"Breaking the D-Q Line": After Action Report, Bovington 2012

The smoke-blurry and gas-smeared eyes could hardly pick them out. The dense smoke of the shelling and the fire from the burning village made the task even harder. The ears could not register them above the constant drone and whine of the “Big Ack” FK8 contact patrol aircraft flying above the main defences of the Hindenburg Line seeking their prey.

From all of their impaired and battered senses, the German defenders of Etaing first felt the arrival of “B” Battalion of the Tank Corps in Etaing on a damp September morning in 1918. A deep, very low, seismic, dull rumble of the earth. A cup of ersatz coffee shaking on an ammunition box. Shivers of soil falling from a leaking sandbag.

Long before they were seen or heard, the tanks were felt on the front trench of the Dorcourt-Queant Line.

The House is crammed: tier beyond tier they grin
And cackle at the Show, while prancing ranks
Of harlots shrill the chorus, drunk with din;

‘We’re sure the Kaiser loves our dear old Tanks!’

I’d like to see a Tank come down the stalls,

Lurching to rag-time tunes, or ‘Home, sweet Home’,

And there’d be no more jokes in Music-halls

To mock the riddled corpses round Bapaume.

"Rolling Into Action" : Completed Project - Tank Corps 1917

I’ve finally got round to painting the four tanks from “B” Battalion of the Tank Corps from 1917. It was a long haul, but that project’s now finished. I’ve added some of the work-in-progress photos as a sort of “I did it my way” blog post, together with some shots of the finished tanks and their crews.


I’d undercoated the tanks in black, and started with a base coat of Vallejo about 75% burnt umber with 25% black. I then shaded a little more black into the mix to paint in the shadows under the sponsons in particular.


I was aiming for the type of colours featured in the Osprey “Mark IV” book, in particular the image of Deborah (D51) from the battle of Cambrai.


On a couple of the tanks, I added some fine sand to the tracks. On one female tank, “Banshee”, I added sand on every track plate, trying to recreate the look of a tank which had been churning its tracks in thick mud. As Second Lieutenant Wilfred Bion recalled of the conditions in the Ypres Salient for tanks in 1917, “We travelled literally one foot to each revolution of the tracks”.


When the PVA glue and sand mix was dry, I painted it a black/ dark brown mix.


I then dry brushed lightly along all the tank panels, bringing out the rivets and armour plating with progressively lighter colours. I used Vallejo English Uniform as the highlight to Burnt Umber.


After the dry-brushing and a heavy dry-brush of grey on the tracks, I got to this stage.


Then, back to an old tried-and-tested Forgeworld technique of flicking a mixture of dark red/dark brown oil paint heavily diluted with turpentine onto the tank, simulating rust, dirt and caked on mud. I then ran a clean brush with turpentine over the resulting splodges.


I wanted these tanks to look like they had seen action, so some oil and grease streaks were added on the sides, and thinned with more turpentine on a clean brush. I was trying to recreate the thoughts of Colonel Bertie Stern, one of the directors of tank manufacture in the Great War, when he said that people needed to bear in mind that the first tanks were not precision motor cars, but were more similar to agricultural machinery.




I added some MIG standard rust weathering powders to the exhaust....


....and dry-brushed the chains on the ditching bar with first dark brown, then a Vallejo gunmetal/ black mix, adding some rust weathering powder as well mixed with a water based fixative from Plaka.






I used some Archer Dry Transfers for the battalion numbers on the tanks, rubbing them on with a soft pencil, then buffing with a Q-Tip.




So that the transfers did not look too pristine, I weathered them as well with some more of the red brown/brown turpentine splatter, and some more oil/ grease streaks.

Although I found the Archer Dry Transfers very easy to apply to the flat surfaces of the sides of the tanks, I found it really, really difficult to work the Archer Dry Transfer lettering for the tanks’ names onto the front armour of the tanks just under the viewing portholes. In the end I gave up and painted freehand, reasoning that quite a few of the names painted on the tanks were done free-hand by the tank crews in a variety of lettering anyway. I weathered the tanks’ names like the numbering using the same methods as above.

So....here’s the final results....


