First outing last night for Adrian's new armies for the Wars of Italian Unification - Neopolitan Piedmontese, so just a few photos of the action.
The Neopolitans attack a town sector... they were summarily repulsed.. ouch.
Had to photograph this (for me this is a rarity..) - a Neopolitan M5 Shock unit went into the attack, four combat dice needing 5s or 6s to it... here's the roll.. made Adrian's eyes water, I can tell you.
That unit was then attacked by 3 units of Piedmontose cavalry. Fortunately they boys stood their ground and were just recoiled (it could have been much worse!!).
Lastly just a couple of shots of Adrian's units alongside some of his beautifully hand made Italian buildings.
A brief update on the expansion of the 1914 Russian forces. Below are photos of the first two regiments which represent half of the fighting stands in a Great War Spearhead division.
This first regiment is painted as a 'conscript' regiment might have looked with old 1904 issue green and white clothing left over from 1904.
This second regiment is painted more 'conventionally' in the regulation 1914 'khaki green'. I have made a conscious effort to vary the shadings of the 'khaki' to represent the vagaries of massed production of dyes and uniforms, and the varying rates of fading of the fabrics. I achieve this by mixing small quantities of paint on the palette as I paint. I take a Vallejo British khaki brown, and blend in a little blue. The blue mixes with the yellow pigment in the khaki to give the greenish hue.
I also occasionally blend a little Citadel Kommando khaki to produce a more faded brown shade.
I make no secret of the fact that the Spearhead stable of rules rank only slightly behind Volley and Bayonet as my all time favourite rules system. I play Great War Spearhead, WW2 and Modern Spearhead. When friend Nick G was around for a game recently he spotted the WW2 Spearhead rules set on the shelf and after a browse asked if we could try a game. Now I play WW2 SH in 6mm, while Nick odes his WW2 (mostly Crossfire I think) in 20mm. He asked if SH could work in 20mm. Now infantry are fine, but we did discuss the ground scale distortion that occurs with the larger 20mm vehicles. Despite this, we decided to give it a try. I set up a small 'training'; game with a battalion each of 1944 Germans and British. The Germans were supported by a small unit of 2 PzKwIIINs and the British battalion was supported by a 6pdr AT gun.
Nick took the Germans. The tanks advanced down a ridge line in the centre of the table and bumped straight into an infantry company. Further to the rear the 6pdr was sited in support. A combination of platoon AT fire and the 6pdr fire destroyed the tank platoon.. dashed good luck, but Nick had learned the first lesson... make sure infantry and armour support each other.
Nick's infantry advanced in a hook around the British left flank, although in responding to the armour threat I was able to re-orient the British defence to tackle the advancing Germans.
A bitter fight erupted as the two infantry battalions went 'head to head'.
Trying to take advantage of German suppression the British close assaulted a German platoon, thinking that there was no other platoon available to offer fire support. However Nick's HMG was able to bring fire to bear and stopped the British platoon in its tracks.
Bitter fighting ensued, but the Germans were winning the firefight, and it would soon all be over.
I am aware that others already play WW2 SH in 20mm, but for me it was something new, and it worked. This was a 'training' game for Nick with very small forces, and I still have my doubts about games with the more usual concentrations of vehicles where each side might include a battalion of armour, but it will be well worth trying. And I think Nick enjoyed it.. game on!!!
I
recently finished reading ‘The Forgotten General” (ISBN 978 1 877505 07 2),
Jock Vennell’s biography of Major General Sir Andrew Russell (Allen and Unwin,
2011).
I
first became aware of Russell’s extraordinary achievements when reading Glyn
Harper’s ‘Spring Offensive’, detailing the New Zealand Division’s part in the
Second Battle of the Somme in March 1918, and recall thinking at the time that
Russell must surely rank as one of the truly gifted generals of World War 1.
Indeed, Vennell joins Harper and Pugsley in saying so.
Russell
was born in New Zealand and sent to England for his education, at the end of
which he passed out from Sandhurst with the sword of honour for the best cadet
officer of his year in 1887. His professional career with the British army came
to an end when he left the army, bored with the frontier duties and attitudes
that he found. He commanded the NZ Brigade at Gallipoli and came out of the
campaign with a Knighthood, and command of the NZ Division that was then sent
to France. He commanded the Division right through to the end of the war,
turning down a Corp Command suggested by of both Haig and Godley, as his health
failed in the last few months of the war.
