Showcase: Entrenchments, Mine Field

 

Just a little something I made for 28mm WW2 wargaming - three sections of entrenchments and a minefield. Oh, and a medic as a little bonus.

A few weeks ago, Col.Bourne of Lead Poets Society fame and I started playing a Chain of Command campaign called '29, Let's Go!'. You can read reports of our games on the Lead Poets Society (from a US point of view) blog and Tabletop Stories (from a German point of view) respectively, 

Spurred on by the first game I took stock of my very small German WW2 collection in 28mm. I was rather sure I had a not-too-pretty Pak40 by Black Tree Design somewhere. So I started rummaging through boxes and instead unearthed a leIG18 with crew. Even better. Then I headed over to Warlord's website, fell over due to the head-spinning price increase on everything. Got up, ordered some pretty Empress figures from the Netherlands (hooray for mainland Europe stockists!).

Until those arrive I decided to make 'little' support stuff. The sort of stuff you only think of when having to deal with a limited list of supports and you don't get distracted with all the shiny toys.

For our first game Col.Bourne made some last-minutes low-level supports for Germans (minefields, entrenchments, barbed wire), and had a pretty ingenious idea for depicting minefields. You can seee it here in the picture in the upper right:

Just four posts, makes for great, flexible minefields. Excellent. So I nicked that idea immediately, and made 8 such posts for 28mm gaming and 8 for 15mm gaming (usually we play Chain of Command in 15mm, so I have all sorts of stuff for that size, but 28mm's been rather neglected so far).

I read that the German army used all sorts of markers to subtly mark minefields for friendly troops. I didn't feel like using the old "achtung, minen!" sign. Then I found a photo of a sign saying "Minenfrei" (meaning "free of mines", cleared). Which would be more entertaining, as a sort of detestable trick. Then I read that at some point they used posts, painted olive drab, with little flat parts cut into the wood facing the 'friendly' direction, painted red, with a black M painted on. I like that because it's easy to do and it's a very optimistic idea as well, expecting never to come through again, facing the other direction.

At the same time I made some entrenchments based on these suggestions (whilst listening to the ESC and feeling a bit sick. Not due to the ESC though.):

http://northern-wargaming.blogspot.com/2015/07/ww2-entrenchments-in-28mm-with-tutorial.html

By no means perfect, but my main objectives were not to make them too large, to keep them as generic as possible (so I can use them for several periods) and simple/sturdy. Entrenchments on top of a table are always a bit odd anyway, aren't they. Of course there's the proper way of doing it....

https://tinyhordes.com/dug-in-soviets/

...but the way I did them should work alright. Especially since it's mostly guns which are sitting in entrenchments anyway.

Oh, I also made a medic from some plastic warlord sets (and an arm from the Wargames Atlantic Partisans set. Very useful.), rummaging through his little medic's purse. 

I hope that this little blogpost had some useful stuff for you!