Punjabi Carrier Platoon
Some of you may remember I began this addition to my Punjab Battalion way back in July:
https://baberonwargames.blogspot.com/2026/07/punjabi.html
Well as with other side projects this one was shelved whilst was doing other stuff and I waited an order from Raventhorpe to wing its way to me via my lads. Anyway things went sideways as they sometimes do and I ended up with the wrong heads, my fault I`m sure - D`oh! 😕 So I decided to proceed anyway using what I had to hand and some Sikh heads which I`d removed from those Britannia figures earlier! My rational being, it is my table and I`m not sure I can tell the difference between a Sikh turban and a Punjabi one on a figure in a vehicle at 4ft across the table anyway!! 😁As always I apologise if this offends any readers, but hey ho.....
First off as Britannia vehicles come with stowage, I bought three different models, so they would at least look different: RVM017 British Universal Carrier; RVM113 British Machine Gun Carrier and RVM112 British OP Carrier with 8th Army crew. I did have to add stowage to RVM017 as it was a little plain for my liking; I also covered the Vickers on RVM113 with a tarp out of plasterscene as I didn`t need it as a machine gun carrier.
Britannia resin vehicles are suffering a bit through mould wear and age and these days I only buy off Andy`s trade stand, so I can inspect them. There were some bubbles, holes and resin flash, sometimes only visible after undercoating, the crew figures were fine.
They look very nice Richard 👏👏 Excuse my ignorance, but was there much “mixing” in the Indian regiments? Or would, say, a Sikh unit be pretty much (exclusively?) made up from that particular group? I do know that the Sikhs were a rather martial lot, so very capable soldiers.
ReplyDeleteCheers,
Geoff
Hi Geoff, British Brigades were usually made up of 4 battalions of infanty taken from various regiments. As an example 25th Indian Brigade in Italy in July 1944 had: 1st Battalion, 2nd Punjab Regiment; 3rd Battalion, 18th Royal Garhwal Rifles; 1st Battalion, Kings Own Royal Regiment and finally 4th battalion of the 11th Sikh Regiment. (confusing isn`t it :) Indian battalions were ethnically/regionally/religious based so all Sikh OR Punjabi OR Garhwal OR Gurkhas OR white British, etc. Generally during WW2 non-whites do not seem have held ranks higher than captain, though NCOs, senior NCOs and junior officers would seem the general rule - I could be way off here, but from my reading I don`t find Indian majors or above!!
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