New Year / New Army

Well 2025 has arrived and with it a New Year/New Army Challenge from the Shoot and Scoot Team here at Breakthrough Assault. Whilst Duncan,Fez and Lee will be talking about this on the pod cast and hopefully making the odd written contribution. I’ll be keeping track of my own progress here on the blog. For my New Year/New Army project I’m going to make use of a British Mid War Armoured Fist Crusader Squadron Starter Army, my prize from winning the British Nationals back in 2023.

So to start with, what’s in the box – well its not the most obvious starter set to be honest, at first glance it looks more a random collection of units. You get 6 Crusader sprues, 3 Valentine Sprues, 3 Grant/Lee sprues and 3 Churchill sprues, 2 Daimler and 1 Dingo armoured car sprue as well as 4x 25pdr guns. What this starter does is gives you lots of options for a core Formation choice. I can build out a Crusader Formation as the box suggests, a Death or Glory Formation or evan a King Force Formation from the box.

I am going to base my Force around the Battle of Alam el Halfa in September 1942 and build a mixed Formation representing A and B Squadrons of the 4th County of London Yeomanry (4CLY) of 22nd Armoured Brigade, 7th Armoured Division. My reasoning for using 2 Squadron markings is it allows me to have a Squadron of Grant tanks when I need to worry about reserves which were issued to A Squadron in mid 1942. I’ve decided to go with the Crusader Armoured Formation as my starting point. This will use the 6 Crusaders and 3 Grants as well as the always usefull 25pdr Artillery. This leaves the Chrurchill and Valentine sprues for another project or to add in later, 4CLY were issued Churchill tanks later in the war after they left the Desert.

With what I have in the box I can build an HQ and my first 2 Formation Platoons so I’ll be needing some extra models as 3 Formation platoons isn’t a good idea. I will need at least 7 more Crusaders to bulk up the Formation including adding an extra tank in the HQ Platoon to bring it up to full strength. The fact you can have 4 tanks in the HQ is a big bonus when you need to commit them to an Assault and means you can be a bit more agressive with how the HQ is used on the table top, the extra hulls compared to most Tank Formations allows you to absorb losses in your HQ platoon without risk to your overall game plan. It would have been nice to build some swapable 2pdr/6pdr turrets like the Soviet T-34 kit makes but sadly the sprue only makes 1 of the 3 turret options, having only one lower turret piece, so I will have to make more models than I will probably foeld at any one time. One thing I will be doing is making a few of the hulls up with the machine gun turret still present, the Crusader II tanks that arrived in North Africa in 1941 had this fitted but it was quickly removed as it was pretty useless and meant the crews didn’t need to be so large, saving on trained manpower. It will also be a handy way to identify different troops which can otherwise be hard to do. Another way to make this easier to recognise will be in what stowage I use on the models, I’ll aim to model each platoon slightly differently to help me and my opponent understand which tank belongs to which platoon. Unlike the Germans, the British tanks generally did’t have individual troop markings in the Crusader equipped Regiments.

My Force initially contains just Tanks and Artillery so I will want some sort of Spearhead unit, this will help in a couple of ways providing me something to block enemy reconnaisance with and to allow my fast but under gunned and easy to hit (read Agressive) tanks a greater opportunity to flank the enemy position by being deployed forward. Now the box comes with a Daimlers Armoured Car Platoon but I’m going use these for my LW British so, I have added a couple of Universal carrier patrols to fill this need. For infantry I’m going to add a platoon from the 22nds Motor Company riding in soft skin transports. I have a couple of the old Resin 15cwt Trucks in my cupboard left over from an old DAK army box that will meet this need nicely. I can expand these Support platoons into a 2nd Formation just adding in a Motor HQ and a platoon of 6pdr anti-tank guns; but that’s for another day, famous last words there!

Altogether my New Year/New Army design is well underway but not quite 100 points, I have enough points free to add a 2nd 25pdr Battery or complete the Motor Company build but I really would like to include some element of the Desert Airforce which played a key role in the Battles in the Desert. Plus I just love the RAF paint scheme on desert aircraft, so there is a decision to be made, before I get too far along the journey.

• Crusader Armoured Formation
  • Crusader Armoured Squadron HQ with 2x Crusader II and 2x Crusader CS Tanks
  • 2x Crusader II Armoured Troops
  • 1x Crusader II/III Armoured Troops with 2x 2pdr and 1x 6pdr Tanks
  • 2x Crusader II/III Armoured Troops with 1x 2pdr and 2x 6pdr Tanks
  • Grant Armoured Troop
• Support
  • 25pdr Artillery Battery with 4 guns
  • Motor Platoon with 4 Bren Gun Teams with 2x soft skin trucks
  • 2x Universal Carrier Scout Patrols

So with this list in mind I did some internet shopping during the Christmas holiday and got all the tank models I needed plus a few extra models – I actually have ended up with enough models to field 6 Crusader troops giving me enough to field an all 2pdr armed Crusader Formation for 4CLYs debut in Operation Crusader in 1941 (Early War – should be done by 2026!). I then spent several days building them and got most of them primed ready to start painting last week on January 1st.

I have a painting plan as always with my projects in mind. As I want them to potentially double up as an Early and Mid War Desert force I am going to go with a plain Desert Pink colour scheme to keep it simple to start with, I’m using the painting guide from Colours of War to do these. Keeping my paint job to a small pallette should ensure I can complete at least 1 platoon each week with the aim to be ready for a MW Tournament in early March at TableTop Republic in High Wycombe. To test the paint scheme out I have started by painting up the soft skin trucks, this allowed me also to look at a basing scheme for when I do the Motor Platoon, these are drop cast resin models with inegral bases. Well that’s the plan lets see how I get on, Martin.