Collins Does a German Winter Offensive

tunics, coats, trousers = German field grey washed nuln oil black and highlighted German field grey

breadbags, waterbottles = German cream beige washed nuln black highlighted German cream beige

helmets = German grey washed nuln oil

helmet whitewash = really watery white grey

map cases, shovels, rifles = flat brown washed black

metalwork = enchanted steel washed nuln oil black

snow smock, trousers, helmet covers  = white grey, wash with apothecary white and highlight white grey

gas cape, ammo boxes, gas mask tins = yellow green

panzerfaust = middlestone washed nuln oil black highlighted middlestone

skin = Cadian flesh tone, washed reikland, highlighted cadian and Kislev flesh

I ended up buying some cool metal models from the Stalingrad winter range sold by great escape games and picked up a few sprues from Facebook marketplace and eBay for the warlord plastics. I quite like the models to have as much ‘kit’ on them as possible. It irks me when I see toy soldier armies constantly fighting light when in my experience, if you don’t carry it, you don’t have/receive it and thus you got cold/hungry at night.

None of them came with bases so I pootled off down the bank to withdraw £1 in bases (2p coins)

Once built to suit the list I then primed everything in Halfords basic white primer and for those models in greatcoats of majority fieldgrey uniform I airbrushed over that with German field grey by Vallejo model colour.

In the top picture you can see my test models for the colour scheme, a sniper team from great escape games with what I feel are overly large heads… them boys are clearly the brains of this platoon

with the 2p bases I also did a few tests of the basing materials I had picked up from my local generic model kit/train shop.

Im glad I did this as I observed some interesting effects, the snow diorama mix picked up colour from the maybe below it and so did the GW vallhallen blizzard paint too.

not an issue, I can varnish between the layers but im glad I did the test. check out the GerryCan videos on this topic, quite helpful.

link to easy army list

I’ve decided I want to have a recon themed list. so I’ve gone for minimal infantry mounted in small halftracks (250 variants) and a 222 armoured car.

problem being that halftracks are quite expensive at veteran level but I expect (from memory) dealing with a lot of armoured vehicles can be quite difficult as BA is more of an infantry game. Sure everyone can have access to AT guns in varying sizes but you won’t take out 4 vehicles in 1 turn and they all come with machine guns which leans heavily into the germans strength in the game. all the shots, all the time.

so the basis is 1 officer squad, a light AT rifle team, 5 small 5 man infantry squads all with machine guns with a smattering of SMGs and panzerfausts, 3 of the smaller 250 half tracks and the 222 with the recce rule.

This provides 30 soldiers, half on foot and half mounted, and a small amount of AT, only really +2 on the pen value (from the rifle and the 222) so if they run up against a serious tank I might have an issue but I’ll be able to get 3 shots a turn at it from 2 angles so hopeful for some luck (and 6 fausts hitting +6 pen if I get close enough).

The big benefit for this list is the 9 machine-guns, that’s a silly amount of dice to throw each turn before adding in rifles or SMGs etc. I also refused to put assault rifles in the list as last time I played BA you couldn’t move for being peppered by assault rifles, apparently Germany didn’t use the Kar98k as far as BA players are concerned.

However I think the biggest weakness is the halftracks, if the infantry dismounts and then gets killed or flees the battle the battle-taxi will get knocked out with them almost by default so I’ll need to be careful with them in order not to lose points unnecessarily.

Ok, so as this is going to be bolt action it is going to be accurate to the point that I want it to be which means, not all that accurate in this instance.

I started by simply deciding I wanted to do a winter list of some sort with winter basing, that led me to warlord and looking at the winter options and just settled on the Germans because why not.

I then just started searching for very generic photos of German soldiers in winter gear, no idea what units/regiments/arms of service these people are from.

The purpose of the images above was to make me think about how I should paint the models.

Obviously the winter German boxed set contains a lot of greatcoats and not a lot else, my limited googling shows that it was quite common to see a heavy dose of white over smocks and trousers in the snow environment.

Although the above images show that usually everyone was equipped in a similar fashion, aka all had smocks or nobody had smocks, I wanted to add a little variety to the squads and mix it up, perhaps they’ve had a bit of a tough time on the front and so a few units have been amalgamated to create one understrength unit.

Back to the webstores I went, the next best box was the SS box as they have lots of smocks too. instead of doing peadot, oakleaf or Italian pattern camo just paint them grey and off-white instead, maybe a few headswaps with the winter box to get the wrapped up and a bit cold look. job done.

Then into the discord house of water #besthouse I went for advise on alternative shops for winter German models. they did not disappoint and sent me off to multiple stores to window shop.