What's up for 2014?

It's a long time since I wrote anything here. Why? I haven't done so much playing lately. During the autumn I played 2 games of Dropzone Commander and 1 of Hail Caesar. Not much.

But what is the plans for 2014?
-The greens for the support weapons are with the caster. So they should be ready soon!
-Making a Åland campaign. Swedes against Russians and Germans! WW1 is over, Russian Civil War is in full swing and Sweden want to take back a few Swedish speaking counties that they lost 100 years earlier. I just need a few more Russians and the Swedish support weapons.

But I don't know what rules to use. A few days ago I played two games of Dust Tactics and liked it. Maybe I would make some easy conversions for my Ålands Campaign and use the Dust rules?
If you want to follow my Dust adventures just go to my new blog: northerndust.blogspot.se.

This blog is not dead. It was just sleeping.

Getting the small men painted

A while ago I started to count all my unpainted figures and it struck me that I would never get all my miniatures painted. I'm not talking about a few unpainted figures here or there, I have whole armies that will never be finished. Around 1000 figures! And that excluding a few hundred fantasy figures. Instead of giving up and throw away everything, I started to think about using a painting service. I send a few Russians to Fernando Enterprises in Sri Lanka to see what they can do.
The figures are from Brigade Games' Storm in the East range (World War One/Russian Civil War). The figures themself are very nice so I asked Fernando to use their "Super Showcase" quality. I send them the figures in the middle of August. As painting guide I send them a picture I found on internet.

Random picture from internet, used as painting guide

Today, a month later, I got the first two pictures for approval.
They look nice; it will be interesting to see how they look in reality.

 

What am I going to use them for? Fight the Swedes for the control of Åland of course!

And another review

Just got the news that WSS (Wargames, Soldiers and Strategy) has reviewed the Swedish Interwar range!

Part Four of my merry band from Strängnäs

After I saw PanzerKaput's brilliant boy scouts I have to do some for me. They are a little bit different from english scouts, they have blue shirts! I will just make a small group of seven.
I will tell you more about their background when I have painted the Scoutmaster.

Bought a few new books

Got a few new books this week. Two of them are about the Russian Civil War. They are translations from russian. Seems to be very good.

What are they good for? Part 5 Russian Civil War

The Estonian War of Independence was a small part of the much larger Russian Civil War. When the Russian Empire collapsed into civil war the Estonians and many others made a bid for independence in 1918. First they were invaded by the Germans, but when they surrendered to the allies they evacuated Estonia. Shortly afterward it was instead the Red that invading the country. They quickly took Narva and advanced quickly toward Tallinn. At Christmas Eve they are just 34 km from the capitol.

At this point the first of two Finns regiment arrived in Estonia to help their neighbors. Many, if not all, of the Finns were veterans from the Finnish Civil War. Estonians and Finns are closely related and their language is very similar. With help from armoured trains the Estonians counter-attack and push back the Reds to Narva.

A force of 1000 Estonian marines and  Finnish volunteers made a surprise attack on Narva and pushed out the Reds. At the end of January Estonia was liberated and instead they attacked into Russia and Latvia. But the Germans hadn't disappeared from the Baltics; there was a large army in Latvia fighting the Reds. Now they invaded again Estonia to create a Baltic state under German influence. To make a long story short a year later the Estonians had defeated both the Russians and the Germans and now they were independent!

The Estonian army had during spring 1919 volunteers from Finland, Sweden and Denmark. There were as many as 300 Swedes in the Estonian army. Most were in Finnish or Estonian units, but they did also have a unit of their own, Svenska Kåren i Estland (The Swedish Corps in Estonia). There were around 100 men in it. Many had fought in the Finnish Civil War, but instead of being an elite unit it was a disaster.

While the soldiers and officers were in Narva, the staff was in Tallinn, drinking. It looks like they used all the corps money for booze. A few months later the unit had a new commander and it took part in battles in southern Estonia or northern Latvia. Very soon half of the men were wounded. Instead of recruiting more Swedes to replace the losses the unit was disbanded. It is possible that low moral made it unusable for battle. It is even possible that there was a mutiny just before the end.

After the disbandment a few joined Finnish, Danish or Estonian units, while others formed "Svenska Vita Legionen" (The Swedish White Legion) and fought for the Russian North-western army.

But did they use Swedish uniforms? In the Osprey book Man-at-arms 305 there is a picture with Swedish volunteers. They don't have Swedish uniforms, but they have helmets that look like the early Swedish. The caption says that it is from 1918 and the helmets are Swedish. The problem is that all my sources say that the helmet was being used from 1921 by the Swedish army, so the text must be incorrect, either it is later or it is some other helmets.



Swedish soldiers at Narva

Expanding the range

Without saying to much, I can say that Aaron of Black Crab Sculpting (who did the first batch Swedes) are right now making a second batch for the Swedish Interwar range!
Just remember that this is Work-In-Progress pictures.