A long time ago, I was walking through a convention flea market looking for some good deals. I came across a FOW Battlefront Polish Armored Train box. It was marked down fifty percent and I thought it would be good for a couple of my gaming buddies. I was unable to reach them, so I decided to buy it and worry about selling it later.
Well, as often happens when I make this decision, none of my buddies was that interested.. So, the box went on the shelf for later. Every so often, I would look at new lists or list ideas and think about using the train for adding to my existing Russian or German forces. However, the BF train style was only used by two polish trains and both were destroyed, so is did not really work (so yes, I am a bit anal about proper armored train use…). So, on the shelf the train stayed.
While the train sat on the shelf, I considered doing a Polish force to add to my collection. I have the poles for later periods of WWII, but just not 1939. We tend to play larger scaled games (if you have seen my battle reports) and would need more than a small force. As none of my other buddies had started poles, I did not want to carry the whole load.
Well, time went on and that began to change! So, I made the decision that I would pick up more poles once I found a good deal. While doing some online shopping over the summer, I found the Gajo was clearing out their older polish infantry sets. I decided to take the plunge and ordered enough to fill out my desired force.
The Gajo sets were done in a staining style. This worked well, as I was able to fill in some gaps with some figures I have. I pulled out some 100mm artillery pieces I had with my Italian models (already have metal version of the same for that army) and found some 37mm ATGs on eBay.
I decided to go with straight green paint job on these and not camo them (this is optional for guns and soft skins). I painted them up using some green spray, armor wash, wet brushing and dry brushing. Now I had the guns and the troops done.
Next I went into my BF base box (I have a ton of these from various purchases). I sprayed them brown, glued down all the troops and covered them in brown Vallejo pumice. A wash and some drybrusing and the base color was done. I then covered them with gamers grass tan tufts. I filled in gaps with my own tan static grass and flock mix. This gave me a nice summer field look that I was looking for. I painted the base borders, sealed the models with spray dull coat and they are ready to go.
Now, I just need to paint up some tankettes and that train that is still sitting in the box on the shelf….
Manteuffel