Martin back with more progress on my Hungarian Huszar Squadron, today I’m focussing on my initial support platoons. So to recap on what I have already painted up
- HQ with 2 cavalry teams- plus infantry replacement teams
- Huszar Squadron with 7 cavalry teams and HMG – plus replacement infantry teams
- Huszar Squadron with 7 cavalry teams and HMG – plus replacement infantry teams
- Huszar Squadron with 5 cavalry teams and HMG – plus a replacement HMG infantry team
A total of 24 cavalry bases and 19 swap in infantry bases painted and for a whole 30 points of a Force!
My support plan at this point consists of Formation 40mm anti-tank guns, an over costed 105mm artillery battery and some vintage WW1 80mm field howitzers from Force Support. I hope to acquire some in Formation Huszar 75mm mountain guns but these are rather difficult to source (interestingly Battlefront have removed them in the Hungarian catalogue section in Eastern Front). The 40mm guns are essentially German Pak36 guns modelled with Hungarian crews and I built mine using the plastic gun sprue (GSO266) with the Hungarian Anti-tank gun crew (HSO104), I modelled these with the basic barrel for maximum flexibility (lets be honest they look daft with the kerngranite barrel). My 105mm were again the plastic sprues with siocast crews from the LW starter set (alternatively its GSO222 and HSO101) and the 80mm field guns were sourced from Irregular Miniatures (I actually used 7.7cm fk16 guns which are not noticably visably different to the 80mm 5/8M at this scale) using up the reminder of the Artillery crew blister I had already purchased.
Additionally I made an artillery observer team from a spare binocular equipped artillery figure and an ammunition carrier from the HMG platoon which I had swapped out for one of the anti-tank gun figures previously – the ammunition box easily passes for a field telehone box. Amazingly these double my points adding another 32 points to my Force so my list now looks like this:
The key decision for me was what colour to paint them, german grey, hungarian olive green or the Hungarian three colour camo pattern. I decided as the 40mm are quite small I would go with olive green trails and wheels with camo painted gun shields, after all these were actually Hungarian guns whilst the larger 80mm field guns got the full camo treatment being of vintage Hungarian origin and the wheels look rather natty in camo. The german supplied 105mm guns were done in the plain Olive green, I did ponder doing them in the original grey scheme but decided that the Hungarians probably had enough time to give them a quick repaint after they arrived. Camoflage is less important for these much longer ranged weapons and the large gun rule makes them a bad choice for an ambush, assuming I ever use them in the first place, so why bother with a camo scheme.
With all these I added some ammunition crates and loose shells to the bases to add some interest, my leader teams in the artillery were modelled with staff officers and plotting table from the Soviet gun sprues to make them easy to identify on the table top.
Well that’s my update for today, next I’ll address the thorney issue of coping with Reserves and adding some more punch to the list – Happy modelling, Martin