US Paratroopers Army Update –3: I Want a Base of Fire in those Trees!

Moving on down the line, and applying what I'd learned with some of the earlier platoons, I got to work digging in the weapons platoons supporting Easy Company. At this stage of things, I wanted to keep things very consistent in terms of the look and feel of the army, but I didn't have as much work with in terms of theming the individual teams -- the further you get from the rifle platoons, the less is seen in Band of Brothers. The mortar teams, if shown at all, are given only the briefest glimpses, while it is pretty hard to tell the .30 light MGs of the machine gun platoon apart from those of the rifle platoons. I also had much less to go on in terms of historical information -- in all my reading, I could only find a hand-full of names from the Battalion weapons platoons. As such, the Machine Gun and Mortar platoons are a bit more stylistic in nature, and don't conform quite as rigidly to my historical and design specifications as does the core of my force. On the other hand, the more static nature of the emplaced weapons meant that I could be some what more lavish in terms of the added details on each team, and I had fun coming up with small details to link each team in a platoon.

Machine Gun Platoon:

By this time, I'd come up with a few ways to work that figure castings into the base work, with building it up for that little extra depth I needed for he fox holes. The simplest was to lay on about 4 pieces of card (I went a little deeper than with second platoon, so the guys would really get down in the holes) with the holes cut in the card and just glue the miniature on top of the whole thing, sometimes cutting one foot free of the base tab and gluing it on top of something else. Another interesting method (very useful for prone poses) was to cut a hole in the top piece of card for the base tab to fit into, they lowering it relative to the top level of card. I mixed and matched my way through the platoon, using each trick as seemed right and improvising along the way.

The command team didn't require too much extra work, just a bit of greenstuff and a wire for the antenna, plus one of the large storage crates that would be the identifying item of this platoon -- I needed something to distinguish these guys in holes on the edge of a wood from the guys in second platoon, also in holes in the woods. Other than the wooden crate, there would also be the number of men per base, three instead of five.

The bazooka men did get a few interesting details, like pockets and straps for the backpacks added to make normal US infantry look more like paratroops. I rather like this running guy:

Even though it has no real game-play value, I decided to get a little creative about this platoons equipment cart. Rather than show them brining it up to the men or something, I decided to open it up and show the contents being distributed.

First I cut off the closed pack with a razor saw, then I made new open pack sides in green stuff before adding all the little bits of weapons and ammo, including the wooden crate of the MG platoon.

Now lets get onto the machine gunners. These guys are mostly from Battlefront, but I didn't limit myself to just the paratrooper gunners. I've actually got new and old paratrooper machine gunners (the poses are ever so slightly different) mixed together with normal US infantry guns with .30s. Most of the standard infantry gunners would require a bit of conversion to make them fit in with the paras -- just the usual stuff like back packs and cargo pockets. At this scale, those seem to be the big details that catch the eye and tell the view that they are looking at a jumper. This first shot of team 411, taken before the coffee mud was added, gives a good view of the card board layers adding the depth:

The edges are smoothed over with a two-part epoxy paste, and a ring of sand and superglue makes the raised lip of the fox hole. It looks pretty rough in this picture, but after it is covered in coffee it looks pretty good:

You can also see one of the details that would link this team to a shot from the miniseries, as in one sequence you could make out a large pile of supplies mostly covered with an army blanket, made here with a piece of aluminum foil. I've also added lots of green stuff details that hopefully, when painted, will look like ration packs and coffee cups on cooking burners. I hope I remembered to add some spent shell cases before I primered these...

This next one, team 412, also shows the layers of card board well, plus some of the things I'd do to work the figures into it: the bottom of the hole actually extends down into the plastic base, cut in with a dremmel tool. I removed as much of the base from the legs of the gunner as I could, then bent him pretty sharply in the middle. His MG is resting on the edge of the hole, with the lip of glue and sand coming to meet it, while his feet are down in the bottom of the hole.

The miniature in the middle had had its base completely removed. He is mostly glued to the tree stump casting for stability. Its pretty easy to make the base tab disappear when it just isn't there! The casting on the far right of the piece has its tab down in its own little hole. This makes him look like he's laying flat on the ground in the finished piece. The casting actually started life as a gunner, but at some point I took his weapon away for some other use. Rather than waste the model, I just worked him in behind a stack of crates and gave him new hands:

Ah, here are some of those shell casings I was looking for! This also shows one of my converted gunners. You can see the green stuff cargo pockets added in the second picture. The base tab on the standing figure was, again, hidden by cutting a hole in the top layer of card board to level it with the stand.

This hole isn't as deep as some of the others. The depth of the hole was really one of the few things I had to play with on this platoon, since so much of the base elements are sort of dictated by their combat role.

