Monday 29 April 2013

WW2 German artillery photos


When buying second-hand books I usually check the database in my mobile phone to make sure I haven't bought the book already, and, if I've got a data signal, I also check Amazon to compare the price and read any reviews.

Ian Baxter's Images of War: German Guns of the Third Reich was criticised for inaccurate captions, but for £5 it seemed a reasonable purchase. I'm not an artillery specialist but I've collected quite a few books on artillery by authors like Ian V Hogg and Christopher F Foss which focus, naturally enough, on the guns themselves.

Now, I've probably got all the tank books I'll ever need, but books about ancillary vehicles are rarer, and what struck me about this book were the photos showing guns being towed.

For earlier periods I tend to avoid modelling 'limbers' if at all possible. Firstly I resent having to paint all those extra, but non-combatant, horses, and secondly, limbers clutter up the battlefield exacerbating the exaggeration of depth implicit in using models (though I am aware that artillery did have considerably more depth when the caissons and limbers are taken into account).

In WW2 and later period wargames, artillery is usually off-table at least in lower-level games. When playing games at Megablitz level, however, I would feel compelled to model the appropriate transport, and I would jump at the opportunity to model horse-drawn limbers as an antidote to the bumper-to-bumper Tiger II mentality.

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