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...

British Armoured Platoon - Sherman tanks and Firefly VC

I recently bought the Flames of War, Late War British Guards Armoured Sherman platoon boxed set, to give my commando troop a little armoured support.

They were assembled with Araldite 2 part epoxy glue, undercoated black with GW spray, then sprayed with Battlefront's Late War British armoured spray paint. After this all the detailing of stowage and tracks etc. was painted.

Then came the tricky bit - the decals. How to apply them best, and exactly where!?

The bit of "how" was not so difficult; I painted the areas where decals were to go with Humbrol decal fix, and let this dry. Then added decals (after trimming them with scalpel hobby knife) by water-slide method. Then applied FOW/Vallejo decal softener, allowed to dry and then applied another layer of decal fix. Then tanks were varnished in Polyurethane gloss, and finally Vallejo matt-varnish.

Oh, I also glued in the rare-earth magnets to hold the turrets safely in place. These were a bit fiddly and it was tricky getting them right way up. Get them the wrong way round and they repel, not attract!

The interesting bit was learning where to put all the decals.

The boxed set pictures nicely showed the places where the Guards Division symbol, white eye on a blue shield, and AoS or Arms of Service number, the 53, denoting Armoured, went.

After several explorations through the helpful files on the FoW website, and asking many questions to the knowledgeable forum folks, I managed to work out that the allied star marking went on rear engine deck, which I was fairly sure of anyway.

Next came the tactical signs (tacsigns) These are often depicted as various coloured hollow shapes; triangles, diamonds, squares or circles. These normally go on the sides of the turret. However the Guards followed the convention of applying these markings to the hull sides. Also they normally filled in the hollow shape with black, and added a numeral to it. So I had figured out where to put the black squares, with blue edging.

Lastly I added the WD or war department markings; a white number, preceded by a "T" (for tank). I had often seen these on the sides of tanks in pictures, but some confusion occurred here, as one forum poster suggested this may have been a radio call sign that may be added to rear of turret. So I ended up putting one on side of hull and one on rear of turret. At least that way I know which turret goes with which tank and I don't get any magnet repulsions!

So here we have the platoon:








And here's a very handy reference from the FoW website.

The Guards Armoured division took part in may battles through Normandy and onwards, perhaps most famously portrayed in the movie "A bridge too far", with Michael Caine, as Vandeleur, leading the tanks of XXX Corps as the "garden" part of Operation Market Garden.

A good reference is here, again on the FoW site:

Guards Armoured