Catching up on things done in 2011: US infantry finished

Another 'quick win' in terms of completing things was finishing off some of my US Infantry for Rapid Fire or Cross Fire. In truth all, like the US Marines, the hard work ie. painting, was done quite a few years ago, maybe even 10 years ago in fact, but I had only done the most basic job in terms of basing. This made them look decidedly unimpressive next to the Germans which I had bought to fight against them, and I'd nicely based up to match with the Russian army I'd completed.

All of these are Revell US Infantry, sculpted very much with the Ardennes in mind, many being dressed in heavy greatcoats. I have not, however, gone for 'snowbases' (but am thinking I might do a separate force, at least say for Crossfire, with them), but had added quite a few clumps of green (from Gale Force 9 basing scenics) to the bases along with static, to make them look right for Western Europe.

As time as gone on, and I've got to fight out some Rapid Fire games, I've become less and less 'coy' about using multiple basing, as it not only looks better, but is so much easier for moving them about and now have rules from 'platoon-level' to 'brigade-level' none of which absolutely need individual basing, and have more than enough 'singles' should I really, really need them for, say, a man-to-man skirmish.

Here are only around one battalion's worth of figures, but I also have an absolute stack of Esci US Infantry, in various stages of painting, including at least as many again that are completely painted. The only reason for not completing the basing on them is that, once again, I've used up all my storage boxes and until I get some more, there's no room to store them once they are based. So for now this is just a 'taster' of what the infantry contingent of my WW2 US army for Europe will look like.

WW2 Japanese

Bashing through several WW2 armies for Rapid Fire late 2009/early 2010 meglomania took over in the Cavalier wargames show in 2010, and I acquired a couple of boxes of Waterloo 1815 Japanese and a bag of old Airfix Japanese too from the Harfield's stand. Having finally finished the Eastern front forces in March of that year, WW2 fatigue overcame me, but by the end of the year, I was able to get the Japs out of the cupboard. After the enormous headache of trying to assemble all the vehicles to fill a Rapid Fire order of battle for a German, Russian, American or late war British army, I was quite looking forward to tackling an army with mainly infantry, which could borrow trucks from there German allies, and where a few light tanks and artillery pieces, and perhaps a plane or two would be 'the icing on the cake' rather than essential.

The main task was researching uniforms, which mainly revealed lack of much consensus on uniform colours. The basic colour was pea green, which often faded badly, and was apparently substituted for a light khaki in 'tropical' areas. All of this research led me to conclude: go for a colour that looks nice! I ended up mixing some green paint I used for basing with some buff paint I use for WW2 German tanks and washing the figure at the end with a brown wash. Seemed to work. You can judge for yourself from the pics.

I finished painting well over a hundred figures last winter. The pleasant surprise was how good the Airfix figs looked when painted properly. These must have had a thousand bad paint jobs and lain around unpainted or with chipped paint in thousands of play boxes, which is how a lot of us think of them, but this figure set sculpted back in the early 1970s actually stands the test of time and painted up they looked as good as the Waterloo 1815 figures released a year or so ago. The Waterloo 1815 box is crammed with goodies like HMGs, knee mortars, radio operators and flame throwers, so many in fact, I was glad of the Airfix to make sure I had enough riflemen. I've not including any of the Heavy Weapons in the shots, but barring a few extra 'ammunition carriers' I make up by trimming off weapons, so that under Rapid Fire rules I have enough weapons crew, virtually everything is painted up, if not varnished and based.

My chief innovation for this project was basing. As I'm sure I have bored Steve to death about already, basing for me has become something of a minor obscession, having completely ignored its importance for most of the time I've been painting figures. If you collect 20mm plastics in wargaming circles you develop something of an 'inferiority complex'. 15mm gamers smile and tell you big figures and vehicles like that are 'oversized for the table', while 28mm 'metal snobs' say, "gosh aren't they small, how do you paint those?" So to counter this, I am always striving to make 20mm plastics look as good as I can on the table. You can only go so far, by painting, and when I ran my online shop and took a professional interest in painted figures, I started to notice a 'well-painted' figure was usually a 'well-based figure', and a pretty averagely painted figure can look great with good basing. I started to notice the difference when I worked a bit harder on the look of the bases for my DBA elements. When I switched back to painting WW2 figures, I had based them on 5 peseta coins I had from when I lived in Spain. Smaller than 1p coins, they 'did the job' but I noticed that they seemed to 'diminish' the figure. I have variously experimented with 2p coins, but for WW2 I initially fielded by German and Russian armies on 5 peseta coins. I decided that it didn't do them justice, so started to study the brillantly well painted figures in the Rapid Fire books, noting the common convention of basing quite a few two-to-a-base on generously sized and well-terrained bases. I therefore, left my figures on peseta coins, for extra weight, but stuck them on larger card bases, which I then terrained with rough sand and also normal static grass.

