Buildings Preview

For the last three weeks I have been working on a batch of new buildings for sale. There are still a parts of the buildings in this batch to complete, but as a bit of a teaser here are some preliminary images. The full batch of seven items  is expected to be completed by the end of the month.

This French farm still needs an hour or two work on the main building roof and the front gate, but it's coming together nicely.

The main part of this batch is a series Middle Eastern / North African buildings. There are two pieces that form part of the bazar. They will be able to be used in isolation or together. Here is the first of those pieces completed. The second piece is still in the early stage of construction.

Also included in this set is a large rambling compound of four conjoined houses with a rambling stairway that leads to the roof. There is still a bit of work to be completed here.

Along with this batch will be three 15mm pieces that have been laying around in my study for 25+ years.

A week ago I spent a very pleasant couple of hours chatting with Ken the Yarkshire Gamer for his podcast show.

The Samurai Get an Outing

Today the samurai army and their Korean opponents were allowed out of their boxes for the first time since June last year. 

The rules were To the Strongest and it was a bad day for the army of Toyotomi Hideyoshi which was severely thrashed by the Koreans.

Here are a few images of the game.

A view across the field of battle on turn three

Those menacing Korean infantry...

...close in on Kato Kiyamasa's command

The Korean heavy cavalry form up...

...and clash with Ahimszu Yoshiihisa's samurai contingent

Il Naomassa's 'Red Devils' surge forward

The Korean's approach a village...

...but soon clash with the Red Devils

The Korean cavalry smash into the flank of the last of Ahimszu Yoshiihisa's infantry...destroying them and ending the game.

Still More Bavarians...and a Few Prussians Too...

I have finished the 3rd Battalion of the 9th Regiment, in firing line poses for a change.

This is the sixth of thirteen battalions I am doing for the Bavarian contingent. It completes the 9th Regiment as well as von Thiereck's Seventh Infantry Brigade.

The remaining seven battalions that make up Mallinger's Eighth Brigade will have to wait in the painting queue while I complete another batch of buildings for sale.

Also completed before construction work began were some Prussian generals and a second Bavarian general. The Prussians are from the high command set, supposed to represent Moltke (in the fatigue cap), the Crown Prince (in the pickelhaub) and Prince Frederick-Charles (in the hussar uniform), although I will be using them as generic senior officers. The Bavarian is the free Hartman figure that comes with the purchase of three boxes of plastic figures, but will be used as a brigadier and the divisional command will come from another source. I have to say that I am disappointed with these figures - they are not up to the usual quality expected from the Perrys.

The Texas Lancers

For the last fifty years or so I gave been a prolific reader of American Civil War history. In wargaming terms it is my first love and I wholeheartedly agree with Stew that this Civil War is the best Civil War. One of my favourite (and possibly one of the least known) campaigns is Confederate General Henry Hopkins Sibley's invasion of New Mexico in 1862. 

In this bizzare operation Sibley intended to not only take control of New Mexico by occupying Albuquerque and Santa Fe, but then to move up into Colorado and secure the gold and silver fields for the Confederacy. On top of that he then planned to march to California and secure the Pacific ports to enable the South to break the Union blockade. All this was to be achieved by with a single brigade of 2,500 men in four regiments. Like many other Confederate generals he believed that thousands of new recruits from the occupied region would flock to the Southern cause.

On the surface Sibley seems no different to hundreds of senior officers on either side in the Civil War. Born in Louisiana in 1816 he was 46 years old in 1862. A West Pointer he had seen service in the Second Seminole and Mexican Wars. While on duty in Texas in the 1850s he invented the Sibley Tent, a conical tent used by the US and British Armies. He saw service in Kansas during the Bleeding Kansas years and against the Mormons in Utah. He was on duty in New Mexico when the Civil War broke out. But Sibley had a serious problem with the bottle, a problem that would incapacitate him for days at a time.

Sibley got his brigade to Fort Bliss (modern day El Paso) in early January and set off on his adventure in February. The first objective was Fort Craig that if taken would eliminate all Union resistance south of Albuquerque, but more importantly Sibley was dependent on captured supplies to keep his troops and animals fed and the fort held a huge volume of them. The Confederates appeared before the fort in mid-February. Sibley knew he could not carry the fort by assault and tried to entice the Federals out, but they were not about to play ball. Then, when his army needed him the most, Sibley went on a bender, handed command to Colonel Tom Green and retired to an ambulance.

