FOW Painted Italian ETO Infantry Army

I’m still in the middle of the great basing project and next on the hit list was my Italian WWII FOW army. I had these troops painted up by Fernando in Sri Lanka a year ago. I finally sat down with the mid war FOW Italian cards and reconfigured my units to fit within V4 organizations.

I wanted an Italian army that was uniformed in the standard European style uniform to use them in Russia and the Balkans, with some possibly of Sicily and Tunisia. So, I put together my instructions painted a sample figure and sent the whole kitten caboodle out for painting. After a few approvals, the figures finally came back.

In going through the orgs, I had to make some adjustments and paint up a few missing figures here and there. I also needed to paint the heavy weapons, as I did not send those out. There were also a couple of minor errors that needed to be touched up (brass mortar rounds being the most obvious). Once that was all sat out, I glued the figures to the standard battlefront bases.

I then applied medium brown pumice from Vallejo to every base. Once that dried, I dry brushed up the brown with some tan. I then painted the boarders of the bases with a dark tan. Then I applied some flock mix and two different color tufts to give a semi arid look to give me options on different boards. Once that was all dry, I went back and glued down the various laying down figures on top of the basing. I hate having to work around the figures, so it is nice when you have laying down figures that do not have their own mounting base, as you can do the base faster and just attach them. I also glued down the mortar and HMG models that I painted up at this point. Everything was followed up by some dull coat.

With that, I have enough troops to do most infantry organizations allowed by the rules, by just organizing the bases correctly. I opted to glue the Brixi mortars to small bases, as this is what the engineers use. For other use, I can just keep four of the together in base contact to simulate the large base (I am not a fan of these new large base support weapons, so am opting for multi bases I can group together).

I still need to finish my supporting artillery and anti tank guns, but those will take a little more time. Then of coarse there are all the vehicles… That is a project for another time! In the meantime, I have more than enough to field infantry based forces.

• Manteuffel