Monday, July 23, 2018

Poking About...

Here we all are again. It has been a while since I last posted here - not too much to say, I suppose!

So, what's up with you?

I've been plugging away at my 20mm French Napoleonic troops. Four units of foot, a command group and a couple of guns now, which I feel is reasonable progress I'm working away at another gun and crew as well as a caisson - all from the Zvezda set I have been ruining my eyesight over.

I have also been looking wistfully at one of my perennial favorites - the Great War in Africa. In my own case, this is not just the swashbuckling antics of Lettow-Vorbecks men in Africa, but it also takes in pseudo colonial,  and dashing antics on the part of German and Empire forces in the Pacific in the form of the various actions undertaken to snap up Germany's Pacific posessions in China and New Guinea as well as the hunt for the gallant raider "Emden".

Two lovely websites I have happened upon have many excellent images of Germany's colonial troops.

The first is extremely comprehensive:

http://www.germancolonialuniforms.co.uk/

The second has a series of charming water colours that show the Germans and their Askari troops on campaign and are wonderfully evocative of the war:

http://www.reichskolonialamt.de/inhalt/rehfeldt/rehfeldt.htm

I'm prompted to pull out my HaT Askari and seeing what might be done with them. Twenty-man Feldkompagnies with an attached Maxim and ten Ruga-Ruga and another twenty porters seems fairly reasonable organization to build. Three FK painted and you might add a mountain gun. Six and you might even add a Koenigsburg gun!

Oh, if only Suren had been pulled into this period!

2 comments:

WSTKS-FM Worldwide said...

Good to hear from you, Greg! I've been wondering how your Napoleonics have been coming along and now this. Have you read An Ice-cream War by William Boyd? Historical fiction and pretty interesting too, all set within the context of The East Africa Campaign. Agreed, there are elements of WWI that are highly intriguing. Were time and money limitless, I'd go whole hog for some early war eastern front antics between the Germans and invading Russians in East Prussia where things remained a bit more fluid than in the west. Admittedly, I have thought briefly about doing this at the corps level in, say 5mm, or even 2mm, which would make painting somewhat easier, but I simply like 25-30mm figures too much for that I''m afraid.

Best Regards,

Stokes

Bloggerator said...

Stokes,

Zvezda do superb Germans and Russians in something like 1/72, although PSR sniffily decry them as 25mm.

And Hat do lovely Jaeger both on foot and bicycle.

Artillery is there too for discerning buyer in plastic.

Regards,

Greg