This
is the story of an extraordinary man who made (and admitted) his share of mistakes (the NZ Division’s
losses in their 12 October 1917 attack at Passchendaele would be his worst) but
who learned quickly. He valued the lives of his men, and combined tough
discipline with tactical innovation and thoroughness of preparation and
planning, to create one of the best performing divisions on the Western Front.
In
the Preface, Vennell writes:
“…
prominent military historian Dr Chris Pugsley
went much further, rating Russell as not only the outstanding divisional
commander among the British armies that fought on the Western Front, but
the one
military commander of genius that New Zealand produced in the twentieth
century.”
If
you are looking for an in depth analysis of Russell’s performances on the battlefield,
then you would be better advised to read Harper’s ‘Spring Offensive’, but for a
fascinating view of the life of New Zealand’s ‘Forgotten General’, you could do
little better than to read Vennell’s biography. I highly recommend the book to all 'students' of World war 1, and New Zealand military history.
I hadn't intended this blog to become an 'Army Diary'. This week's work however has added the first of the new infantry stands, and a few of the required MMG stands, and as these are the first for several years I thought I'd add them for completeness (but I have no intention of adding photos every time a few more stands roll off the painting pins!!)
These first infantry are painted as reservists might have been equipped - clothed in old reserve (i.e. 1904) uniforms. There are a few (the lucky few) in this batch who have been issued with the correct post 1912 green khaki uniforms too. The bulk of the divisions will of course be painted with the green-hued khaki, but these 'reservists' will make a nice visual break, and a break in the painting tedium as well. The 3 new MMG stands are in the background.
This is the Divisional Command stand, and I thought that painting these guys with blue 'Cavalry Uniform' trousers might represent the probable 'hierachy' that existed in so many 1914 armies.
In Great War Spearhead each infantry stand represents a company, and the base size represents the area occupied by a deployed company in the context of the ground scale used in the rules. Typically a full strength battalion in GWSH would be represented by four company stands, and the theoretical Russian TOE has one MMG stand per battalion (representing the allocation of the Regimental MMGs to the battalions).
All of these figures are from the HaT 20mm range. The infantry come from the Russian infantry set, while the MMGs and the Divisional Command stand use figures from the Russian Heavy Weapons set.
The artillery component of the 1914 Russian force is now finished with the completion of 5 stands of Putilov 76mm with the crew painted as foot artillery. The figures on the end battery show some of the crew painted in the 1904 style green trousers. I also tried to get quite a variation in 'khaki' with varying shades of the theoretical green khaki, some with more of a brown tinge, and quite a few faded to greyer khaki (attained by mixing grey with the khaki colour itself.) I mix the colours on the palette in small quantities so tat I ma mire likely to get differing shades as I work.
When Stan brought along the Putilovs, he also handed me a box of British 4.5 Howitzers (also but HaT), announcing that according to his sources 900 of these were shipped to Russia. Now these were not guns I'd planned on painting.. in GWSH they are most likely to be off table, so no models required. However (as Stan obviously knew) once I'd seen them there was no going back. I'd run out of Russian artillery crew, so resorted to crew from the Heavy Weapons box to crew these guns.
So finally here is the 'artillery park' complete. Five stands of foot artillery, three stands of horse artillery, and 3 stands of heavier Corp guns.
As a final note, a commment on the HaT kits. These are moulded in hard plastic, are historically accurate, and go together like a dream. The crew are the modern gluable soft plastic that HaT now uses, althugh I had no cause to glue anything about the figures themselves. Highly recommended.
I'm surprised at how quickly I've managed to get back into the swing of things with my "Restart WW1" project (although the end of the academic year helps). So here are the first fruits of my labour (and the first 20mm WW1 figures I've painted in quite some time).
The three guns (HaT Putilov 76mm field guns) represent a Great War Spearhead artillery regiment, with each model representing a battery. These guns are horse artillery (hence the blue trousers on the crew), while the remainder of the guns I paint will be field artillery.
I thought I'd pose them with some cavalry (Dragoons) to create a little of the feel of these guys on the table top. The foot figures are Hat Russian infantry, while the mounteds are Strelets Russian Dragoons.