I added a Webley .455 pistol being brandished out of a pistol loophole by one of the tank crew. I was quite intrigued to read that tank crews could, and did, fairly frequently deploy revolvers through pistol loopholes, particularly against an enemy close assaulting a tank. There’s one chilling extract from Captain Daniel Hickey’s autobiographical account of his service in the Tank Corps which deals with the use of a pistol loophole to deal with a German solder near the tank and suspect of feigning death: “I took a look through the front revolver loophole in the left sponson. The man was elderly, short and thickly set. He was lying in front of the tank and almost on his face. His short, thick neck was wrinkled and weather beaten. I closed the flap and the report of Hardy’s revolver ended the incident.”(Daniel Hickey, “Rolling into Action” page 106)


The tanks also carried carrier pigeons but “only to be used in an emergency”. Here’s one flying off from “Belladonna” (B8).




Here’s a closer view of the Female “Banshee” ....


and the male “Black Prince II”, both of which fought at Cambrai.


And here's the completed “band of Brigands” from “B” Battalion, 1st Tank Brigade, Tank Corps, 1917, together with some photos from the tanks in action in a game this weekend.






And, finally, the image of a section commander leading his "diamond" of four tanks forward under enemy fire through the battlefields of France and Flanders will be a memory from my reading about the Tank Corps which will stay with me for a long time...

Finished Tank Crews: "B" Battalion, Tank Corps, 1917

I’ve posted below the finished crew figures from one of the sections of “B” Battalion of the Tank Corps from 1917, based on the descriptions of these soldiers in Ian Verrinder’s outstanding book “Tank Action in the Great War”.

Each of the Mark IV tanks (irrespective of being Male or Female) had eight crewmen, with an additional section commander (usually a First Lieutenant or Captain) joining one of the three or four tanks which comprised a section in the Tank Corps in 1917.

I painted up 18 figures to accompany my section of four tanks. Of course, if all the four tanks “ditch” and the crews get out, I’m in trouble in umpiring a game! Probably not in as much trouble as the British player will be in by that point, but trouble nonetheless....

However, painting 33 tank crewmen to cope with this remote possibility does seem a little excessive. So, there’s 18 finished figures, plus two casualty figures to simulate “shock” in the “Through the Mud and the Blood” rules which we use for our Great War games. The motorcyclist belongs with “B” Battalion but not the tank crews, and slipped into the rear of the photo owing to my over-enthusiasm.

A number of the tank crew figures are converted. The officer with the ash-plant walking stick is based on Major Mark Dillon of “B” Battalion who served as one of the battalion’s reconnaissance officers at Dessart Wood in the Third Battle of Ypres in 1917. Shortly before an attack, tanks would be guided to their starting positions by reconnaissance officers following white cloth tapes laid out over the battle field. Following these tapes in the dark, over a battle-scarred terrain was far from straightforward. The tapes could rip under strain, or be cut by shells or by tanks passing over them. Major Dillon’s vivid recollection is featured in Ian Verrinder’s book: “there is always a dirty trick awaiting one where least expected. All went well until the Company reached the point where I had left the beginning of the tape. It had gone. …..A search right and left and found our tape again. I had suffered an agonising hour, and the relief of finding the tape was enormous” (Tank Action in the Great War, page 103). I also swapped the officer's Webley for a flare pistol, reasoning that a reconnaissance officer would be far more likely to carry a flare pistol on a filthy, pitch black night than a .455 Webley revolver. The 'tape' was made using the foil from an old wine bottle.


I added a spare Vickers machine gun to one of the prone crewmen to replicate him having dragged a machine gun from his tank after it had "ditched". Afficionados will immediately realise that the Mark IV tank didn’t actually have Vickers machine guns fitted – however, at the time I did the conversion, I didn't realise that I could get 1/56th scale Lewis guns from a supplier on the internet. The strips of Vickers ammunition are just thin brass wire cut to fit and glued along a strip of the foil from the same wine bottle.

