Pastures New

(Brigadier’s log, show date S-7)

It’s not often that we launch a completely new range – the last one was probably Small Scale Scenery, which itself only started as an add-on set of terrain accessories for Land Ironclads.

But today, here’s something completely new and utterly unconnected to anything else we make – and it’s a historical range as well. The two of us first started gaming together in the mid-80s playing WW2 actions in 20mm. Phil had a reasonably large collection of late war German and US forces, while Tony concentrated on the early stages of the conflict with German, French, British and, possibly his favourites, a small contingent of Belgians. We’ve both still got them, probably 1000+ 20mm vehicles between us.

At our club, Maidstone Wargames Society, there are some 6mm WW2 gamers, so Tony wanted to recreate his Belgian force in that scale, but found a shortage of options. However, one of the best things about running a miniatures company is that you can make whatever you want so, just like Phil did when he created our WW1 Belgians, we decided to make our own. We commissioned Martin Baker, who created most of our 6mm sci-fi figures, to sculpt a set of infantry figures while Tony designed digital masters for the vehicles. As you can see from the photos below, Martin has done a magnificent job – just look at the expression on the squad leader’s face as he urges his men forwards. The figures are slightly smaller than our 6mm sci-fi figures, as we’ve designed them to fit in with the 1/300th WW2 ranges made by other popular UK manufacturers. The basic infantry pack has enough for a single rifle platoon – Belgian infantry platoons were relatively large at ~50 men. The exact composition of a rifle platoon does seem to be up for debate, we’ve found at least four different organisations so they may have differed between regiments. All being well, we should also have packs of Maxim heavy machine guns and DBT light mortars (there’s an HMG in the photo below).

The initial vehicle range starts out with the core of a Belgian armoured force – the T-15 light tank, early and late versions of the T-13 tank destroyer, plus the two versions of the Vickers Utility Tractor (infantry and cavalry). T-13s were organic to the infantry divisions, with a company per division, and they were also fielded by cavalry units. T-15s were restricted to cavalry units, plus a small number with the Chasseur Ardennais. The Vickers Utility Tractor comes in two versions, infantry and cavalry, also known as Type A and Type B (although which was which isn’t always clear – we’ve seen both designs referred to as Type B, with one website mixing the two up on the same page !). The vehicles are designed as best we can at 1/300th using scale plans and drawings, plus references to photos that Phil took at the Antwerp war museum,

Assuming these sell well, we will follow up later with more including some towed ordnance – artillery, heavy mortars, anti-tank guns – and maybe even the famous Chasseur Ardennais on their bicycles.