German Stosstruppen and French Casualties

Just a quick update of my first tranche of figures for Curt’s AnalogueHobbies 2013 Painting Challenge for anyone who missed them when Curt posted them on his excellent blog.

There’s a 1918-vintage polygot selection of German Stosstruppen with MP18 Bergmann sub-machine guns, a German sniper, a couple of German Mauser Tankgewehr M1918 13.2mm anti-tank rifles and part of a “ditched” crew of an A7V tank, all in 25/28mm. These are effectively some of the “odds and ends” I’ve had around which I just wanted to get done before the main event. Think of them as a canapé with light champagne before the French arrive proper!

I played around with a couple of things here. The green-stuff German camouflage cloak on the spotter for the double-based anti-tank rifle is improvised, but not completely unrealistic I hope. I used something similar on some German snipers in 2012, and I thought it fairly likely that the Mauser Tankgewehr M1918 would have selected their targets with similar sniper-like stalking skills – at least as far as their huge weapon would have allowed them.

The camouflage cape on the sniper matches the terrain colours of our gaming boards and the improvised painted-on camouflage on German helmets in 1918.

The German tank crew figures are from Old Glory. This is the only manufacturer (to my knowledge) making 25/28mm German tank crews with their distinctive overalls. As sculpts go they fit size and dimensions-wise perfectly with Great War Miniatures figures. They’re quite reasonable sculpts and the images on the Old Glory site don’t really do the figures justice. They paint up very easily, and the officer has some super facial details. As many of the A7V tank crews transferred from other units, I’ve painted him in the uniform of a JägerSturmBataillon officer in some rather jazzy regimentals.

Et les Francais? Ah, well, I wanted to test Horizon Bleu on a couple of casualty figures first – mixing Vallejo Neutral Gray with Vallejo Mirage Blue seems to give a reasonable result, adding black and white to shade and highlight. So there are a couple of fallen Poilu on the bases as well, each scratch-built from a generic casualty figure.

Let me know what you think to my attempts at Horizon Bleu! I have already tinkered around with what you see here to add a little more highlighting. 

More, later in the week.....

Stosstrupptaktik – The Missing Map

As I mentioned in one of the comments on this Blog last night, the map for “Stosstrupptaktik”, the pre-game which accompanies my article “SturmAbteilung Vor!” in the TooFatLardies “Christmas Special”, went walk-about from the final version which was published.

I have no idea how this happened.  I’d done the map weeks ago (it was one of the first things to be finished).  Richard had done a splendid version for the magazine.  And yuletime gremlins had removed it.

Mea culpa, mes braves.

Anyway, here’s the map (my original) in both .jpg format and with a PDF in the right hand “Playtesting Scenarios, Campaign Diaries and Play-Aids” section.  It’s nothing very grand, but I hope that makes the pre-game in the magazine make sense now!

SturmAbteilung Vor!

You wait all year for a project to be finished….and two get done at (almost) the same time! You’ll remember that I was really struggling a few weeks ago to get any closure on a couple of projects.  It felt a little like I was project plate-spinning in a fashion much beloved from British family game shows of the 1970s. In the end, the darkest hour came just before the dawn.  

I managed to finish the ruined Rattenloch last week, and finally got to the end of writing my article “SturmAbteilung Vor!: A set of rule adaptations for using Stumtruppen, Stosstruppen and Ersatzstosstruppen in “Through the Mud and the Blood” for the TooFatLardies “Christmas Special” on Saturday morning.  OK, so it’s not the shortest title ever.  But it hopefully “does what it says on the tin”.  

It took me a while, but I got there in the end.  The "Special" should be available on the TFL website HERE by the time you read this.

In the end, I ended up with three or four times the material I finally put into the article.  I was rushing to leave stuff out, rather than force everything in.  Some sections are a lot briefer than I have wanted, and quite a bit of material about the creation, or fabrication, of the “stormtrooper myth” in the 1920s and 1930s didn’t make the cut.  I felt in a wargaming magazine I should concentrate on the hard facts mostly: organisation, tactics, deployment, military theory and battlefield practice.  Like all great projects, it’s unfinished – but it’s as finished as I could get it in the space Rich and Nick allowed me.

For those interested, here’s the introduction, reproduced by kind permission or Richard and Nick:

“If a group of wargamers were each to pick one formation to recreate in miniature out of all of those fighting on the Western Front in the Great War, it would be a safe guess that a sizeable number would choose a formation of German stormtroopers.  And that choice would be hardly surprising.

We think we know about these troops:  the image of their stallhelm and their bread-bags of hand grenades seem as distinctive as their innovative methods of fighting.  We have probably all seen the same photographs, of groups of aggressive, athletic, young men posing for the camera in a rear area, awaiting battle, perhaps a MG08/15 light machine gun at their feet or a MP18 Bergmann sub-machine gun carried proudly at the front of the formation. 

We think we know these troops, and how they should be used in our wargames.  Infiltration.  Aggression.  Storm.  Attack.  Speed.  Surprise.  We see them in our mind’s eye looming, masked, out of a cloud of phosgene gas.  A visceral, near-feral, uniquely Teutonic whirlwind tearing through their opponents.  “This is the New Man.  The storm soldier, the elite of Middle Europe.  A completely new race, cunning, strong and packed with purpose….the axis of the future” wrote Ernst Jünger in 1925.  We think we know all about these men, and their way of warfare.

And then we look closer.  We read further and look at some of the revisionism about the stormtroopers…or is that sturmtruppen … or stosstruppen … or ersatzstosstruppen?  What exactly were these formations?  Were they all the same?  Were they that different from British or French troops? How did they fight, and was it always in the same way? And what happened to them after the Kaiserschlacht, the Götterdämmerung on the Somme?  And perhaps, slowly, we start to see a far darker sub-text, one which unrolls through the early literature regarding stormtroopers in the 1920s and into the nationalistic writings of the 1930s.  We begin to wonder if there is a “Stormtrooper Myth”, or worse, mis-information.”

So, if you’re curious, and you’d like to read more, you now know where to go!

So the desk is just about clear for the next project.....  

Great War Great Reads: #1 – German Assault Troops of World War I

First, many apologies for my absence from the blog.  October has been a bit of an up and down month to say the least.  I was very busy at the end of September at work, and as soon as I finished the project I was working on I caught ‘flu. 

I’ve only had it once before, and I hadn’t remembered how awful it can be.  It’s taken a good two weeks to get over the worst of it, and in the process I’ve had to miss a great weekend of gaming in Burton with a couple of very good friends, Simon Gaudin and Craig Ambler.  Best laid plans and so forth – but all the same, I was deeply sorry I had to miss the weekend. 

Laid up in bed, there’ve been few high spots of the last couple of weeks in wargaming terms.  There’s not much you can do with the ‘flu other than lie in bed, as I am sure many of you know through similarly wretched experiences.  However, over the last week things have been getting back to normal and I’ve been working (very slowly) on my pictish warband.  More of that in the weeks to come.

 

I also finally managed to concentrate on a couple of books I’ve been saving for a while.  One of them is Thomas Wictor’s “German Assault Troops of World War I”.  This is a very lavish reference work, written by a very prominent contributor to various Great War online forums and follows his very well received first book on “German Flamethrower Pioneers of World War I”.  I thought I'd take the oportunity to review it here.