Monday, September 27, 2010

German Artillery and AA '88'

Tonight I completed two more support platoons for my Leichte Pionierkompanie. On the left a single 8.8 cm '88' Luftwaffe heavy AA gun, on the right a motorized light artillery battery consisting of two 10.5 cm LeFH18 Howitzers with command, FO and staff teams. As with some of the other units I've been painting for this project, both of these are short platoons because of limited lead availability at the time I started working on them.
This is the motorized light artillery battery. At the time I started it, Adler Hobby only had one blister of the leFH18 guns in stock so I purchased that, the staff team, and the transport vehicles shown. This past weekend a restock arrived and I picked up the additional blister of two more guns to bring the platoon up to the full strength of four (4) guns. At this time these are in process on my painting table. Absent from the transport are half-tracks to tow the guns. I'll be adding these later. Since the transportation is optional, I can field them without the half tracks for now. I've used one of the extra motorcycle stands that I painted up earlier for transportation for the FO for the battery.

This is the Luftwaffe heavy anti-aircraft gun platoon. I painted this up when I painted the artillery battery since the few added crew figures and one extra gun model didn't add a lot of work to the job. I've modeled this as the Luftwaffe version without the gun shield. I'll most likely be making a rare-earth magnet mount for the shield so I can use the gun as a heavy anti-tank platoon as well. I've based the gun with five gunners on the main base and the extra three optional gunners on a separate base so I can choose to use it as a ROF 2 or ROF 3 gun. This platoon has its complete complement of transportation: a staff car for the command team and a Sd Kfz 7 half track for the gun and crew.

5 comments:

Steve-the-Wargamer said...

Nice work indeed....! I do like the early war stuff, just for the diversity - if I hadn't started my WWII North Africa project, France '40 would have been my choice..

PS. Do you think the rest of the guys on the 88 will tell the range finder he's looking the wrong way.. :o))

AJ (Allan) Wright said...

Planes can come from anywhere!

Hmm I might have to turn him around though! That's sort of embarrassing!

Steve-the-Wargamer said...

I once based a regiment of WSS troops up, only to find one of them was facing backwards.... :o))

Alfrik said...

Your spotter may have spotted a local Fraulien he's not mentioning to the rest of the crew.....

AJ (Allan) Wright said...

I've spun the range finder figure around so he's facing forward now. Thanks for the heads up on that guys!