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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