Army of Freedom Complete
Colonel Scipio here, bringing you painting projects on target, under budget and to the standard the Imperial citizen expects. Vote Scipio for a safer Forty-Second Millennium!
Which means, that as WW2 Month draws to a close I have the completed Army of Freedom to show off! Make sure you check out the original post and the background to our alternate history project. These are all Warlord Games packs - partisans, some individual US Airborne, and the SAS NW Europe Section. I'll let the painting talk for itself and not waffle today - enjoy!
Another project done! I'm really pleased with how these turned out and after working non-stop on my Palladian Guard for weeks, they made a nice change of pace for me to try out some new techniques. I have more WW2 stuff in the post, this time from West Wind Productions, but for now it's back to 40K for a little while as Headologist builds up his force for the NUTS campaign.
Thanks to you all this month for your comments and feedback for the WW2 stuff and rest assured I'll keep you updated.
The Colonel.
I think you have really sown off your painting skills with this project - Superb stuff!
ReplyDeleteWell done for pulling it together in the month time frame too! I think a month is just the right amount of time for a side project. For me, any longer and I start getting distracted and don't end up finishing things.
Those are awesome mate, can't wait to see some batreps and read the narratives involving them.
ReplyDeleteVery nice work, Col. I read the backstory posts and enjoyed them too. I have several Sea Lion games. Including one from GDW's old Europa series, and love them (GMT has another good one). I agree with you that the chances of German success were slightly more than nil for many reasons. But one has to simply see a film like It Happened Here (thanks for posting that) to be fascinated by the idea of the invasion of England and how it would be resisted. I look forward to following the exploits of your Army of Freedom.
ReplyDeleteCheers,
Mike
Your excellent work on these has had looking through all the items on the Westwind Studios site. CURSE YOU COLONEL SCIPIO! lol! If I had more money or less minis I think I would have already jumped in with both feet. I do love alternate history settings and my friends and I have tossed around the Weird War II ball, but with the new edition of 40K, the Guuseprian Civil War, and the ongoing conflict in the Rim Stars, I think I'm just too busy to command either the suppression of those Anglo agitators or to kick Jerry right in the swastika. If I can manage to get rid of some of my 40K stuff I haven't used in many moons I may have to join you on the beaches. Keep up the good work.
ReplyDeleteThanks a lot, guys!
Delete@Col Ackland: Cheers, yes with a project that's only got 20 models in it, I can afford to spend a little bit longer on it. Good shout for the month thing - it wasn't intentional really, I just had a lot of WW2 stuff to post about so I put the brakes on my 40K stuff for a while. But I might start taking 4-week breaks every so often to chase a little side project like this from now on.
@mad padre: Thanks for your thoughts on this Mike. My interest was sparked when I bought a book about the invasion of the Channel Islands, which had a photo of a German officer asking directions from a British policeman. There will be many exploits, and many photos for you have no fear! And after seeing Major Terntadust we may make a sally into Weird War too, further down the line.
@Chris: Ack! Gahhhh! Can't ... reply ... am too ... CURSED! Thanks a lot mate. West Wind are relatively new to me, but despite WW2 month being officially over some West WInd bits did arrive yesterday. Hopefully once I've got the rest of the 40K stuff all up to date I'll do a post on them. Anglo Agitators ... that's what they're getting called now. I know the feeling - as well as all this me and Headologist are struggling to find the time to do Russo Japanese War and English Civil War - but you can't prioritise everything. More's the pity. Anyway I look forward to seeing what you do with your projects, especially the Guseprian Civil War!
Absoloutely fantastic stuff, the Volksgrenadiers/Anti-Partisan troops and the French are about to be the test subjects for a brown undercoat spray which should save a bit of time...
ReplyDeleteHaha, I like Anglo Agitators, we need a name for the Welsh who will not be happy at being called Anglos lol. Going to order the Ynys Mon Irregulars ASAP, I'll do a post on the blog when I get a proper day off work
Brown undercoats work well - I haven't used them on my Germans but those Soviets I had years ago turned out very well with that. Interested to see the results of that. And the Germans would call them Anglo probably, after the habit of people from outside the UK of calling everyone English - Malcom Tucker to Gen Miller: "Don't ever call me f**king English again!"
DeleteI've used brown undecoats since doing some Copplestone White Russians 10 years ago, and as I tend to go for natural flat colours it definitely works well, I think if I was doing dress uniforms where I wanted a bolder look I'd go for black. But as I said I think brown undercoats have become a painting superstition for me lol. It was more the particular spray paint I was curious about
ReplyDeleteI imagine they would lol, and I thought of Malcolm too (new series is looking outstanding...) However, on a slightly seres note, would the Germans have a higher regard for the English being Germanic rather than the "Celts" who are not? Similarly were the French associated with the Franks or with the Gauls...?
Yes - bang on, although there was a lot of misunderstanding about the Welsh/Irish/Scots (hence most contemporary Germans referring to the British forces as the 'English Forces'). It's interesting that the British Free Corps was British, not English, however - when they raised a Belgian unit they made it specifically 'Flemish' so as to exclude the French and Walloons - they could have made a specifically 'English' unit to exclude the Celts, but didn't.
DeleteThe French volunteers sidestepped their way into the SS by being inducted from an anti-Bolshevik, right-wing militia which was already in the Heer late in the war, so their racial background wasn't really under scrutiny. But it's interesting to note that the French division 'Charlemagne' was a 'Waffen-Grenadier Division' (as opposed to an SS-Grenadier Division) which meant it wasn't 'racially' on a par with the Germanic units, whereas the British Free Corps would have been a full SS-Grenadier unit if it had been properly raised.
Although even by the Nazis own supposedly rigorous racial profiling standards they were pretty chipshop about it most of the time. They didn't consider Croats, for example, to be Slavs but instead accepted some pretty mad theories that they were displaced Goths, and so were racially acceptable. The history of foreign units in the SS is a long story of cramming as many people into the SS as possible, regardless of nationality, and then coming up with some very dodgy justifications for it retroactively.
Didn't even think about the British Free Corps, is that perhaps for connotations of the Empire rather than racial ones. And I forgot about the Charlemagne Division too - which would the aforementioned Frankish connotaion... but that difference between the two is rather interesting and I wasn't aware of that at all. The Free Corps only had a handful of members in the end didn't it?
ReplyDeleteI did recall that about the Croats - the Muslim troops were rather well regarded were they not? More because of Himmler's own personal interests in Islam and the perception of the martial lineage of the faith?
Yeah, the supposed strict guidelines of profiling on paper always seem to be much more pragmatic in reality