"Firing into the Brown" #11 - Blitzkrieg, Italien, "Starfish" and stuff..

"So Carnehan weeds out the pick of his men, and sets the two of the Army to show them drill and at the end of two weeks the men can manoeuvre about as well as Volunteers. So he marches with the Chief to a great big plain on the top of a mountain, and the Chiefs men rushes into a village and takes it; we three Martinis firing into the brown of the enemy".

Kipling "The Man Who Would Be King"

Time for another update...

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Book finished and per the post where I mentioned and expressed some doubts about the slightly sensationalist statements on the front, time for me to review and advise whether the book is indeed worthy of all the glitter on the front..  in short, does it describe a whole new raft of myths and realities, is it "stunningly revisionist"..  errr...   or not?

Well.. the short answer is "no"... not surprisingly..  to be honest I wasn't expecting it to be..  Hastings, Beevor, Keegan and others have been raking over the first hand written and audio testimony for years now, and it is unlikely that they with their researchers would have missed anything "stunningly revisionist", and based on this book they didn't..

What we have is a very readable history of the Battle of France from the start of 'Fall Gelb' ('Case Yellow' - the first part of the assault - ie. "hold in place on the Belgian flank while the Panzers swung through the Ardennes and round the other flank" or as Captain Mainwaring called it, "a typical shabby Nazi trick" 😁) to the end of 'Fall Rot' ('Case Red' - the breakthrough, defeat, and occupation of France)

There are no surprises here - the author covers it all (very well), but the editors, book designers and whatever have done him no favours by promising all the snake oil on the cover.. so what we DO have is a clear and concise account of the failings of the French army (operationally, tactically, mentally welded to their fortresses, and the concept of the positional battle, completely unable to react as quickly as they needed to), and we have the Germans, flushed from success in Poland where they have learned hard lessons on the actual field of battle, and with leaders like Guderian, Manstein and Rommel, absolutely overflowing with confidence in the new Panzer arm, trying desperately to persuade the more conservative elements to let them do what was planned, and eventually succeeding.

An excellent book, the descriptions of the condition of the German tank troops and panzer grenadiers, after being awake for days at a time, was gripping. 

Very good, I'll give it 8 out of 10 despite the cover snake oil, but in my opinion, the absolute go to account of the campaign is still Alistair Horne's book "To Lose a Battle" which I reviewed here [clicky] and very much recommend..

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Work has been going on with that promised upgrade to the standard of the Royal Italien..  but then I looked at them and thought..  "hmm, they're a bit shiny"..   and then "hmm...  bases are a bit thin and warped"...  so...

Ready for new bases..

Stuck on and a coat of 'dull cote' applied by brush..

Looking better..

New flag offered up.. bases flocked...

Doesn't that look better than the old one..  pleased with that... 

Flag courtesy of David [clicky] at "Not By Appointment"...

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Was doing some reading this week prompted by a comment I read in one of the local papers about decoy operations in my local harbour during WWII..

The islands you can see in the middle of the harbour (which are now bird sanctuaries) were used in WWII as decoy sites to lure German air raids away from nearby Portsmouth harbour. 

Code named "Starfish" this [clicky], and this [clicky], are particularly interesting reads on the decoy operation and how they worked (electric light and oil flamed fires primarily)...  by all accounts they were very successful; on the night of 17/18 April 1941, over 140 enemy aircraft were lured away from Portsmouth and in excess of 200 air-dropped munitions fell semi-harmlessly into Langstone Harbour and Farlington Marshes although inevitably some bombs dropped long and landed on Hayling Island causing casualties (including anti aircraft gunners based at Sinah Common - SC in the map)

I cycle past this bunker most days on my way to work (part of my route is across the top of the marshes) and had no idea what it's function was until I started reading up on the operation..

© Copyright Mike Searle

It's a control bunker for the 'QL' bombing decoy site on Farlington Marshes (FC on the map). It operated with a separate 'Starfish' site whose control building was on the east side of the marsh (FC2) - everything controlled from "FP" (for Fort Purbrook) on top of the hill where they would have had the perfect view..

We're surrounded by history - must keep an eye out for that second Farlington bunker on my next cycle..

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"Laters", as the young people are want to say...

"Firing into the Brown" #9 - Books, Blitzkrieg, rebasing and stuff..

"So Carnehan weeds out the pick of his men, and sets the two of the Army to show them drill and at the end of two weeks the men can manoeuvre about as well as Volunteers. So he marches with the Chief to a great big plain on the top of a mountain, and the Chiefs men rushes into a village and takes it; we three Martinis firing into the brown of the enemy".

Kipling "The Man Who Would Be King"

Time for another, smorgasbord-style, update...

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One of the undoubted joys of the easing up of COVID restrictions in the UK is the ability to go browsing in physical bookshops again..

So it was that with half an hour to waste the other Saturday I found myself in a proper bookshop surrounded by the smell of books (Amazon is brilliant, but it can't do that.. 😀) and with a well stocked military history section to browse, and I spotted this one..

I've not come across the author before, but the blurb was enough to get me intrigued so I invested a tenner, and have just started it..  time will tell if my money would have been better spent over the bar for a couple of pints, and whether the 'myths and realities' aren't anything we haven't heard before..!

Any of my reader read it? Should I be worried by the fact that despite the book being about the fall of France the cover picture is from Barbarossa??  😟

German Schnelltruppen, supported by Schutzenpanzerwagen Sd.Kfz. 251/1 and 10 (armoured personnel carriers), move into a burning Russian village at an unknown location during the German invasion of the Soviet Union, sometime between June 26th and July 1st, 1941.(Colourised by Royston Leonard UK)

The picture deserved repetition - the colorisation definitely adds to the impact..

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Good news, the rebasing of the 15mm WW2 German forces are complete...

Heer first..  officers/commanders on the left (mounted on 2p's) regulars on the right on penny's

Selection of supports - recon motorbikes and a "door knocker", 37mm anti tank gun..

Slightly out of period camouflage on the heer... all I can say is that it was a good idea at the time! 😁

Transport, soft and hard, and AFV's

Those vehicles are beginning to show their age... compare the Opel in front (Peter Pig) with the one behind (Zvezda)

Love this fellow..  full of Prussian vim and vigour...

"Entschuldigung, wo geht es zur Meuse?" 😀

Now they're done, I'd better get a game on then!

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This one's for DC - crank it up loud, man..  ☮😁

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Maigret is on a fact finding and sharing trip to the US where he is being handed off by one police force to another on a cross continent trip - each force seemingly being relieved to hand him on so they can get back to work, when he stops over in a small southern town where a coroners court is in seating to come up with  finding on the death of a young girl under mysterious circumstances..

Five soldiers are under suspicion, and surprisingly (even to himself) Maigret is sucked into the ongoing investigation, and finds himself asking questions that he thinks need to be asked and aren't..

Simenon is quit e interesting in this book as Maigret thinks on his view of America and American's, and how very different they are from European's - the book was published in 1949, so at this time both Europe and America would have had a closer relationship and knowledge of each other than before the war..

Good book - prefer it when Maigret is in France - he seems slightly like a fish out of water when he is away from France and Madam Maigret..  😊  Rate this one as an 8/10.

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 Laters, as the young people are want to say...

"Firing into the Brown" #8 - Huey's, books, more rebasing and stuff..

"So Carnehan weeds out the pick of his men, and sets the two of the Army to show them drill and at the end of two weeks the men can manoeuvre about as well as Volunteers. So he marches with the Chief to a great big plain on the top of a mountain, and the Chiefs men rushes into a village and takes it; we three Martinis firing into the brown of the enemy".

Kipling "The Man Who Would Be King"

Time for another update...

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Couple of years ago I read the Max Hastings history of the Vietnam war (or rather "wars" as you can probably differentiate between the French Colonial war, the civil war between north and south, and then the increasing American involvement) and was hugely taken with the section where he recounted the experiences of just one of the Huey pilots who had been assigned to Vietnam after basic training.. came back to me again the other day, so I thought I'd go off and do some reading round the subject..

