German Guns

I need a variety of Jerry guns for the paras to attack to play through the scenarios in the Red Devils scenario book. The first scenario is built around the attack on the Merville gun battery on the night before D-Day, so I'll need a gun or two to put in the massive casemate... but more on those in a future post. 

For today, I have a PaK-40 anti-tank gun:

This is a pretty nice mini, but I feel like the gun barrel is out of scale... it's as big around as the crew members' heads. That said, though, the mini is nice and should look fairly imposing as it lobs shell after murderous shell at the Tommies.

I decided not to make a base for this gun because I plan to put it in my fancy Grand Manner trench system. I may still build a base for it.  The figures are unbalanced enough that they have to be leaning against the parts of the gun in order to remain upright, so it would be nice if I could put the whole thing on a solid foundation, but it would have to be a base where I could remove the gun itself, which would be tough... I wouldn't trust Blu-Tac to hold it.


Next, an le.IG 18 infantry gun:

This is a fun model. The gun was fairly easy to assemble (though putting the shields on the four guns I built in the last week all felt a bit sketchy... the connection points are small and I don't know how strong the glue is), and the crew figures are cool - especially the guy yelling his Aryan face off as he pulls his little box. I put the figures on washers and based them as normal, because an infantry gun like this is fairly portable and will probably move around quite a bit, unlike the PaK and the artillery. 

As a final note, I wish the Nazis had given the crazy capitalization on their acronyms a rest. Seriously, le.IG 18? Either capitalize everything or nothing. No wonder everybody thought they were dicks.

Dead Cows

Yep. Dead cows.

I'm not very happy at all with how these poor exploded fellas turned out, but I didn't want to commit a lot of time to repainting them. They are just dead cows.

I guess you can't win them all.

German Third Squad

I actually painted these guys when I went up north for Christmas, but never got around to finishing their bases until I needed them for a test game I played last week. I had hoped to get my big order of paras by Christmas, but they arrived the day after I got back. Oh well, I can always use more plastic Germans.

Paras Command Section

This is the command section that came in the Red Devils boxed set. I'm pretty glad I only got one of the boxed sets, because I'm not sure I would have much use for two radio operators or bugling Frosts at the scale I'm playing, but they will be nice, distinctive figures to use in my games.

Paras MMG team

A bit of support for my poor, beleaguered paras. This time, a Vickers MMG.

As with my mortar teams and other weapons groups, I made a plastic base to contain all the figures. They are stuck on with Blu-Tac (you can actually see it in the first pic) so they can be removed as needed, or just used individually if I need to set them up in a window or whatever. 

Paras Second Section

Second section complete:

There were a few different poses in this section compared to the last one. I'm not sure about the guy lunging forward as he throws a Mills bomb, but the rest of them look good to me. As always, these figs were a pleasure to paint, and I feel like I have learned a few ways to make my painting a bit more efficient.