XXX Corps - Guards Armoured - British Shermans - FoW

I have been working on these tanks for some time now, off and on between churning out the juggernaut that has become my Wehrmacht forces, of which it has been commented, Speer would have been proud of.. ;-)

The ten tanks are from 2 boxes of 5 Plastic Soldier Company, (15mm) Allied Shermans M4A2, which the Brits called the Sherman V.

These ten tanks give me an HQ of two Shermans, plus two platoons of 4 tanks each comprising 2 Sherman V's and 2 Sherman Fireflys, fitted with the British long barreled 17 pdr anti tank gun.

I have matched as best as I can the paint and decal scheme from the Hells Highway Supplement. I ran in to a couple of problems though. These plastic tanks are fractionally smaller than the BF ones, and the decals I have used are left overs from my original BF Sherman boxed set, and a new set of BF British decals I bought ages ago... The rear deck of the firefly hull is some what occluded from view due to the turret extension, and looking in the HH supplement they sported the Allied star on the turret top. The problem here was there was a lot of knobbly little details on the tops of these plastic tanks, which I was not confident the decals would lie smoothly over, even with decal softener.

The other decal problem was that even on the BF Shermans the Regimental markings and Guards markings were a tight fit on the hull front curved housing, and on these plastic tanks that area is even smaller, there was no way the BF decal was going to fit... so I left them off, having to be satisfied with the rear mounted ones only.. But other than the decal hassles I am very pleased with how these have come together and painted up.

I did use some of DOMs decals for the Tank numbers on the rear hull sides.

The Guards, differed from other tank companies, in having their platoon insignia on the hull sides and not on the turrets. So the picture on the cover of the Hells Highway books shows them correctly positioned, but the painted model examples in the books have them wrongly on the turret sides. But its a minor issue really. I'm mentioning it here just in case I get comments stating I haven't put the markings on the turret!

So these Shermans give me the core armoured force, I am busy adding finishing touches to JOE Vandeleur, and his forward air observer, and a Recce platoon consisting of Daimler I's and Dingos. Hopefully they'll feature in blog post soon.

So once XXX Corps is battlefield ready, I may break open that FireStorm Market Garden boxed set for a look see...