"Though Cobra's and Huey's were the same loaded weight, 9,500 pounds, the latter were quieter and smoother in the gunship role, carrying sixty-two rockets and four thousand mini-gun rounds. Never in history had so many tactical helicopters been deployed – nor would be again. ‘There were times when over a hundred were in the air over a battle,’ said Hickman [who was an American Huey pilot in Vietnam]. ‘When you saw a ten-ship lift going into an assault with four supporting gunships and a smoke ship, it was just awesome.’*" 

*Is it just me who is reminded of the "Tears in rain" (also known as the "C-Beams speech") monologue at the end of Bladerunner? 😊

How amazing is that picture?!

Over 30 years Bell made more than 16,000 UH1 "Huey" helicopters - the US Army had  between 7 and 12,000 alone in Vietnam (depending on your source) providing a number of roles of which the three main appear to be "slick" the troop carrier model (carrying approximately 12 soldiers), the "dust-off" or medical extraction model, and the gun ship which could be armed with any number of variations of gun and rocket. The UH-1H model, was the most-produced Huey variant, with 5,435 units manufactured, and the one most likely to be encountered in Vietnam.

My reading would indicate that natural wastage could account for at least 1,000 of them a year, as a result of damage, wear, crashes, accidents, etc. The Vietnam Helicopter Pilots Association, reckon a total of 11,846 helicopters were shot down or crashed during the war, while the Vietnam Memorial Fund reports 5,000 were destroyed - difficult to identify cost, but I think they were about $4.5/5M each, no one ever said modern war was 'cheap'...

I was within a gnats whisker of another project and re-reading that the other day, and then being prompted to read up on this iconic helicopter has not helped..! 😀

 

If anyone hasn't, and fancies reading further - then these are all hugely recommended - not a one of them is less than 9/10 in my humble, but nonetheless unchallenged, opinion.. 

• Max Hastings "Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy, 1945-1975"
  
• Robert Mason "Chickenhawk"- Huey pilots account of his war in Vietnam and after ..  troubled life, brilliant book...
  
• Michael Herr "Dispatches" - Herr was a war correspondent for Esquire magazine and the book describes the author's experiences in Vietnam. I'm a bit of an old hippy, must have read this about the time it came out..

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The seventh book in this beyond compare series. O'Brian fans call reading the entire series a 'circumnavigation', so this is my second - but whereas for the first one I raced through them all, practically one after another as I wanted to know what happened to lucky Jack Aubrey in the next book, for this circumnavigation I'm taking my time and enjoying them..

At the end of the previous book (which was set during the Anglo American, War of 1812), Aubrey and Maturin (along with Maturin's intended Diana Villiers) had escaped from the American's to a British frigate which had then engaged one of the American heavy frigates in combat and won the day - safe in British held territory, Jack awaits news from home and a ship to return. 

When they finally get a ship home they are chased by two American privateers, Maturin has managed to snatch some very valuable intelligence papers and it is clear that either he, or Diana who has absconded with a large diamond, is the target..

Back in England at last, but without a ship, and penniless again due to a poor business investment Jack is saved (in more ways than one!) by a mission Maturin is asked to undertake, and in which he asks for Jack as captain of the ship needed to take him to the site of the mission in the Baltic.

After a successful conclusion to the mission, their ship is wrecked on the way home, and they are captured, and imprisoned by the French - Maturin is then identified as a spy by one of the American intelligence officers and all is not looking good, but there is then a final and surprising turn...  brilliant!!  9/10

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Rebasing is proceeding apace..  the following after the first coat of "Forest green"..

They have since had a second coat, and flocking has started...

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 "Laters", as the young people are want to say...

"Firing into the Brown" #7 - Books, LCT's and sundry stuff..

"So Carnehan weeds out the pick of his men, and sets the two of the Army to show them drill and at the end of two weeks the men can manoeuvre about as well as Volunteers. So he marches with the Chief to a great big plain on the top of a mountain, and the Chiefs men rushes into a village and takes it; we three Martinis firing into the brown of the enemy".

Kipling "The Man Who Would Be King"

Time for another update...

