Little Tanks & Tiny People

Two more vehicles from Butlers Printed Models arrived last week, one of which is this BMP-1 armoured personnel carrier. To me, the BMP-1 perfectly reflects the Soviet design aesthetic: ugly as sin, but it gets the job done!  BMP is short for Boyevaya Mashina Pekhoty, which translates as (if Wikipedia is right) infantry fighting vehicle. Unlike many APC’s, which usually only carry a machine gun, the BMP actually packs quite a punch and can even take on tanks with its 73 mm gun and wire-guided anti-tank missile. It has a crew of 3 and can carry 8 infantrymen in the back. Many countries have used the Soviet-built BMP-1, including East Germany. Unfortunately for me, East German BMP’s were never given any interesting camouflage paint jobs. Just solid green, I’m afraid. Looking at photographs of the period, it seems that two different shades of green were used. In some pictures the vehicles look to be a shade of olive drab similar to that used by NATO countries, while in others they s...

My order from Under Fire Miniatures arrived last week, so I spent this week painting up my four new DDR soldiers. I now have a nice squad of eight, which, as it turns out, is the exact number of passengers that fit in a BMP-1. Hmm, interesting... The eight-man squad. Soldiers with the NVA equivalent of the AK-47, the MPi-K. Perhaps you're wondering why the magazines are painted brown instead of black/metal. That's because the NVA used both stamped metal magazines, which were black, and magazines made of red-brownish bakelite. Plus, of course, it adds a bit of colour to the models. Soldier with RPK light machine gun.

I know I just started the Sherman tank build , but sometimes you want to think about tiny insignificant differences between tank variants and sometimes you just want to plonk some paint on a mini. This year Germany is celebrating the 30th anniversary of the German reunification in 1990. The Berlin wall, cutting off West Berlin from the DDR, had fallen the previous year. I therefore thought it would be fun to build a little Berlin wall diorama with some East German Nationale Volksarmee (NVA) soldiers. At the start of the Corona lockdown I bought a pack of four superb 28 mm scale NVA minis from Under Fire Miniatures , but only now got round to painting them. I liked the sculpts and the painting process so much that I have since ordered another set, as well as two packs of West German Bundeswehr figures. I intend to paint these up as Dutch soldiers, as both armies were using NATO equipment and the differences between their uniforms at this scale are pretty minor. Those are for a later p...