Since the gunners are all pretty much doing the same thing, I had to look to the other men to provide some of the variety and try and tie the teams into various shots from the miniseries. One scene that caught my eye involved someone crawling up the back of the hole:

You may notice in this and the previous picture that I'd sometimes place the back packs on the ground instead of the figure. As long as there is a back pack on hand I think the effect works to make the men look like paratroopers -- they couldn't have worn all their gear all the time! There are a few other details on the pile for this one, such as the big rolled up tarp, some ammo boxes, and of course the spent shells. Team 413's gunner has spent a few rounds...

The four teams in the first MG section all natch each other really nicely, but by the time I got to the second section, and had made all the MG teams in the rifle platoons, I was running low on ideas. I was also running low on un-used scenes that prominently featured machine guns. There were still ideas I wanted to use, they just didn't go together quite as nicely as the stuff in first section did. One idea I'd wanted to use from the beginning was someone servicing their rifle, and that idea ended up in team 421.

The guy in the hole has had his base completely removed, along with his knees, and about half the thickness of his lower legs -- they are still there when viewed from above, but it you could see him from the side he'd look pretty messed up. But its pretty hard to get a good view from that angle, and it was the only way to bring him down enough for his gun to be near the ground without everything else being awkward.

I carefully cut open the breach on the machine gun and opened it up, bending his arms in to look like he's doing something with it. I also added a green-stuff bipod, as it looked like one was present in the scene that inspired this piece. The other two castings are worked low into the ground with a pair of holes in the top layer of card board, and the edges are smoothed over with epoxy paste before the the coffee covers everything up. They are hard to see, but the artillery crew man with his back to us has cargo pockets added with green stuff to make him look more like a paratrooper -- I'd have given him a back pack, but the guy wasn't wearing one in Band of Brothers.

I'm pretty sure that in the context of the mini series they were supposed to be members of the rifle platoons, not part of the MG platoon, but hay -- I'm running out of ideas here! So I've got two guys taking cover behind fallen logs, one with a read wooden stick, the other with a plastic model tree trunk:

With the real stick I again cut small holes to fit the base tabs into, and then built up sand and superglue to blend things together. I didn't have to worry about that as much with the plastic tree, since I used Old Glory machine gunners, and the base tabs on them were actually pretty thing:

As always, green stuff, spent shells, sand and coffee to taste:

This last team doesn't really match the platoon, but I liked the scene in the miniseries and wanted to include it. It doesn't look like much in this first picture...

... but it comes into its own with the addition of all the green-stuff sand bags. I also really like the loose hand grenade on top of the low wall. You can actually see the grenade better in the small picture at the top of this post.

Mortar Platoon

The mini-series really didn't give me much to go on with the mortar platoon. Aside from a few shots of individual 60mm mortars going off, I think there are a total of two shots in the entire miniseries were they briefly cut over to several mortars firing as a unit. I'm not even sure if they are showing 60mm tubes or 81mm. But, hay, ya do what you can:

Based on one of the better shots of mortars in the show, I decided to dig them in all together in a semi-diorama style. Would this be smart to do on the game table or real life? Nope -- one good artillery barrage and you loose the whole crew. But it does sort of look good, so what the hell. As you can see, I did it as if the mortars each had their own hole, but pairs of gun crews sort of worked together, with the officer using his own hole, and the bazookas splitting one.

In these two shots of the command team, you can see some of the details I used to link all the teams in the mortar platoon. The extra mortar bipod is pretty obvious, but there is also that little piece of greenstuff on the edge of the foxhole. Its a representation of the special leather pouch used to store and transport the sites for the 81mm mortar. I added on of these to each team.

The hold itself is fairly simple, just a ring made up of a few layers of card board, smoothed over on the outside with epoxy paste and topped with a bit of superglue and sand. All three miniatures have had their base tabs completely removed to better fit down inside the hole, and are glued to both the bottom and the sides for stability.

The two bazooka teams were done the same way, and the two stands push together into a single hole. For the first team, I left the base tabs intact, with the miniature in front getting a hole in the top layer of card board to sit down flush into, while the other is standing on top of the whole thing. They got a mortar baseplate (not really visible in this picture, its down in the hole) to link them into the platoon.

The second bazooka team is down lower in their hole -- base tabs were completely removed for this effect. They got another extra mortar bipod, so you'd quickly be able to tell what platoon the team is a member of.

By now, the technique I used to make all these holes should be getting pretty routine, so there isn't much to really say about the mortar teams themselves. Each team got one of the fancy leather site cases, as well as a tube of mortar ammunition and a few random spare bits of kit in their holes.

The lips of the fox holes were built up on three sides with super glue and sand, but I left one side a bit lower, as if each pair of mortar teams were working together to dig their holes.

Most of the base tabs were completely removed, but some of the miniatures were set so that one foot was up on the side of the hole. Many of the crew miniatures were used unchanged, but several were converted slightly -- mostly bent arms -- to make them a bit more dynamic. I like the look of a shell about to be dropped into the tube.

