Finally Finnished

This is the last instalment of my odyssey of collecting, building and playing with my Finnish. I have now completed buying, building, painting and playing with them at least for now! Overall I have amassed over 100 teams since this all started back on July 12th.

The final units I have completed are the light anti-tank gun platoons, partly as these will probably only get used in mid- war and partly because I couldn’t get crew figures thanks to the pandemic.
I have modelled the 37 and 47mm teams with interchangeable guns as they both use the same plastic sprue and are very unlikely to be used together. I see the 37mm with Steilgranite being the most useful of these overall; with AT12 it can still do a decent job as a defensive option in LW, also it is a Formation platoon choice.
The 47mm is like the 5cm, caught in the no mans land of costing too many points for what it can do, i.e. Not having enough AT to be scary to medium tanks. The 5cm also suffers as being in the same unit choice box as the 7.5cm which is vastly better.
In White Death (MW) you can field three AT gun platoons rather than just the two of LW is what has driven my modelling.  You can field 37mm, 47mm and either a 5cm or 7.5cm unit as there is no Close Defence Platoon option in MW.

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The collecting bit

The overall force I have collected is detailed below and tops out at a basic 200 points in LW which is a nice round number and will certainly give my summer Soviet Strelkovy a challenging game.

• An Infantry HQ of two infantry teams
• An Infantry Platoon of 9 teams with both Panzerfaust armed or regular HQ team with optional Panzershrek or Lahti Anti-tank Rifle team
• An Infantry Platoon of 9 teams with both Panzerfaust armed or regular HQ team and optional Panzershrek
• A SMG Platoon of 9 teams with optional Panzershrek team
• A Pioneer Platoon of 7 Rifle/MG teams and 2 flame thrower teams with optional Panzershrek
• A Close Defence Platoon of 5 teams
• An 81mm Mortar platoon of 3 teams
• A HMG Platoon of 4 teams
• A 120mm Mortar Platoon of 3 guns
• A 37mm or 47mm Anti-tank Platoon of 2 guns
  
• A 5cm Anti-tank Platoon of 2 guns
• A 7.5cm Anti-tank Platoon of 2 guns
• A 76mm Artillery Platoon of 4 guns
• A 10.5cm Artillery Platoon of 4 guns
• An Infantry Artillery Observer
• A T-26 Tank Company HQ of two T-26 tanks
• A T-26 Tank platoon of 5 tanks
• A T-34 Tank Platoon of 3 tanks with 76mm or 85mm guns
• A T-28 Tank Platoon of 4 tanks
• A KV-1 Tank Platoon of 2 tanks
• A Landsverk II AA Platoon of 2 tanks
• A BT-42 Assault Gun Platoon of 3 tanks
• A Sturmi Assault Gun Platoon of 3 tank
  

The Gaming Bit

My gaming has been limited to just eight games in total with the Finns. 

Firstly there were a couple with my original list from article one which was a decent enough build for club gaming but was a bit under powered and the Close Defence Platoon proved very tricky to play with effectively.  With more time I can probably find a way to make these work more effectively so that’s a challenge for the future.

As I had said I would take Finnish to Warfare 2021 I made the decision to add the Tank Formation to my collection in late September and this made a massive difference to how the Force worked on the table top, even if I only had played one game with the new list before playing with it at a Tournament. My exploits with my more competitive build can be read about in Finishing First.

The Future

So what’s next, yes I know I started by saying I was finished with this project but, I really want to get at least one more Lahti anti-tank rifle team and I want to do a unit of Panzer IV’s. I will wait to see if the Panzer IV J models return to the online store as these were what the Finns were supplied with. The alternative is to start hacking about some IV H models to ideally remove the zimmerit as well as the schurtzen hangers, neither of which the Finnish tanks had; this could be a tricky process. On the gaming front I want to try them out in a few MW games to see if the Finns are as effective there as they have been for me in LW.

Well, I hope these articles may have inspired a few of you to give the Finns a try.  They are an interesting army; light in AT but with fearsome infantry units and are more than capable of holding their own in LW – Martin.