Other side...

... of the hill. The esteemed Kinch requests armour other than of the Hun. I give him some Bolsheviks:

This armour, support and odd bits and pieces all form part of various 'Rapid Fire' units, but I'm damn'd if  can remember, off hand, what or which or whatever. I would need to think about that, and, at the moment, that is beyond me.

And, some out of focus infantry:

Still on a sort of Russian theme, this fellow surfaced (the loft gave him up) the other day. He is a Spencer Smith imagi-nation type (but  note green coat) that I gave my son a few years ago to encourage him in his desire to go 18th Century-wards. However, he has not, yet, reached the age of enlightenment. But, I still have hopes.

Vorwarts...

.... advancing on the Ferdinand front. Basic build complete. The running gear was fiddly, and I left it for a good 24 hours to cure before handling it again. However, the superstructure went together well, with only the slightest amount of filler needed where the rear fighting compartment met the lower hull, and even that might have been my fault as I didn't clamp the assembly. So, all in all, despite the slightly indistinct casting of the wheels in particular, a nice kit:

I won't be using the decals from the kit as they are for a Ferdinand lost at Kursk, and I don't want to set off on the wild goose chase of building thousands of AFVs for Kursk in 20mm (doubtless someone, somewhere is doing that as I type. Poor, happy fellow). That left me with a small puzzle, as I know that vehicles used in Italy and in odd places later in the war where modified Ferdinands - i.e. , Elephants. That would have meant sourcing a Stug III commander's coupla and building a front mg position in the hull. But I was fairly sure I had a reference to a Ferdinand that would do the trick. And I did:

The colour plate is from the fount of all tankie knowledge, Steven Zaloga, and James Grandsen's excellent 1983 book:

and shows a Ferdinand at the Nikopol bridgehead in November 1943. So, that's what my Ferdinand will be.

Wombling?

No, Wirbling! I've finished the flak support, and it looks ok:

The crewman on overwatch is the venerable Airfix armoured car chap with new trousers to make him look a little more late war.

Jabo hunting, but in plastic, in 20mm, thankfully.

Ferdinand...

I'm caught up in a mid/late war armour fest. Not content with the Wirbelwind, I took delivery of a really heavy bit of kit today:

I've never previously been tempted by the failure of Kursk (or was it just badly deployed in a tactical sense? I don't know), but not so long ago, I saw a photograph of a Ferdinand in late 1944, possibly involved in the Battle for Narva - that stunning defensive action. So, given my current inability to spend too much time doing anything, I thought another kit would be just the ticket, hence the beast. As for the Trumpeter kit, the mouldings are a bit fuzzy, which surprised me, but look at the tracks:

Oh joy! The bag contains trillions of individual track links, but, aaah, wibbly rubber band style tracks are also included - for which, much thanks. The running gear assembly has been broken down into pretty much as many sub-assemblies as one would think possible, so, I've only managed this much:

Of course, given the tension associated with the rubber band style tracks, it will be a few days before all the running gear is in place, the glue fully cured and ready for the tracks.

Meanwhile on the Wirbelwind front:

But, noises off the armour construction board are calling me to more colourful times:

While in the real world, today was a beautiful Autumn/Fall day in West Mercia, with clear sunlight lighting up the flowers enjoying a last hurrah. Here be 'Devil's Teardrops':

Finally, for the Very British Civil War enthusiast, or anyone with an interest in the ideologies that helped make the last century so awful, there is another free bit of my writing available. See the right hand column here, click on the image of the Soviet chap and access a free University of Warwick Pdf.

Wirbelwind...

... a slightly trickier build than I expected, with many of the small parts having no clear location guides, and the instructions being vague. On the plus side, I took a chance with the tiny 20mm barrels and managed to drill the ends out (thankfully, the flash dampers were moulded onto the barrels). So, current state of play is:

The Flakpanzer IV was, apparently, a pretty rare beast, and my library isn't really late war heavy, but William Auerbach's Last of the Panzers (Arms and Armour, London, 1984) came up with the goods again:

A clear view in the photograph above, with another Wirbelwind, very ominously damaged, below:

Both these were taken on the Western Front in early 1945, and Auerbach notes that only 86 Wirbelwinds were built (using reconditioned Pz IVs). Given this, and the obvious anti-ground attack role of the Wirbelwind, I'm beginning to wonder if it only served in the West. If so, that's a nuisance, as my late war armies are all orientated to the East. Blow.

Stopped in my tracks?

not at all! Spurred on by blogs like Plastic Warriors, I decided to crack on with a quick project to keep me on wargaming/modelling track:

A second-hand Hasegawa PzIV flakvierling (donated by my son). No box top, but all the bits present. Running gear and body of the sharp end completed. I should be able to really push on tomorrow with this interesting bit of kit. I remembered reading an article in Airfix Magazine in the early 1970s in which some enterprising fellow used the then new Airfix Panzer IVF1/2 as the basis for a variety of flakpanzers, so I dug around in the shed and found these:

The November 1971 edition was the first copy I bought, as an 11 year old. I can remember quite clearly standing outside 'Raymond's' in the small town I lived in, peering at all the bizarre oddities that he sold (it was the sort of bucket shop that just doesn't exist now, in the age of sky high rents, niche markets, and the triumph of the glossy), and there was this copy of Airfix Magazine. I cadged the 15p from my mother, and I had added a new interest to my life.

Unfortunately, nearly a decade later I loaned most of my Airfix Magazines to a friend, and, of course, I never saw them again. But a few survived, including this one from November 1973, with the late John Sanders' '8th Army in the desert'. What a wonderful series! Only rivalled by George Gush on Renaissance Warfare.

A long time ago, but still there, somewhere.

'like a thief in the night'

I was intending to be walking in North Yorkshire this week, with wanderings through beautiful Swaledale, and hiking up onto the North York Moors. I should have left on Saturday. Instead, I spent three days in hospital, and now know that my feeling of being below par was more than a feeling. After much needle stickings, scans, X-rays etc, it was established that I have a pulmonary embolism - blood clots in the lungs to you and me. When the doctor told George Orwell that he was lucky that the round which passed through his neck missed anything vital, Orwell replied that he would have considered himself lucky if the shot had missed altogether. I get Orwell's point, but I am lucky, as walking up into the North York Moors would have, in all probability, seen me off. 'I will come like a thief in the night'.

On the up side, being in hospital meant that I was able to finally finish Paul Elliott's The Last Legionary, which is a very neatly put together book - full marks. I also had time to read this little known Nevil Shute:

Although it was first published in 1928, it took Shute two years to write (his day job at the time was working on the R101), and it is a fine piece of 1926 General Strike literature - full of international Bolshevism, fellow-travelling Members of Parliament, disgruntled trades union officials, stalwart English craftsmen, country houses, veterans of the Great War, rural versus industrial life, flying (of course - a Breguet XIX is at the centre of the action), and, very interestingly, the view that Italian fascists were fine fellows - 'I liked the look of them', says the hero of a squad of Northern Italian Blackshirts. A fascinating period piece, and the 1959 cover of the edition I have is another period piece. I've always found all this sort of stuff interesting - looking up from where I am sitting, I realised that most of the books (with the exception of Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson), and the models are all early twentieth century: