Opening the boxes - US Infantry

The first box that decided to open has a label - US 87th Infantry. I seem to remember giving regimental numbers according to scale. There should be boxes for 87th, 76th, 72nd etc.

This box contained Airfix first type US marines, which came as a surprise, as I thought I had already found these and based them. Here are the contents:

All quite nicely painted and best of all there were some US light anti-tank guns, as well as some jeeps, heavy machine guns and commanders,

Last night I finished off basing them and when added to the original battalion painted last week I have a sizable force, which I will call a brigade:

The vehicles are 1/76  scale and somewhere I know I have some half-tracks and tanks, as well as artillery.

Amongst this group are some interesting conversions. First off there are two 37mm? anti-tank guns with converted crew:

A couple of heavy machine guns:

Some additional bazooka men:

and a rather smart looking senior command figure group:

Next I am going to go hunting for tanks and vehicles.

More Army Reforms - Infantry

I have more-or-less decided that my WW2 wargames will be played on a hex mat using modified Memoir '44 (M 44) rules. To that end I have been slowly reorganising my model figures and rebasing them. My groupings of figures are designed to be used at various levels, so a group can be a platoon, a company or a battalion. Most often they will be used at battalion level.

I have boxes of painted loose figures that were used in the 1980s in a series of large WW2 wargame mini-campaigns, one of which included a D-Day assault on the German held Isle of Man!

I digress.  My infantry 'groups' are a cluster of 'units' and essentially consist of four rifle units, one or two machine gun units, a mortar unit, an anti-tank unit and a command unit (I use the term unit in that these 'units' are stand alone elements when it comes to using the M 44 rules),  I have drafted some additional rules that allow these 'units' to perform as such on the table - for example a machine gun unit is classed as infantry, has a strength of two figures, rolls three dice out to a range of 4 hex.

I will set out a summary of these rule additions in a future post. To illustrate here is an Airfix US infantry 'battalion' that I have just rebased, set out as above:

I have also rebased my Russians, and here are two Battalion groups, representing a Regiment/Brigade:

I am working on a German group, made up from old Matchbox figures. I have still to work out how to incorporate transport for my troops - for example does a machine gun armed half track become a unit? Lots of mulling over to be done!