Green decided to move east around the fort and force the Yankees to fight for their line of communications to the north. In a sober moment Sibley approved of the plan and on 21 February ordered Colonel Scurry to lead the way into Valverde and secure the fords across the Rio Grande. Scurry soon clashed with Federal troops sent north to intercept them. The Texans, armed with shotguns and pistols could not compete with their rifle armed enemy and took cover in an old dry riverbed. Both sides brought up more troops and around 4:00 PM Tom Green brought up the last of the Texans and with Sibley back in his ambulance suffering from his self-imposed illness, Green took command of the field.

Leading Green's column was Captain Lang's Company B 5th Texas that were armed with lances. Lang asked Scurry if the could charge against a unit of Federal militia that stood about 500 yards away. Scurry said no, but Lang continued to press him. Finally Scurry relented and Lang led 50 lancers forward against the Yankee militia at the gallop. But these were no raw militia, they were a company of hardened, well drilled Colorado miners and frontiersmen who just happened to be dressed in militia grey uniforms who fired two well disciplined volleys that killed or 20 lancers and killed or wounded every horse in the company. The charge faltered. The survivors returned to their lines and threw down their lances, burning them later that night. So ended the only charge by lance armed cavalry in the American Civil War.

When I stumbled across the above of the image of the charge on the cover of one of my books recently, I thought "why not!" So here is Captain Lang and his company mid-charge.

Bavarian Ramblings

Plague came to the Bavarian village of Oberammergau in 1633 and in just over a month half the population of the village, 81 people, perished. This loss prompted the remaining villagers to make a vow that if they were spared, every ten years they would perform a play depicting the life and death of Christ. From that day on there was no further loss of life from the plague. Keeping their word the villagers performed the first Oberammergau Passion Play in 1634 and they have kept their promise for 391 years. In 1680 they changed the timing of the performance to years that ended in zero and have managed to stick to that schedule except for nine occasions (one being in 1870, because of the Franco-Prussian War, and another being 2020 which was postponed to 2022 because of the COVID 19 Pandemic). 

In 1933 the Oberammergau community decided to stage a series of special out of sequence performances in 1934 to celebrate the 300th anniversary of the first play.  The Nazi party, having come to power the previous year, got right behind the event to extract as much propaganda as they could from it. They ensured that the wording "Deutschland ruft Euch! (Germany is calling you)" was printed on the official poster (right),declared that the Play should be a “national people’s pilgrimage”and reduced the entrance fees by half to encourage Germans to attend. Hitler and a bunch of his cronies attended the play.

My mother and her sister attended one of these special performances. I do not know why they chose to attend since neither was deeply religious, and as members of the Church of England they were deep into Catholic Germany. Nonetheless tavelling in Germany in 1934 must have been eye opening for two young English women from rural Kent (my mother was eighteen at the time my aunt in her mid-20s) given that Bavaria was the centre of Nazi activity at that time, yet oddly my mother never talked about it much - maybe having served through WWII she found it a difficult subject, I don't know. The only thing she ever spoke about on that trip was the time she and her sister spent in Switzerland, visiting Berne, Zurich, Zermatt and the Matterhorn.

Why am I blathering on about this? Well four reasons: First, when cleaning up recently I turned up a bunch of trinkets she had gathered on that trip - including a beautifully carved wooden crucifix from Oberammergau; second, because we are in the process of planning a European holiday next year and Bavaria is marked as a stop; third, because today is the 155th anniversary of the Battle of Wissembourg which was the first action of the Franco-Prussian War in which the reformed Royal Bavarian army fought; fourth, because it makes a nice segue into the real purpose of this post - to show off the latest addition to my Franco-Prussian War Bavarians, four boxes of which arrived on my doorstep nearly three weeks ago.

This is 2nd Battalion, 9th (Wrede) Infantry Regiment. This battalion was only slightly engaged at Wissembourg, suffering a loss of one man killed and eight wounded in the assault on the town. 

Roughly handled in the opening stages of the Battle of Wörth two days later, the battalion was fortunate to suffer only 83 casualties. It went to fight at Bazeilles, Sedan and in the Siege of Paris.