198th ID Staff

(15mm Piggies against a Ukraininan landscape by Arkhip Kuindzhi)

Just diverting from the horsedrawn theme to tidy up the staff component for 198 ID.

The commander at the start of Blau was Albert Buck, whom we met in the last episode. Here’s a bit more:

The command figure is a Piggie Russian with reprofiled cap and jacket. He almost seems to be giving a Nazi salute, although this was clearly not the designer’s intention. I also can’t claim this to be portraiture … we are adding a generic General to represent the man who commanded the division. Of course, given what happened, even at Operational Level, it seems appropriate to have a figure for the man himself, and the unarmoured staff car he would have been driven around in …

The car is an adapted resin Franklin Olympic from Peter Pig’d Spanish Civil War range … I have chopped it about a bit to make it look a little more like it belongs to the Wehrmacht on the Russian Front. It is quite generic, but based on the type 320 (with a touch of Hogan’s Heroes, maybe)

I painted it that greasy green colour, rather than Panzer Grey because of those ‘Operation Barbarosa’ colour photos we used to see a lot of in the 1970s, in which a lot of the vehicles looked quite green – whether this was because of the colour filters used, or was early colourization by technicians who didn’t know the real colours, I am unsure. But it looks right to me.

Anyway, good on general Buck … commanding from (at least near) the front, where wargamers put their generals – and getting killed in an ambush by grenades being lobbed at an unarmoured staff car. If you now more about the attack on Buck’s staff car (and, indeed, more about the car), please add somecomments below.