Showing posts with label Portugal. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Portugal. Show all posts

Tuesday, 30 July 2013

Operation Vijay

This was Bob Cordery's game about the Indian invasion of Goa in 1961, played at COW earlier this month.  Bob did all the hard lifting while I provided the toys and helped run the game.  A team of five players represented various elevated personalities in the Indian army, navy and air force while a further three flew the flag for the Portuguese Empire.
Speaking of flags, Bob had provided a couple as a rather atmospheric table covering.

The Indian team hard at work arguing over who was in command.
The Portuguese Governor General (centre) trying to figure out where Goa is.
Plans made, the players assemble for the invasion.
The Indians sent columns from the north and west, and had large naval forces standing by in support.
For the land forces I used the toys I had already prepared for various Indo-Pakistani games.
Given that the Portuguese had only six battalions of light infantry the
 Indian divisional-level assault seemed unstoppable!
Several bridges were blown up in order to slow the attackers.
Sadly the relief flight which finally arrived didn't contain the hoped-for Para brigade!

The Indian Air Force was much in evidence....
...while not to be outdone, the Navy floated up and down bombarding things.
Soon the noose tightened around the capital.
And the Admiral arrived in person to be present for the surrender.  All in all an very interesting game about a little known campaign.  Bob very kindly lent me his maps and briefings (and flags!) after the game so I will be running it at the Sheffield club in a few weeks time.  Book now!

Sunday, 14 July 2013

DC-6(ish)

The Operation Vijay game (more on that soon) allowed for the possibility of Portuguese reinforcements arriving by air.  Thus it was back to my box of random 1/300 aircraft to select a suitable model.  The Portuguese Air Force had a few DC-6 on fleet and I had a spare model of the very similar C-54.  This is a Heroics & Ros casting and is really quite a big lump of metal.
A least the markings were a bit easier to paint on surfaces so large!

Tuesday, 9 July 2013

Sabre rattling

As there was a possibility that the Portuguese air force might show up in Operation Vijay, I dug out this old 1/300 F-86 Sabre (which I think is a Skytrex casting) and slapped on a bit of paint.  The markings were something of a challenge to paint in this (or any?) scale but the thing emerged looking Sabre-esque and clearly not Indian.  Which was good enough.
For a photo of a real (better painted!) Portuguese F-86 have a look here.  Apparently their last Sabres were retired as recently as 1980.