For the Japs, I've gone one step further and to a further extreme. I want to make up some Jungle Terrain, for these boys, and bought a bunch of acquarium plastic ferns etc. and having so much, put a few sprigs on the base of the figures.

Although I principally intend to use Rapid Fire rules, I really used to enjoy 'Crossfire' rules too at my last club, which is a particularly good simulation of 'company level' infantry combat across dense terrain. This works especially well for jungle fighting. Most 'Crossfire' players I've come across use 15mm figures, but there is not as such any reason that 20mm figures don't work. Crossfire, does, however, mainly use 'element' basing, the size of an element not being fixed, and it can represent a squad/section or a platoon or even a company. After playing around I thought it would do no harm to base a few dozen figures on three figure bases, which could still be used for Rapid Fire, but looked the part as a 'Crossfire' element.

These looked particularly good with 'heavy terrain', but judge for yourself....assuming you can find the figure in all that foliage, of course! I haven't ruled out adding more 'tufts' and such 'high-end' basing accessories to these bases, despite my cheapskate nature.

Unfortunately one of the 'downsides' of using such generous basing, is that the army rapidly grew to require more storage boxes, which I had by this stage just run out of! The final pic is the full force, half based for now, until I have somewhere to store them all.

WW2 Australian/Commonwealth/Brits

Towards the end of 2010, I cracked out most of my WW2 Japanese army. Although I have plenty of US troops painted up, including some marines, although there is not actually much difference, I really wanted to get them up against some British/Commonwealth opponents. I was inspired both by a Rapid Fire scenario that I found based on a battle by Australian troops to defend the Kokoda trail in New Guinea (which can be found here http://www.worldoptions.com.au/fourpipers/rapid/scenario.html -see 'Isurava' under 1942 scenarios and follow up scenario here- http://www.worldoptions.com.au/fourpipers/rapid/efogirf2.pdf ) and the exploits of the Chindits, a force in which my wife's uncle, a colourful chap, was a captain. So in February my birthday order from Model Hobbies included a couple of boxes of Airfix Australians, and Hat's WW1 Anzac heavy weapons set, to supply HMGs and mortars and crews otherwise lacking. Having got to see the Ozzie film 'Kokoda', I also plan to use some Aifix 8th army figures too, as some troops clearly wore helmets and shorts, too.

As far as I can tell at this scale the Chindit uniform was identical to the Australian, and I also have 3/4 of a box of Gurka's for a Chindit force. Caesar Miniatures not long ago brought out some Chinese troops for WW2, who aided the Chindits and also fought the Japanese in Burma. Not a priority purchase, but could be a set with a lot of potential.

I've tried to find out what uniforms I'd need for the attack on Malaya and Singapore, and the retreat into Burma. Most units were drawn from the Indian army, so I could use my Colonial Sikhs and the WW1 Indian Infantry that are in the pipeline from Hat, plus 8th Army and ordinary WW2 British infantry (as long trousers and khaki certainly seems to have been normal in Burma), and possibly my recnetly acquired late WW1 British, once painted, too. Although I've found references to some unit dying their uniforms green for jungle fighting prior to the issue of 'jungle greens'-and some pictures on the Singapore wargaming clubs site, and they are the people most likely to know, seems to bear it out-, as far as I can see the basic uniform was 'khaki drill', ie. same as Eighth Army. I'm not planning on doing armies for North Africa, but if I invested at some stage in a unit or two of Eighth Army in 'Khaki Drill', I could also use them for places like Crete.

I cracked out most of the Australian infantry over a weekend back in March, while working on other things. I've got the heavy weapons and some figures lying down left to do, plus the 8th Army & Gurka figs, but its not a big job. One of the main things holding me up, though, is lack of storage boxes.

As the pics how, I've for basing I followed what I tried out on the Japanese. I have really carried to extremes testing the view, that especially where 20mm plastics are concerned, the basing is more important than the painting. The figures I've based up so far I've done 3 to a base, with some sprigs of 'fish tank' plastic foliage added as well. This base would look good for 'Crossfire', not my intended main ruleset for these figures, but a ruleset which works well at simulating 'company' level infantry fighting on a tabletop covered in terrain. And you don't get denser terrain than in jungle-fighting! I'll also be basing some up in pairs and singly for both 'brigade level' Rapid Fire, and 'platoon level' Disposable Heroes.

This shows the three bases I have done so far.

An the final pic shows all the figures so far painted, plus the storage problem of the relative space taken up by the 9 figs on fancy bases taking up a quarter of the box, and the other 60 fitting happily in the remaining space!

I've been putting off ordering new storage boxes, but with other things spilling over I'll have to soon. This will also hopefully mean I'll have somewhere to store the jungle terrain I plan to knock up for these guys, the Japs, Vietnam and Darkest Africa.