The small black cat on the single base is a historical mascot. Oddly enough, this isn't made up - there are a couple of references to cats serving as mascots of British and Americal tank commanders in the variouos books about Great War tanks. The cat is courtesy of Irregular Miniatures (does anyone else make 1/56th scale cats?). I sense a “Through the Mud and the Blood” card, ‘Lucky Charm’ or ‘Sooty’, approaching!

I also wanted a figure to look as if he’s loading up a tank with the not inconsiderable stores which would need to be carried into a battle. According to John Glanfield in “The Devil’s Chariots”, “The tanks’ already narrow gangways became choked with more drums of engine oil and grease, a spare machine gun and four barrels, 33,000 rounds of Small Arms Ammunition in the female types, thirty tins of food, sixteen loaves, and, for some, a basket of carrier pigeons” (page 154). He’d also do for a supply tank for when I get round to that. I love the cigarette hanging from his bottom lip as he carries two tins of petrol to his tank.


Finally, here’s a picture of the figures deployed on the wargames table. I’m planning a game later this month, ‘Jackdaw Wood’, which will also feature in the TooFatLardies "Christmas Special" along with an article on wargaming with First World War tanks. The game will be featuring these figures and the finished tanks from ‘B’ Battalion (see earlier blog posts), and I’ll post an AAR here when we’ve played through the scenario.

In the next blog post, I'll feature the finished and weathered tanks. Look forward to seeing you then.

Tank Building - Great War Style

I’ve added some photos below of constructing the four Mark IV tanks for my 1917 Tank Corps project. What took me so long? Well, that’s a very fair question. I started this project in September to be timed with a game that me and Richard Clarke are putting on in Burton on 13th November.

I can claim to have been busy in my non-hobby life. But hey, so is everyone reading this blog, right? So my work and personal life has, being truthful, only been part of the problem with the delay. The other major difficulty I had in October was in keeping myself motivated to build four of the tanks. One was fun, two fine, but the third and fourth were a really painful exercise. So, mea culpa, and I’ve learnt a salutary lesson when it comes to building sections of tanks in 28mm – go for the smaller section of three tanks not four!

That being said, here’s the snaps from the Roundwood Workbench.

Ok, first stage, give the resin a good clean. I figured that as the Great War Miniatures tanks have smelt very resin-y since arriving at Roundwood Towers, they were probably coated with some invisible release agent. Thinking I’d best take no chances, I did the metalled parts as well. Oh, and don’t forget to wash the sponsons...

As they arrived, fresh out of Northstar Nick’s parcel, I thought the Great War Miniatures Mark IVs were a nice kit. Certainly the surface detail was very finely sculpted, with numerous rivets, pistol loopholes and access hatches. There were some pretty pronounced mould lines on the models, however, especially at the rear of the tank. The same mould line appeared on each of the rear tank tread, but is pretty easily removed with a scalpel. I’m sure I can strategically place some mud on the part of the track which was affected, anyway. There was one tank with a mould line across the rear .. ‘fender’ (?).... of the tank, so some green stuff smoothed that down.


I had a little less fun with the large roll-bars which were such a prominent feature of the Mark IV. These were fitted to allow a “ditching beam”, which was basically a reinforced iron railway sleeper which could be chained around the tank tracks and rolled over the top of the tank (on the cast iron roll-bars) if, or more likely when, the tank “ditched” in the mud of the battlefield. The iron roll-bars seemed to be present in almost all of the photos of Mark IVs I’ve seen, and are a really nice feature to add. However, the Great War Miniatures Mark IV kit’s roll-bars are a bit fiddly to fit, to say the least. I ended up gently bending them and cutting down the locating lugs.


The reason for this is that models in my games are used at my local club as well as at home. I therefore wanted to make sure that the roll-bars were are as securely fixed as possible to the tank. To do this I glued the front roll-bar to the cabin of the tank, rather than (as would have been more historically accurate) leaving the bar elevated slightly above the cabin. OK, so I’m not a purist, and I admit the models as made by me are not strictly accurate. It’s a compromise, but if it means I never need to repair a broken roll-bar, I’m happy!


The roll-bars also needed a fair bit of filing before fitting. I wanted a smooth cast steel look for the top of the roll bars but the casting of the roll-bars wasn’t perfect. As you can see, filing the bars was a pretty tedious task when you have 16 to do (4 for each chance). Time for some music or a podcast, I think ...

