Women's Battalion of Death

 As I noted in my recent post for my WWI Russian Army, the force includes a few members of Maria Bochkareva's Women's Battalion of Death, from Siberia Miniatures.   The figures however are big, beefy soldiers, who tower over the regular soldiers. While I want a full platoon of the Battalion of Death, I decided that the majority of the woman soldiers should be closer in size to their male counterparts.  However I love that at least a few of the women soldiers satisfy the stereotype of the big, strong Russian peasant woman!

Fortunately, Wargames Atlantic's digital shop includes STL files for 3D printing the Women's Battalion of Death (WBD from now on).  Now, I don't have a 3D printer, and the WGA shop has a pretty strict licence attached to STL files that it sells, so I decided to purchase printed models from WGA's partner, Only Games.  Naturally, I couldn't purchase just the WBD figures, so I boosted the order with some Viking shieldmaidens, French female resistance fighters and Queen Zenobia of Palymira.  When my order arrived, I was pleasantly surprised to find that I received 9 French partisans, instead of the 5 I was expecting, and 5 Zenobias instead of 2.  Look to see these all painted up in a future blog post. Today the attention belongs to the WBD!

The 20 figures came loose in a bag.  OnlyGames did a good job of stripping the supports, which I imagine was quite a lot of work. I still needed to do some minor cleanup but what was left for me was quite minor, not much different from metal or plastics.

The figures are well proportioned, no exaggerated boobage.  In fact, as long as figures clothed, women soldiers don't really look much different from men in 28mm!  One thing that did stand out for me was that the women's heads all came with hair nicely pulled back into a tidy bun.  However, the recruits into the WDB all got the standard Russian army head shave, as can be seen in photos of the WDB soldiers.  

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/38/Ruk_genskii_battalion_1917.jpg/473px-Ruk_genskii_battalion_1917.jpg?20131018092953

My solution was to cut off the buns.  It was too much to completely shave the heads, besides the hair would gradually grow back as the soldiers completed training before moving to the front.

The women took some assembling, about the same as with multi-part plastic figures.  Plastic cement is no good but CA glue worked well.  They are mounted to 1/4" washers, same as the WGA Russian men.

And here they are painted to match their male counterparts.

Here are a couple done up as officers, including the only one that was allowed to keep her hair in a bun!

These three are intended to serve as NCOs, probably as Yefreiters (section leaders, equivalent to corporals).

A firing line!

Here is a comparison with WGA on the left and Siberia Miniatures on the right.

And another comparison, WGA WBD, WGA man and Siberia Miniatures WBD.  The WGA woman's proportions are not extreme, and match well with the male soldier.  Of course both are shrimps compared to the Siberian WBD!

I've now got 25 members of the WBD plus Maria 'Yashka' Bochkareva herself!  I have a scenario ready to go, but of course it calls for 31 WBD figures :P  So I will still need to make up some numbers with men, but as they match closely I don't think it will be obvious as long as I screen for beards and moustaches!