Assembling the Troops

Continued from The Beginning

In the last post I discussed how I finally settled on the army I was going to make. Unfortunately, I'd already started buying miniatures before making my final decision. This left me with a box of T-34 obr 1942 tanks and a box of KV-1s tanks that I wasn't going to need. Plus, I'd opened both boxes and actually assembled one of the T-34 tanks before I figured this out.

Fortunately, neither was a completely wasted purchase as I ended up using them in various ways during the assembly and pre-painting process. That didn't change the fact that I still had models to buy. With that in mind I went to two sources. First, I went to my local FLGS, Black Diamond Games, and bought what they had on hand. Then I placed an order with the Warstore for the rest of what I needed.

It was shortly after I placed my order that I realized that I'd made yet another mistake, I'd ordered too many T-60 tanks! As it turned out, this also ended up not being a completely bad thing (except for my wallet).

I made a decision early on that I wasn't going to model the aircraft right away, just the tanks. There was already a rumor that Battlefront would be releasing their own aircraft models, so I decided to wait and see what they came out with rather than hunting down my own.

Assembling all the tanks took a bit of work. I had more than one T-34 hull that had broken bits, one of my T-60 hulls was warped out of shape, and all but one of my KV-1e models were missing their turret hatches! In the past this wouldn't have been much of a problem as Battlefront used to have an extremely fast turnaround on replacement parts. Unfortunately that turnaround time is now measured in months, so my goal of "quickly" building and painting an army was in jeopardy. This is where my earlier foolishness in buying models I didn't need actually helped me out. T-34 obr 1941 and T-34 obr 1942 tanks use the same hull, so I was able to swap out some of my damaged ones for good ones from the box. I had over-ordered T-60s, so one warped hull still left me with enough models. Finally, as it turned out, KV-1e tanks and KV-1s tanks use the same turret hatch. That left me set to go.

The KV-1e and T-60 tanks were relatively easy to assemble. The T-34 tanks were a bit more of a problem. The treads don't quite match up with the body and several of the turret holes were just a little too small for the turrets which meant that the turrets couldn't be turned freely. This required a bit of filing and dremel work to get things lined up properly, but it wasn't too big of a pain.

The only thing left was the tankodesantniki. These were a late addition to my list, and broke my original rule of not having any infantry models in my army. I bought the models, but decided not to work on them until after I had finished the tanks, which is what I'll discuss in my next post in this series.

Just for clarification, the picture that starts this piece shows German and not Soviet tanks. I didn't think to take any pictures of my Soviet tanks when they were under construction. The Panzer IVs in the picture above are part of one of my other projects which I'll discuss in the future. Here's some of my Soviets "assembled":



Continued in Painting the Troops

Comments

I just unlocked the comments so that you don't have to be a registered user to make one. I did activate word verification to hopefully keep any adbots out. Feel free to make any comments. I will post again tomorrow with an article about how I went about assembling the force that I discussed yesterday.

The Beginning

(edit: there used to be a picture of Za Stalina here, but it was a link to the old BattleFront site. For now I've replaced it with the Ostfront book until I can find and scan in my copy of Za Stalina.)

My main project for Flames of War right now is creating a Soviet Mixed Tankovy Batalon based on the units that fought during the second battle of Kharkov in May of 1942. The path I took to come to this decision involved several factors. The first was a desire to get a fully painted force on the table quickly. For me that meant an all armored force with no infantry units. Secondary to that was that I wanted a force that would still be competitive in the game. Third, I wanted to be reasonably historical in my unit composition.

I settled on Soviets after finding what I considered a fair match for Russian Green in the form of Testors Medium Green spraypaint (as it turned out later, the spray is a couple shades lighter, but it worked out). I then turned to my limited knowledge of the Eastern Front for historical inspiration. As it turns out, one of the more detailed books on my shelf is Kharkov 1942: Anatomy of a Military Disaster by David Glantz. I began going through the index of units and comparing them to an order of battle (OOB) I found on the web at armchair general (I later also checked OOBs from the game Kharkov '42, which differed some from those I found on the web). I then checked the OOB against Za Stalina to see whether I could recreate the unit using the army lists. If I could, then I went back to the Kharkov book and re-read any accounts of the actions that the units were involved in. Eventually I settled on the 197th Batalon, 198th Tank Bde, 21st Tank Corps, 6th Army.

The 197th fought in the southern part of the Kharkov operation, spending the first few days in reserve before being committed in a succesful attack towards Kharkov. The day after it completed that attack, it was pulled out again and sent further south to deal with German forces that were counterattacking. It spent the next few days in combat with elements of the 14 Pz, 16 Pz, and 60 Motorized divisions of the German Army. It was surrounded and eventually destroyed in the pocket formed by the Germans.

According to the OOBs I read, the unit started on May 11th with either 4 KV tanks, 8 T-34 tanks, and 8 T-60 tanks, or at full strength with 5 KV tanks, 10 T-34 tanks, and 8 T-60 tanks. In order to build a 1500pt force for Flames of War, I ended up taking 4 KV-1e tanks, 9 T-34 obr 1941 tanks, and 7 T-60 obr 1942 tanks. I added tankodesantniki to the T-34 company and Limited Shturmovik air support to use up the remaining points. The result adds up to 1495 pts.

Continued in Assembling the Troops

What's This?

I'm creating this blog to document the stuff I'm working on for the World War II miniatures game Flames of War, including organizing various historical items related to the forces I'm attempting to model in the game. I was orginally going to cover this in my main blog, but decided that some of the things I'll be talking about are going to be beyond the scope of that blog. Besides, this gives me another site to mess around with formatting.

Updating is likely to be extremely erratic, but we'll see how it goes.