Hopefully you can see in this picture the filed smooth right roll-bar being fitted to the top of the tank’s cabin. Without removing the front locating lugs the bar would have been elevated above the cabin’s roof. Hopefully, with the roll-bar being glued to the cabin roof instead, it will be more robust on the gaming table. Fingers crossed...


Now for a more pleasant task, the sponsons. These fitted well on the Male Mark IVs, but there’s quite a bit of trimming to do on the Female Mark IVs as without this the entrance/escape doors under the Female sponsons won’t fit flush with the side of the model.


One this is done, however, the sponsons look very impressive, and are nicely cast on both Male and Female models. The 6-pdrs guns on the Male tanks fitted fine. My main decision here was whether to go with the Hotchkiss machine guns which Great War Miniatures supply all the Mark IV models with. My reading of the Mark IVs in action in 1917 at Passchendaele and Cambrai was that they were still equipped with the Lewis gun with an ammunition drum. Ian Verrinder in his excellent “Tank Action in the Great War” mentions that at Fontaine on 22 November 1917 the Lewis guns performed particularly badly, with many Lewis Guns being rendered unworkable in the action, not least through the guns being vulnerable to armour-piercing bullets and splinters (“Tank Action in the Great War”, page 156-157).

After reading this, I was keen to give my clubmates who are aspiring Great War ‘tankies’ some realistic problems with “B” Battalion’s Lewis guns. I wanted to swop the supplied Hotchkiss for some Lewis guns to fit into tank sponsons. No-one yet makes these, but from most of the photos of Mark IVs from Ypres and Cambrai all that really can be seen is the Lewis gun’s metal tubing. I therefore used some brass rod cut to the same length and drilled out the sponson holes accordingly. Not a perfect solution, I admit, but I liked the slightly different look it gave.


One final message about sponsons. The Female sponsons should be glued in place with the vision slits at the top, and pistol loophole at the bottom of the sponson. Any photo should show this fine. You could, of course, be like me and find out the hard way that you’d glued a sponson upside down......and have to prise the sponson off and fix it later!

The long exhaust was easy to fit without much work. I added a slightly greater bend to a couple of the exhausts supplied. Apart form that, perfect.


Then to fitting the roll-bars. You don’t want to do this too early, as once they’re fitted the model becomes a lot more delicate. It was a juggling act trying to glue these chaps in place and took a number of goes to get the first one right. The others were quicker, but by the end of the fourth, I was thoroughly hacked off with the project !! The problem was in getting the bars to hold in place while the glue set. I mainly use araldite because an epoxy, at least in my eyes, is less brittle than super glue, especially when you’re using the models a lot in gaming. But in situations like this, super glue, in retrospect (and especially with an accelerant), would have been better. In the end, even after the roll-bars were glued I added some thin solution super-glue (the sort you use for naval rigging) to the more exposed joins for greater strength.

At least once you’ve got the roll-bars in place, you’re almost there. Next step was the ditching beam. Great War Miniatures’ early castings of Mark IVs didn’t seem to have these, which is a real shame as the ones now supplied are very nice indeed. They are well cast and a fine chunk piece of metal which adds a lot to the finished model. I glued them in place on the roll-bars, holding them in place with blu-tac as they dried.


I was in a bit of a quandary about how these beams were actually attached in action. I searched the books I had looking for photos without success, and looked on the Landships website (www.landships.freeservers.com) for more information without finding anything. There were several accounts, particularly at Passchendaele, of the ditching beam being shot away by enemy shelling, so I did wonder whether they were lashed on with ropes. However, as the ditching beams were clearly chained on when the “unditching” process was happening (the Osprey Mark IV has a great illustration of this), I settled for the fact that the ditching beams were probably chained on. I got some 14 link-per-25mm chains from 4D Models in east London and glued these in place near to where the roll-bars joined. I made sure that the chain ends were equal lengths to ensure that it looked as if the beam was double chained to the roll-bars. If anyone has any information as to how the ditching beams were actually secured, I’d be very interested, although please note I am not changing the models now !



