More Painting

I have managed at last to finish my French grenadiers, a battalion of Grenadiers de France, perhaps I am not as slow as I think but having put them aside to do a bunch of WWII kits it just seems they have taken a long time. Anyway they are done now, these guys were all amalgamated into four battalions so coming from other regiments they were officer heavy and had colonel's coming out of the woodwork, so they did not carry a colonel's colour but only a battalion one. GMB who do beautiful flags give you two for your money so I will add another battalion of these guys to use up the expensive flag, the British will get another amalgamated battalion with no flag.

As you know I got two Waffen-SS squads from Offensive Miniatures recently and as my go to rules of the moment are Bolt Action I determined I needed the choice of adding another LMG to the squads, you can also add one to veteran Heer squads as well. Offensive do not do extra LMG packs but I asked anyway if they could help and they did, they fished two out of their 'spares' box and sold them to me, they provide the gunner and two assistants carrying ammo boxes, great stuff.

I had some time spare the other day and actually looked up German infantry squads, the standard in 1944 was 9 men, one NCO with SMG, one LMG with pistol, one assistant with pistol and six riflemen, at least one with a semi-auto rifle and one with a grenade launcher, these latter two weapons are not always mentioned depending on where you look. On one site there were some quotes from two veterans and they laughed at the above numbers saying there were normally around six men in the squad and they never had a second LMG. In wargames both the British and the Germans seem to sprout LMG's in the second half of the war and I just wonder why? Yes I have heard from wargamers that veterans picked up as much firepower as they could but the two German guys found the suggestion laughable. When you think about it, when Squad A turns up for replenishment and asks for double the amount of MG42 ammo because they have an extra gun what is the quartermaster likely to say to him? I also thought if something stops the LMG from firing what good would two pistols be to the squad? I was not there of course and I was just passing some time and I am not an expert on WWII infantry squads, but as a wargamer this kind of thing intrigues me.

I watched several videos on painting SS camo patterns as well as looking at guides, I settled for the Warlord written guide and this is what my first squad is based on, I think for a first effort they have come out OK. I know some painters can get all the little dots on but my eyes will not play that game and to be brutally honest unless you pick the soldier up and peer at him the overall effect of  'smudging it' when looking down on a table is absolutely fine. I did notice however that the colours used by the Warlord guide are not quite perfect for the Spring/Summer pattern, now who is the pain. The scheme uses brown, black, dark green, light green and grey, I have to admit the artist did a far better job than I could.

I have started painting the second SS squad and have gone back to basics and actually looked at the Spring pattern smock, Spring and Autumn are mentioned but Summer is not, so these will have the Spring smock as per the examples I see on the interweb. So three colours this time, brown, dark green and green, there should be lots of little dots but as above, I cannot really get away with this, there are smaller 'dots' of colour but overall these tend to blend in, which I suppose is exactly what the camo is supposed to do, no? Oh, the sharp eyed will notice the yellow binoculars, now this is the kind of detail we wargamers love,  a talking point and just waiting for 'that guy' to point it out as wrong, the Germans at times used yellow for these, remember you saw it here first.

Guess what, I have been slapped on the wrist by Facebook, I normally put my newly painted units on my FB page and within about 36 hours I was told it had been removed as the content could cause someone, somewhere distress and was against Facebook's policies. I can only think that the words Waffen-SS were the trigger for Mr. Zuckerburg's ire. So the algorithm from the Wunderkind can pick up Waffen-SS but is not clever enough to shut down terrorists, peadophiles and self harmers etc. As he now bans anyone whose opinion he doesn't like from his media platforms I think I should do the decent thing and ditch him.