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I have been to...  "Landing Craft Tank LCT 7074"

Been meaning to share these pictures for ages as I found the subject fascinating..  last summer I took a ride down to Southsea on my new then e-bike ('Gertude', by the way..  don't ask..) as part of a circumnavigation of Portsea island - done for no other reason than it was a lovely warm day, with little breeze (so no sailing) and I had a new electric bike to ride..

Outside the D-Day museum (which I must revisit soon as I haven't been inside in ages) they now have a new installation - the last every surviving Landing Craft (Tank) in the UK, and according to the information I've read the last surviving LCT that was actually present on the beaches on D-Day.

She was saved from a life on the bottom of Birkenhead docks, where it had sunk following an interim life as a club house and then a nightclub (!), and restored/returned to it's war time appearance with a National Lottery grant - and it is huge... 

On D-Day this would have carried 10 tanks, the display has a couple of the Museums exhibits in it (a Churchill and a Sherman), it's a Mark 3 version, one of about 250 built..  She had a crew of 12, maximum speed of 9 knots provided by twin 460HP engines (fairly unusually she had petrol rather than diesel engines), about a 190 feet long..

The vessel was built in just three months by Hawthorn Leslie on Tyneside, at a cost of about £28,000, the equivalent of just over a million pounds today.

The "17" is to indicate that she was part of the 17th LCT flotilla, and given that she was only launched on April 4th, she had just two short months to prepare for D-Day (in fact, less than that, as she had engine problems after launch). Evidently this preparation was successful though, as on the day, commanded by Sub Lt John Baggott RNVR (picture following), a trainee solicitor in Swindon in "real" life, she landed 9 of her 10 Sherman's (another source says she had 1 Cromwell tank, 2 Sherman tanks and 7 Stuart - but confirms 9 of them were landed) on Gold Beach in support of the British and Canadian landings.. as ever, it is the story of ordinary people doing extraordinary things that leaves you gob smacked..

Sub-Lieutenant John Baggott RNVR, who commanded LCT 7074.
© National Museum of the Royal Navy

Then check the following (picture courtesy and copyright  the IWM) which is fascinating..  first..  look at the hole in side of the LCT next to them ... two, the Germans on 7074 don't seem to be too bothered about having been captured.. and three, on the back of the LCT with the hole you can just see written "looters will be shot", clearly the crew of that LCT were very proprietorial..  😁

LCT7074 7th June 1944 on Gold Beach with enemy prisoners for return to the UK. © IWM

"While I breathe, I hope" - inscription on the bridge..

After D Day she continued in her role of delivering men and tanks to Normandy, and over the following months made 32 landings in all.

To get an idea of the size of it - this might help with scale...

 

 

More here (3 and 4 in particular, are very interesting): 

1. https://www.nationalhistoricships.org.uk/register/713/lct-7074
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMLCT_7074
3. https://www.combinedops.com/WW2_LANDING_CRAFT_LCT_7074_RESTORATION.htm
4. https://blog.twmuseums.org.uk/lct-7074-hebburns-remarkable-d-day-survivor/
5. https://museumcrush.org/worlds-last-d-day-landing-craft-tank-to-be-restored-and-displayed-in-southsea/
   

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Just finished this one which was very good ..

David Gilman is probably better known as the author of the 100 Years War series of books featuring the archer turned knight Sir Thomas Blackstone, and very good they are as well - now to my knowledge that author hasn't completed that series but clearly fancied a change as a couple of books ago he started this series, set in modern times, and featuring the ex French Foreign Legionnaire, Raglan..

Raglan served a long and eventful career in the Legion in their special ops regiment, where he cultivated a number of very useful friends and contacts, one of whom, in this book has disappears in mysterious circumstances leaving only a message that if he does so, Raglan is to be contacted..

Raglan follows the clues, meets a number of people who do and don't help him, kills a fair number of them (😀), hunts and is hunted, but in the end tracks down his man (or rather woman) and Armageddon then ensues in the middle of a jungle..

I have never read any Jack Reacher books, but am enjoying the Amazon Prime series, and I can't help thinking Raglan and Reacher would enjoy each others company - wouldn't want to be in the pub with them at the same time though!