All that was left was a quick spray with Halford’s car primer and they’re ready for painting and weathering. I carved an offcut of Styrofoam the size to fit into the underside of the model to hold each tank as it’s painted. Finally, to provide a bit of inspiration, I put the tanks on the gaming table, trundling through a shell-pocked wood to try and get me motivated to finish!



How did I rate the Great War Miniatures Mark IV as a model to build? Probably about 7 out of 10 for the Female and 8 out of 10 for the Male (owing to the Female's entrance/escape doors not fitting well). It's a very nicely cast kit, but the roll-bars are a real pain to fit. Probably add an extra "1" if you're just doing one model instead of four!

I’m hoping to get at least a couple of the tanks, and the final tank crew, painted this weekend. Wish me luck!

The Devil’s Chariots

There’s nothing like seeing the real thing when you’re trying to build a model armoured fighting vehicle. No amount of looking through old photographs, or browsing through a book can quite replace the excitement of seeing for yourself the scale, the size, the toughness of a battle tank, whatever the period.

Living just outside London, I’m rather spoilt for museums of all kinds. It’s been about a decade since I had last visited the Imperial War Museum in Kensington, South London, but I took my daughter a couple of weeks ago. Ostensibly, we were taking a trip to see the “Horrible Histories” exhibition of “The Terrible Trenches” (which was really great for kids of all ages), but I also wanted to get a good look at the Mark V tank, “Devil”, and a few other Great War items.




As you might remember from previous Blog posts, I’m building a representative section of “B” Battalion of the Tank Corps from 1917 for use in our games of “Through the Mud and the Blood”, including four Mark IV tanks. As any “tankies” out there will know, the mark IV tank was being used by the Tank Corps in 1917, with the Mark V tank only becoming available for battlefield service the following year. Indeed, the Mark V was a considerable improvement on the mark IV tank, featuring hand-braked epicyclic gears on each end of the cross shaft which revolutionised driving and enabled one man to control the tank alone (the Mark IV required four men to drive it). While the earlier Mark IV tank produced by Great War Miniatures is the model we have been using in our games, in creating a feel for the scale and size of the tank, and getting that all important inspiration, the Imperial War Museum’s Mark V “Devil” was perfect.



One of the first things which struck me when I got close was the sheer size and impression of power of the tank. Of course there have been far bigger tanks built since, but in the Great War, with other comparable vehicles only being the size of armoured cars, the sight of a tank approaching a trench must have been terrifying.



When I started to look at the details, I was struck by single 6pdr 6cwt QF gun in the left sponson of the tank (the right sponson being removed to give a view into the tank’s interior). For some reason, the bore of the gun just seemed narrower than I had imagined when reading about the accounts of 6pdr case-shot being pumped out onto enemy strongpoints and machine gun bunkers.



The interior view of the tank was very interesting. With the right sponson of the tank being removed and replaced with glass, you can clearly see the cramped interior in which the crew of eight men would have fought. It’s not difficult to imagine the stench of cordite, smoke and petrol fumes during the heat of a battle within the (notoriously badly ventilated) interior.



The purpose built 19 litre six cylinder in-line Ricardo petrol engine giving 150 HP utterly dominates the interior. Ninety-seven years on, from my home in a leafy suburb of London, it’s very hard to understand what soldiers must have gone through after being closed up for 8 or 9 hours in a tank, sometimes having to “mask up” against poison gas. Looking through the glass into the interior of “Devil” gives just a small clue what it might have been like.



Quite understandably it is not possible to enter into the tank, but even looking at the door hatch on the rear of the sponson made me wonder how on earth anyone could exit quickly from a tank on fire. Just when this came into my mind, I then remembered that the male tanks were the easier ones to exit in an emergency, with the a female tank’s entry and exit routes being far more inaccessible under the machine gun sponsons.



In all, while not contributing to the actual ability to produce a model, I really felt that seeing the Mark V close up made my Tank Corps modelling project seem closer, more immediate. At the very least it was inspiring, but more importantly I felt it gave me a more a human context to the project.