Wednesday, December 21, 2022

Army of the Republic of Vietnam, Early War, in 15mm

 All


But on to the stars of the show, and the real point of this exercise (for this section of this post, I mean)...

ARVN, fousands of 'em, Sir!  Spurred (once again) by the indomitable, imperturbable, yet somehow still indescribable Joe Legan, I have once again jumped into an era/force that I previously had no real interest in.  But you're confused; "Jack," you remind us, "you've already shown us ARVN above."

Indeed, I have.  But those are later war ARVN, with M-16s and M-60s.  See, Joe's been doing early war ARVN, say around 1961, before the US became directly involved, and now I want to do it, too (though I've no idea when I'll actually find the time to jump in).  But the M-16 wasn't a thing back then, and the ARVN didn't have M-60s, they had M-1 Carbines, M-1 Garands, BARs, and M-1919 MGs, so I needed some like that.  But no one (at least so far as I'm aware) makes ARVN like that, so what to do?







Well, these are Peter Pig WWII-era US Marines, and they seem to work just fine.  M-1 helmets, Garands, Carbines, Tommy Guns, BARs, mostly trousers unbloused, close enough for me.  About thirty of these guys actually started out as WWII US Marines, but I pulled them off their pennies, grabbed a bunch more, and set to making a fairly sizeable ARVN force.  I've got a CO, an XO, an FO, twelve rifle stands, three combat engineer stands, six platoon command stand, a water-cooled .30-cal MG stand, three air-cooled .30-cal MG stands, a dual-based (two tubes) 81mm mortar stand, three single-based (one tube) 81mm mortar stands, four bazooka stands, two separate flamethrower stands, and a stand of Docs (Corpsmen!).

I painted these guys up plain-Jane green so I suppose I could use them for generic US Army in WWII or Korea, as well.  

The commanding officer.

Again.

A look at the rifle stands.  Lots of Garands and BARs, pretty cool, eh?

More.

More.  Now you can see a couple Tommy Guns.

The engineers, with a flamethrower on each base.

A look at some heavy weapons.

81mm mortars and air-cooled M1919s (which are actually from Battlefront, not Peter Pig).  Hell, I think those mortar tubes are from Battlefront, too, though the crews are Peter Pig.

Then I put a couple M-1917s on a stand and a couple 81mm mortar tubes on a single stand (those tubes are from Peter Pig).  Not sure why, exactly, but okay...

A bazooka team and a couple flamethrower teams.

A look at the backside of the flamethrowers; nicely modelled.

The FO peering through his field glasses, RTO nearby.

The Docs.

And now onto the heavy metal!  These are old Battlefront resin and metal models, a real pain in the ass to find!  I painted them up and gave them a wash which, as usual, turned out way too dark, so of course I set out to rectify the situation by giving them a light drybrushing.

But anyone familiar with the blog knows that I am utterly incapable of conducting a 'light' drybrushing, so I drybrushed the hell out of them and made them look goofy...  But too late now, I'm not stripping them and repainting, I swear...

Then I got a boatload of M-113s, all the newer Battlefront plastics.  I bought about half of them built and painted but, once again, went ahead and repainted them anyway as I was going to be able to make the other half (which I'd just purchased new) match them.

Another issue with the 'used' tracks was that a lot of them weren't built correctly (see the top model, which has the top for an M-163 but has a normal cupola, rather than the Vulcan turret), so I did a lot of prying apart and trying to fix them with extra pieces from the boxes of new models I had.

Apparently I only took a picture of three of them, but I actually have six of the ACAVs.

Then I built an M-163.

And a track with a recoiless rifle.

Please note, if you're thinking the skin tones on these guys is a bit dark, and you're wondering why some of the TCs are wearing berets, it's because these models are intended to be used primarily as ARVN.

And an M-106 mortar carrier.

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