If you like special ops, Frederick Forsyth level weaponry and procedural detail, and a very easy reading thriller style, this is the one for you..  I do, so it's recommended...  9/10.

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Elsewhere, re-basing has started..

These (following) are classed as already "good to go", being based to the standard size/look that I will do the rest with..

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"Laters", as the young people are want to say...

Weekly Musings # 2 - ACW rules thoughts..

Trying to get into the swing of regular posting, so a weekly post, antholog'esque in style (anyone remember "Firing into the Brown" in the old Wargamers Newsletter??😊), seems achievable even if on some occasions they may be short... 

Before we launch, the spammers are also strong this year, so apologies I've added the "I have to approve" thing for if my reader needs to comment..  apologies again, it's a pain but it saves everyone being offered Cialis/Viagra..  though some of the recent offers were decent prices! 😂

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..I've been giving some thoughts to including officers in the ACW rules DG and I worked up (link [clicky]) from those in the Neil Thomas "One Hour Wargames" book..

As I mentioned in the last post, the use of officers to convey/gift strength points back to a unit mid-battle at first sight is a little counter intuitive given that the whole point of the rules is to get a quick game, and adding points will extend the game, but there are some counter arguments..  and besides it's always fun to tinker..

Also I can think of a few scenario specific reasons for doing it in some cases..  for example, I am looking to recreate a particular battle or skirmish where:

1. the actions of an officer had a significant effect on the outcome, or 
2. a unit/regiment/whatever, that on the day performed in a super human way, and remained active far longer than would normally expect,
3. .. etcetc. 

 Anyway - the rule would be optional - I can't see it being needed for every game - and my current thinking is leaning towards including them in a couple of ways...

First - as per the last game, give them a fixed number of strength points they are allowed to gift to any unit, the officer has to be attached to the unit they are gifting (as in base to base contact), and while doing that they can potentially be adversely affected by any casualties the unit takes from firing or melee..

Second - the same, but give them a variable number of strength points they can allocate (say 1D6 worth, or half a D6 worth rounded down, etc)

Movement would be at cavalry rate.. 

While attached to the unit the officer figure would be subject to any damage the unit takes while in combat or under fire..   there's a handy little rule in the AWI McNally rules I use that will cover that nicely.. 

Risk to Generals/officers

If the general /officer is with any unit that suffers losses from melee/firing throw 2d6

• 2 - 8 No effect.
• 9 - 10 Suffers a light wound and moves at 1/2 speed.
• 11 - 12 Dead.

If a general/officer suffers a second light wound he is incapacitated and is removed from play.

Job done..  on a shallow level it also means I have a use for all those officer figures I painted.. 😁

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Finished off a few bits and pieces on the paint table from last year..  by the by is there anything sadder than a water pot that has dried out?? 😏

These were tail ends of the WWII skirmish re-basing for the French - I need to go back and check but this rebasing project may now be complete...? (post edit - yes, the French are complete - need to crack on with the Germans)

Before...

After..

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The Christmas Dickens is now finished, as above, it was "Our Mutual Friend" this year and what a monster of a book - took me weeks! LOL..

I think that completes most of his works for me now and funnily enough this is apparently the last complete novel that Dickens wrote so it is kind of serendipitous that the two events should conjoin...

Quite good I thought (Dickens and "quite good" in the same sentence anyone? 😏) the story concerns one John Harmon believed lost at sea/murdered, and heir to a not inconsiderable fortune that in his absence transfers to his aged (and much loved) guardians the Boffins. The story is basically about how Harmon clears his name and struggles with how he can reclaim his fortune given it will deny his guardians the money while along the way he enrols as their secretary (without them knowing as they haven't seen him years), falls in love and eventually marries ..  but while that is a fairly simple story, along the way there is a simply huge cast of associated and not associated characters that allow Dickens to really go to town on the social inequalities of the time...  "the satire is strong in this one, Obi Wan"... read the passages about the Veneers (what a brilliant and wholly illustrative name for a character) and you think as you (don't) watch "Made in Chelsea/Essex/Jungle", nothing's changed..  excellent 8/10

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Laters, as the young people are want to say...