As was the case through most of this force, I had enough packs to do some mixing. The mortar platoon was no exception, as I mixed in the old and new versions from Battlefront, as well as a few other anti-tank and artillery gun crew figures.

New Table! Urban Table Mat

I just finished my new, quick and dirty, urban games table. OK, urban games table cloth... but it will work. I didn't want to put the same level of investment into this one, in terms of time, money, storage space, etc., as I'd put into my standard woodland/green fields terrain tiles, so I went with a simple throw cloth. Of course, I had to take that idea and run with it a bit.



I started out by picking up a few yards of dark gray cloth at the fabric store. I didn't want hard black, since pavement lightens up so quick. I didn't like the idea of a hard, solid gray color, either. I wanted to give it a mottled, patchy look. My first try at this was to mist it in a patchy pattern with diluted bleach, but for whatever reason (probably not enough bleach in the mix) that didn't really do much of anything at all, so I hit the whole thing with random splotches of white and light gray spray primer. This gave it just the patchy, faded look I wanted. Too bad it didn't really stick -- by the time I was done with the project, most of this paint had rubbed off, and I was mostly back to flat gray Oh, well.



So, How to mark this thing up for streets? At the last Birmingham Flames of War tournament, one of the table's we'd had set up was an urban setting. It was built of modular boards, but the thing I really liked about it was the raised curbs. They made nice positions to fit in the resin buildings, especially since several of the buildings we had on hand seemed to fit into them like the table had been made for them. I really liked this effect, and came up with a way to replicate it on a cloth table without giving up the "roll it up and put it away," factor I was wanting to keep. I came up with the idea of using craft foam.



This stuff is sold in the major craft store chains, marketed to children's arts and crafts projects. I found sheets of it about 1' x 1.5' for about $.97 each. Since I didn't like the stark white look, I gave them all a quick mottling of gray spray primer, just what I had on hand. I wasn't going for an even coat, I really wanted to give them a patchy look. Then I just cut them into strips about 1.5" wide -- whatever width my widest ruler is. I also cut some about .5" wide to make side-streets.



I spread the cloth out on the table and started playing around with the buildings in my collection. At first I had all these specific plans on how I wanted to lay out the streets, but in the end I threw all that out the window and just ran with it. All I really tried to do was keep a few general principles in mind -- avoid a square grid on the table; avoid roads leading directly off the edge of the table at a right angle. It was surprisingly hard to avoid the grid pattern, but in the end I'm happy with the layout I achieved. Most of the city blocks are generic in size and shape, but a few of them were cut with the irregular foot prints of specific buildings in mind.



Once I'd shuffled everything around a bit and was happy with the design, I started gluing down the strips of craft foam. I'm not sure of the brand name, but I used some really tacky, very sticky craft glue my wife had laying around. I just went around the table, trimming the foam strips and gluing them down. Somewhere along the way I decided to lay a rail line through the city, so after I'd glued down all the strips I laid down two thick lines of glue and sprinkled model rail road ballast onto them to indicate the gravel at the sides of the track. When it was dry, I knocked off all the excess and painted on a coating of diluted white glue to help hold it all in place.



The last step was to mark the cracks in the side walk. I cut a piece of scrap plastic into a 1.5" wide strip, just because it would be easier to use than a full ruler, and went along the foam strips with a fine tipped dark gray marker, drawing in the seams from the poured cement. This may have been the hardest step in the project -- for some reason, the foam (or maybe it was the primer) just ate markers alive. I went through 3, plus one dud I picked up at the craft store that never drew a single line.



When I was done, I laid out my rather meager collection of ruined city buildings and admired my work. At present, I only own enough to cover a few feet worth of the table, but I made the cloth as big as I figured I'd ever want it. For one, I didn't feel like making another city cloth later. More importantly, though, I wanted some form of variability to the layout. The entire cloth is about 4x9 feet. Since most games with specific City Fight rules, like Flames of War, do their urban games on a reduced-size table (say, 4x3 or so) I could shimmy the cloth around and use different sections of it each time we played, sort of like an old side-scrolling video game. This wouldn't be truly modular or changeable, but at least it would give some flexibility.



I tried to keep the scale pretty generic. While I was mainly thinking of Flames of War while I did the layout, and almost all of my city buildings are in 15mm scale, I wanted the cloth to be able to serve double duty and stand in for 28mm skirmish games. While its been years since I've played 40K, Necromunda, or anything else in 28mm, I'm sure I'll pull out the giants against some day, and I think sidewalks of this size won't look completely stupid in that scale, either.



So that's about all it took. I didn't have much time for modeling over the last two weeks, but even just putting in a few evenings while watching TV and sipping my morning coffee I got the whole thing done in about two calendar-weeks. I could probably have knocked the whole thing out in two solid working days -- the only really time consuming part was marking all the stinkin' side walks, mostly because as my markers died I had to go over each line three and four times!

US Paratroopers Army Update –4: 1st Platoon, Get the Lead out!

1st platoon (which I modeled almost at the end of the project, naturally) was one of the more streight-forward units to build. In fact, with a few exceptions, I was almost struggling not to give
into the temptation to just glue the little buggers down. I still wanted to customize each piece as much as I could, despite the simple nature of the scene. For first platoon, that scene would be the assualt on Foy. Pretty simple, when you consider that this assault was basically just an advance over open ground towards an enemy held village. So, how do you work any character into that?

I took another look at that scene in Band of Brothers, looking for anything that really stood out. Of course, every one remembers Lt. Dyke crapping out behind the hay stack, and Lt. Spears jumpting to the rescue, but I had already used these moments to model Spears and Dyke (I'll show ya later). There was a fence along one side of the advance, so I could make use of that for a little detail. I could probably get away with modeling just a hint of the tree line they were moving out of, but I didn't want to do too much with that to keep 1st and 2nd platoons distinct from each other. I really didn't have a lot to work with one this one -- nothing like a German gun battery to assault through!



We'll start by looking at the fence, since it is the only significant modeling feature on this platoon's base work -- most of them just got my standard mud coating. I started out by marking the position of the miniatures and the fence posts on the blank infantry stand. Then using a wide-dead drill bit I dug fence post holes about half way through the base -- not enough to really hold the posts, just enough to give the glue something to hold on to. Then I took tooth picks and cut them to length, using a miniature to give me a roughly accurate fence post sort of height, and glued these into the holes. While the glue was still wet I sprinkled a little sand over it to soak it up and give it a little reinforcement.



Once the glue was dry, I took thin copper wire (I think I stripped it out of an old washing machine power cable) and strung it up, wraping it around the fence posts, changing sides with each pass. I wound it as tight as I could on each post and secured it with a little drop of glue. And there was my fence! I lined up several bases and marked them all at once to keep the fence running in a more-or-less streight line accross the platoon. Once each section was strung up, it was generally a simple matter of glueing down the miniatures.



For the bazooka man moving through the cut section of fence I did the same thing, but left
extra-long strands of wire hanging loose from the cut section. Then, after the miniature was in place, I could cut them to the desired length and position them against the figure in a naturally-hanging way. These were also secured to the miniature with super glue.



I had a few more of those tree-stump castings left, so I decided to include a line of them along the back edge of the rear rank of infantry stands, just to give a subtle impression that the platoon was moving out of its cover. Also visiable here are some spent shell casings. Yes, I know they are a bit too long and slightly out of scale, but when painted I think they will still work and give the impression that he's firing the BAR -- and before anyone says anything, I know damn well that the TO&E for a PIR doesn't include any BARs. Do you honestly think those boys didn't do any scrounging?



With as little scenic detail as I was including on this platoon, most of the detail and interest was going to have to come from the character of the men as depicted in Band of Brothers. As always, I was shuffling things around to fit the historical roster, but a few of them really stand out. Starting with the command elements, we have my Lt. Foley (inspired by a pose from Sgt. Lipton, in this case)...



...and Lt. Peacock, lost as always despite the little foil map I've given him:



I would also like to point out the other soldier's radio. Based on a casting from Resistant Roosters, in the scene from the miniseries this guy had the radio, so he does here, but the Rooster don't make anyone in an overcost with an SCR-300, so this guy got one from the bitz box glued to his back, with a quick wire antenna and putty straps.



Speaking of added details made with putty, check out Sgt. "Bull" Randleman here:



The scene is a bit out of place here, being lifted from Normandy, but hay -- that's where the man fell in the roster. Anyway, everyone's paratrooper castings were all fit and trim, and I needed Bull to look a little husky, so I built up has face and back with a bit of putty. I think it worked OK, but we'll see how it paints up -- the line on his face is a bit harsh, and he might come out looking more like Santa Clause.

This platoon included a number of small changes and details, such as this unlucky soldier:



...someone carrying a big heavy ol' .30 cal...



...and some kind of feed trough (made with scraps of plastic card):



You may also have noticed the high concentration of men wearing heavy field coats. These castings all come from Resistant Roosters, and ended up here because they weren't posable enough to be used with 3rd platoon and weren't seated enough to work well in 2nd. But they look pretty good with 1st, so there you go.

In terms of character, probably the best piece in this unit is this one, #119:



Inspired by a scene during the Market Garden operation (I think it was in the episode "Replacements," but I'm too lazy to look it up now) it depicts three soldiers evacuating their wounded buddy on a liberated door. The castings all required various degrees of repositioning to bring their hands together to hold onto the door -- or to lay on it, as the case may be -- with putty filling in the gaps. The door itself was taken from an HO scale out-house.