The BEF

For all that people complain about the crap performance of British early war armour, the 2 pounder tank gun was a damn fine weapon until mid 1941. It could clean up any german tank at 500 metres until the advent of face hardened plate and was well superior to the 37mm of the German vehicles.

I’ve always been fascinated by the various early cruiser tanks, the multiple turret A9, the supposedly improved A10 and the Christie suspension A13 in its various permutations. The key is that the BEF and the early desert forces had some wonderfully different camo schemes, no boring Khaki Drab for these lot. No, instead we have the glories of the caunter scheme and the two colour BEF France schemes. The problem has always been getting decent references books to match. there’s been much erroneous information over the years, much of it caused by the Airfix Matilda paint scheme and the terminology used to describe the paint colours.

Before I even think about painting my BEF armour I’m going to purchase the following books authored and researched by the doyen of British WW2 armour camoflage schemes, Mike Starmer:

I already own the following book which is useful but perpetrates some myths:

There’s a website that get referenced every so often, miniatures.de or something like that. Avoid it. The colour suggestions are out of whack, the information contains egregious errors (BEF tanks using all three greens in one scheme for one example) and basically you’ll just get confused. Better off spending the £10 + £2.50 for the Starmer book and get it right from the start.

More exposition on the Poll choices

The Crete option is something that I’m looking at because I have enough Fallschirmjäger figures to do a full strength company plus supporting platoons and it’s one of those situations where it really was a close run thing and scenario games are very easy to generate.

I prefer an all arms force for the most part, especially in terms of maintaining interest painting wise, as long as there is enough variety in the types of vehicles fielded. Hence the Normandy FJs where I get to play around with a fairly wide variety of uniform schemes and supporting armour/vehicles.

The Paras at Arnhem are a different matter, I’m happy enough to paint up a primarily infantry force there because the camo smocks are such a bear to get right yet the Recce Jeeps are so interesting in terms of modelling.

The 1945 US force has variety in terms of models that I like: Chaffees, late type Shermans with 76mm and Sandbag additional protection, a trio of Pershings and the usual polyglot of wheeled/halftracked transport. The infantry are Peter Pig which i’m not that fond of, another erason to flick them off to someone willing to spend a little bit of cash.

The Winter War Soviets will probably be the most technically interesting to paint and construct as the T26 company will have at least 5-6 different variations in terms of models ( conical and vertical turrets, command versions, uparmoured versions, multiple turret versions, flamethrower armed ones) along with the T28s and the snow basing – it also means that I’ll end up having to assemble a Finn force from scratch (Thanks JR for suggesting that!) but then I’m sure with the return of my Finnish war DVDs I’ll not lack for motivation or inspiration.

The Summer 41 Soviets have been a pet project for a while – I’m looking at something very interesting for the colour scheme as there was a Moscow division that used a three colour camo scheme which will look very pretty if I can get it right and it certainly beats a mass of drab Soviet green vehicles. Plus I really want to field a company of T35s.