Major Ballsup's Hobby Shed

Part 1 of this rambling story told of how I had first become interested in the French Indo-China and Algerian Wars.  We'd left it where I had moved onto other periods specifically late World War 2 Eastern Front.   We're now into the early 2000's.  I'd been very focused on building up a collection of 1/76th WW2 figures.  True to form I went off on a tangent after discovering the splendid 1/6th action figures from Dragon and started collecting these.  It wasn't long before I started kitbashing FIC and Algerian figures using WW2 items.  Now the Internet proved useful and I was procuring from all over. This had given me an outlet for my interest but I still was yet to wargame the period.  Then a couple of things happened around the same time at the end of 2005.  A local hobby shop opened and I found a Matchbox 1/76th M24 and then I discovered Liberation Miniatures.  Praise be!  Liberation did a specific Indo-China range.  Not...

I can pinpoint when my interest in the French/First Indo-China War and subsequently the Algerian War (of Independence) began.  It was in my pre/early teens and it was down to three books. I suspect like many boys of the late '70s and early '80s I'd been reading the Wotan series of pulp novels by Leo Kessler.  These told the story of a fictional SS unit and their involvement in every campaign of WW2, which bizarrely included the desert and Cassino.  The last few books followed Sergeant-Major Schulze the anti-hero of the series, as he survives WW2 to end up serving in the French Foreign Legion in Indo-China and then Algeria. At around the same time I was given Blandford Army Uniforms since 1945 as a Christmas present.  As well as showing uniforms from current (1980) armies the sections on the earlier conflicts were those that I found fascinating.  I think it's the mix of kit that appealed to me.  When I looked at the plates I thought the French paras and legi...