Little Tanks & Tiny People

Inspired by Jemima Fawr’s posts on his cool 15mm scale Dutch army, I’ve been wanting to paint up a few Dutch figures of my own. Not in 15 mm scale, though, but in 28mm. Of course there is no company that makes Dutch figures in that scale, so I had to be a bit creative. Under Fire Miniatures has a small range of West German Bundeswehr figures, some of which can pass for Dutch figures without too much conversion work. For starters, both armies wore a copy of the American M1 helmet. The standard Bundeswehr rifle was the Heckler & Koch G3, while the Dutch used the FN FAL. Both weapons look pretty similar, though, especially in this scale. Both armies also used the Uzi. The differences become bigger, when we turn to the support weapons. This means that only pack 1 and 2 offered by Under Fire Miniatures are really useable as Dutch proxies. The only bit of conversion I did on these figures was add a strip of Miliput to the helmets. Dutch M53 helmets were often covered in hessian camou...

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...