Greek Infantry Brigade - part 2

I have now finished the Greek Brigade, and offer the (hastily posed) photos below.

Close-up of an M-48A5. I had put off painting these guys for ages due to the camo pattern, but I'm glad I finally got round to it.  All Greek AFVs have a stylised flag (white cross on blue field) painted on either side of the turret.

For those of you with an interest in painting Greek armour, I would recommend the following websites:

http://greekmilitary.net/greekmbtanks.htm (you need to scroll down quite a bit to get to the M-48s)

http://www.microarmormayhem.com/Units_Greek.html

The three rifle companies of the first Infantry Battalion.  I used WW2 US infantry by GHQ. The Dodge 1.5t trucks by CinC.

The rest of the above battalion - Weapons Co and AT Co. 

For the other Infantry Battalion I used the open version of the CinC Dodge with seated troops from GHQ.

The Brigade HQ and AA Battery - all GHQ toys.

The Artillery Battalion - 105mm guns and Dodge 1.5 tonners by GHQ. 

The attached Tank Battalion - M-48A5 and M-8 by GHQ.

A close-up of the M-8.  This functions as the Tank Battalion's Recce Troop.  Painting the flags on this was rather tricky!

Landships

A few weeks ago I mentioned* my trio of very elderly WW1 tanks and promised some photos.  These three are all basically the Airfix MkI but without the ridiculous steering gear.  The third tank has been converted to a machine gun armed 'Female'.  All of these were originally built by JR and were in the box of models he gave me in the late 1990s.  I let them 'mature' in a box for a few more years before Martin Rapier came up with the idea of a Cambrai game.  This was in about 2004 and Martin put out a call for all the 20mm (and 15mm) British WW1 tanks we could muster.  Like the fool I am I mentioned that I had a few and promised them for the game - forgetting that they needed paint.  A panic painting session followed over the next few days, culminating in the varnish being sprayed on half an hour before the game started.  Careful handling was called for and a number of players were almost overcome by the fumes when I opened the box.

Anyway, enough of this - here are the toys.

No 4 - a basic 'Male' tank.

No 5 - another 'Male'

No 63 - a 'Female' tank - another great  JR conversion.

While I took the photos above specially for this post, I have now located some photos of the Cambrai game which I will post over the next few days.

*This may have been on someone else's blog, a chat at the wargames club or a dream.  Who knows.

Flying Tiger

Another 1/144 scale aircraft now.  Recently I was lucky enough to pick up on Ebay no less than four P-40 Tomahawks.  These are Wing Club models which come pre-painted but in need of assembly.  All were in the colour scheme of the 'Flying Tigers' - a US volunteer unit which served in China against the Japanese during late 1941 and early 1942.  So far I have only built one, so here it is.



The canopy is supplied as three parts but I had to paint the framing myself.



I added a number and some light weathering.

The Defense of Jisr Al-Doreaa

I was reminded today by Tom Mouat of the existence of this rather splendid book.  I bought my copy in January 2010 and had every intention of writing it up for the blog at the time.  Unfortunately it fell victim to the 'tidying' of my toy room and was, shall we say, misfiled.
The authors of this work are Captains in the US Army and have both seen. service in Iraq.  They wrote the book as a training aid for junior leaders.  It adopts the same format as E.D.Swinton's The Defence of Duffer's Drift, and indeed that earlier (1907) work is reprinted in the new book.  It is currently listed on Amazon for a bargain £4.72.

The book sets a scene in which a young officer must arrange his troops in anticipation of contact with the enemy.  The action is recounted as a series of dreams - the first being a rather disastrous nightmare - in which the officer makes progressively fewer mistakes to the point where in the sixth dream he is making a reasonable job of things.  As well as being a very revealing insight into the problems (not just of a purely military nature) facing unit leaders in the modern world, the book offers much fodder for scenario designers.

As you might expect from it's publication date, Duffer's Drift (this is the 1990 reprint) is set during the Boer War.