incautiously because they had not yet spotted any opposing forces. As they neared some likely points of resistance, the infantry dismounted and took up firing positions.

On the right flank, the two scout cars and two units of motorcycle infantry moved forwards towards the edge of a dense woodland.

As soon as the grenadiers had dismounted from their half-tracks they came under intense fire from hidden Danish forces; a vicious, close range firefight erupted. The 38(t) moved up to provide fire support for the grenadiers, but was then engaged by a Danish anti-tank weapon.

The defenders' second line then opened up adding more weight of fire to the now-isolated Germans.

Emboldened by the success of their opening ambush, the Danish command squad, replete with bugler, charged down the main road to encourage his front line soldiers in the defence of their homeland.

The German front line started to dissolve when a unit of Danes on bicycles pedalled hard towards their flank, dismounted and started to pour more fire onto the isolated infantry unit. The morale tokens were piling up on my infantry and despite trying to recover them with Company Morale Tests (lots of ones were rolled!), things started to look dire.

The anti-tank gun scored a direct hit on the Panzer causing it to explode and burst into flames; meanwhile the grenadiers succumbed to the combined weight of fire from the Danes and were destroyed. 2-0 to the Danes by the end of the first turn!  We were playing a new rule regarding hidden units being able to fire in ambush, without being interrupted, which worked out well for Stuart, but not so much for me. The game mechanics felt right though.

The second turn meant that the German commander could bring up his reserves: three units of infantry and the HMG moved up the road and joined in the battle on the German's left flank. One unit occupied the top floor of the house, which gave them a superior firing position and the HMG set up and started laying down some withering fire. The Danish bicycle troops made a sharp exit by slinging their bikes over the hedge and pedalling for all they were worth down the road back towards their own lines.

The newly arrived German infantry, ably supported by the mortar and HMG, started to make their superior numbers felt and caused the Danish soldiers to slowly fall back bit by bit as they took casualties...the AT gun roared off down the road to take up a new position. 

They put up stiff resistance all the way though, not least due to the number of sixes that Stuart rolled when taking Company Morale Tests. I only managed to roll one 6 all game, despite probably taking a few dozen CMTs throughout ;-(

Further support arrived on the left flank in the form of more mounted infantry to keep up the pressure. However, despite their overwhelming numbers, the Germans could not get into gear to mount a convincing attack; too many units suffered from morale problems and could just not get a break when taking morale tests.

Meanwhile, whilst this action was taking place, the leading German motorcycle troops were racing around the right-hand side of the forest in an attempt to outflank the Danes and get into their rear.

A second troop was hot on their heels.

In the centre, the two scout cars were trying to provide some support to the suppressed infantry, but also trading shots with the Danish AT gun. Given the morale problems elsewhere on the battlefield, the German commander decided to pull the scout cars back behind the cover of the building in the middle of the battlefield where they could continue to provide some fire support, but without being mortally threatened by the AT gun.

To counter this new threat in their rear, the Danes hustled an infantry squad back down the road and took up a defensive position next to the gate.

Back on the left flank, the enfilading fire slowly took its toll on the Danish infantry with casualties starting to mount. The battle was now starting to turn in favour of the attackers.

The Danes took up positions behind walls adjacent to the house on the main road.

With the Danish perimeter starting to collapse, the German commander ordered his units forward in a concerted attack. The scout cars moved forward and combined their fire with the mortar, which proved to be deadly accurate, and eliminated the AT gun. Next in their sights was the Danish HMG, which kept up a significant rate of fire and held the centre of the battlefield for most of the battle.

The perimeter continued to draw closer and closer to the house, with significant morale markers being inflicted onto the Danes, but only for them to be recovered again. I blame the bugler!

The coup-de-grace was delivered by the now-dismounted motorcyclists who destroyed the last Danish infantry squad, who had been valiantly defending the gate.

Overall, this was a really enjoyable game, not least because I managed to achieve a rare win over Stuart. We road-tested a few Iron Cross rules amendments too, which I will post about another time.