New PIAT Teams

Here's a brand new set of figures from Perry Miniatures, Projector, Infantry, Anti-Tank (or PIAT) teams for the Mediterranean theatres!  I already have one PIAT team for my Op Husky Canadians, but seeing how great these look, I couldn't resist 8^)

The set includes six men, or three teams.  There is this advancing team:

This operator is cocking the PIAT.  This is a great addition, as this was one of the more notorious aspects of the PIAT.  At the centre of the PIAT is a powerful spring, which required a huge effort to cock, and was one of several complaints about the weapon.  It's nice to see this aspect of the PIAT presented.

The third team is one firing the PIAT - I like this one the best.  The pose is great. 

By comparison, here is the PIAT team I assembled from the plastic Desert Rats box.

Unsurprisingly, this team looks pretty similar to the 2" mortar team and the Bren gun team made with the same poses!  

So I'm pretty pleased to have some differences for my PIAT teams.  Do I really need 4 PIAT teams?  Probably not, but it will be handy to have more than one.  Each platoon had a PIAT assigned, but in addition, it might come in handy for my universal carriers, as these have the option of deploying PIAT teams.  So there is at least a potential for me to need 2 or 3 PIAT teams, even if it ends up being small!

The Chances of Anything Coming from Mars....

When I was in high school, one of my favourite albums was Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds.  So when I opened my new Paperboys Little Wars book, and found this:

the opening of the album came back to me, Richard Burton's voice reciting "No one would have believed, in the last years of the nineteenth century, that human affairs were being watched from the timeless worlds of space..."

Of course it doesn't look that that in the book. No, the book has two innocent looking sheets:

And then with much cutting, shaping, gluing, substituting scotch tape for glue, adjusting, fussing, fitting, cussing and more, I eventually ended up with this delicate, wobbly, structure.  Looks pretty, as long as you don't look too closely! But this experience has taught me that I'm not much of a paper model builder 8-P

Civilians fleeing before the Martian tripod:

"Bows and arrows against the lightning!"  Soldiers attacking the tripod, to give a sense of the size of the thing.

"The Earth belonged to the Martians..."

German AB41 Armoured Car (stolen from the Italians!)

For the Germans in Italy, here is an armoured car, the Autoblinda 41.  It's an Italian armoured car, with a proud history of service in North Africa and Tunisia, often praised as the best Italian armoured car of the war.  It's not quite correct for German service on Sicily, though.  As long as Italy was in the war as an ally of Germany, the AB41 stayed in Italian service, but when the Italians sued for a separate peace in September 1943, the Germans captured hundreds of these vehicles and pressed them into their own service.  So while there were plenty of AB41s in German service after September '43, I've jumped the gun a bit by giving them to the Germans for Operation Husky.

This car is made by Blitzkrieg Models, which I purchased from Perry Miniatures.

The tank commander was converted from the Perry Miniatures Afrika Korps.

Most of the images I was able to find of the AB41 in German service, especially in Tunisia and Italy, show complex camouflage patterns.  I decided to keep it simple, though, and went with my version of dunkelgelb.  

The model comes with two different turrets, nominally one for the AB41 and one for the AB43.  The difference is in the shape and number of the hatches; both turrets have the 20mm cannon, so no difference in game terms.

The turrets can be swapped back and forth at need.

The commander is on a magnet, so can be removed as needed.

Peter Dennis' take on Little Wars

I recently purchased Peter Dennis' latest Paperboys Book, which is a reprint of H.G.Wells' Little Wars, the great-great-granddaddy of wargaming rules (not counting dreary Prussian Kriegsspiel stuff).  

The rules are quite light and fun, and focussed on knocking down toy soldiers with a toy cannon.  And in addition to the rules, which were written with the intention of playing with toy soldiers such as those made by W. Britain.  This being a Peter Dennis book, the bulk of the book consists of paper soldiers to cut out and assemble.

Unlike the soldiers in the previous Paperboys books, these paper soldiers are each individually based, and are much larger.  They are nominally 54 mm, but as I print them out on 8 1/2 x 11" sheets rather than A4, I have photoreduced them to 92%, so I guess these are 50 mm soldiers.

There are two armies, identified as "Red" and "Blue", but of course the Red Army is British, and Blue Army is French, both in presented in the uniforms of the late 19th Century.

Blue:

Red:

There are multiple troop types, including;

Red Grenadier Guards

Blue Regular Infantry

 Red Highlanders

 Red Indian Infantry

 Red Scots Guards

 Blue Zouaves

 Blue Lancers

 Blue Turcos

 Blue Sailors

 Blue Light Cavalry

 "Red" Hussars (despite the coat colours...)

 Red Dragoons

There are many other troop types that I haven't built yet.  In addition, Peter Dennis sells German-inspired troops as a download on his website, as well as paper buildings.  

Little Wars includes a sheet of civilians:

There is also a cannon and even a Martian tripod (inspired by another of H. G. Wells' works, the War of the Worlds).  I haven't yet made them, as they are quite tricky to build.  I've yet to decide if they are worth the bother!

Dangerous Dames 5

Three more Dangerous Dames!  A martial artist, a gangster and a possibly Scottish lady.

I wanted this martial artist to be brighter and more colourful than my usual fare.  She turned out a bit less bright than I hoped.  Maybe I need to add a few more bright colours into my paint selection.

Dark colours for this gangster, though!  I was tempted to add pinstripes, but realised that there was no hope that I'd get any sort of consistency so allowed discretion to be the better part of valour.

And finally the Scottish lady with a rifle.  Perhaps she is the owner of an estate in the Highlands, and has that rifle to deal with any trouble that might intrude, whether on 4 legs or 2.  She's also a bit of an experiment with tartans and dicing, as I have an upcoming project involving both of those painting challenges ;-)