Reveille 2024

Reveille 2024

Held today, Sunday 24th November at Downend Folk House, Lincombe Barn, Bristol.

Had a great Dad/son day out at this small club event near Bristol. Alex and I havn`t done a wargames show for years, certainly pre COVID, but maybe not since before he did his GCSEs??  

Even though there were a number of traders present - The Square, Andy Grubb, Blotz Terrain among them I was very controlled and only came away with one cheap book.

The show seemed quite busy even with todays awful weather

It was great to meet up and chat to Don Mchugh, Alan McCoubry and finally put a face to Rob Beswick (who I only knew through FB). It was particularly great to see and speak to my old friend from those SOTCW participation games at Gauntlet in Broughton - Will Mcnally who I haven`t seen in several years. I also spoke to Andy Grubb, the owner of Blotz and the guy who runs The Square, all seemed in good humour despite the weather.

Of course the highlights of any show is the games:   

Alan and Don fought Rob in a 20mm WW2 desert bash using Rapid Fire Reloaded.

The game featured some lovely models

Just behind them was a great looking Cruel Seas game featuring some truly stunning ships. The guys running it were incredibly nice and not only chatted about their game took the time to show Alex and me their other fleets - Russian and Italian, very cool.

A 54mm Zulu War game

28mm English Civil War (I think?)

And last but not least my personal favourite of the day a 25-28mm Mexican Revolution bash run by guys from Penarth using Achtung Gringo! The variant of the Crush the Kaiser rules. I spent quite a bit of time discussing both the rules and the period with them.

All-in-all a good day

1st Goumier rifle platoon

 1st Goumier Rifle Platoon

I`ve decided to build my Goumier Tabor (Battalion) along the standard lines of Charles Grant`s classic "Battle" rules. 

So a company will be made up of three 10-figure platoons. Eventually the various platoons will be a mixture of figures from all the available types, but in this painting phase of the project I`m just doing batches of 10 or so at a time.

Two figures from Shellhole Scenics pack FRE5

8 Raventhorpe Goumier (Pack SPEC25)

All together

Helicopter fly-overs

 Helicopters over Spain

The Army Airmobile Force (Spanish: Fuerzas Aeromóviles del Ejército de Tierra, FAMET), the army aviation branch of the Spanish Army. have been buzzing about all day today.

Probably training flights from Alférez Rojas Navarrete barracks (formally Rabassa Barracks) which is situated about 15mins drive from us down towards Alicante. The barracks is the base for The Special Operations Command (Mando de Operaciones Especiales) or MOE and is the command charged with overseeing the various Special OperationsGroups (Grupos de Operaciones Especiales or GOE) of the Spanish Army.

Today`s visitors (25/10/2024)

Goumier support 2

 More Goumier support

81mm mortar team & mule packed tube all by Shellhole Scenics. 

The deployed mortar is a really nice one-piece casting

75mm pack howitzer with Goumier crew

The gun is Raventhorpe Ready to Roll - just excellent 😀

The crew is a huge mix, two are plastic from the Strelets Goumier set, the third man is a Force20 machine gunner; the gun commander is a modified Blitz French officer (from their Goumier command pack) with a Raventhorpe Kepi head 

Whilst reading Bimberg`s book, he regularly mentions eye witness accounts of Goumier accompanied by goats whilst on the march. Then when combing through my photos I came across this sketch.

So I was forced to create a homage

The goum is Shellhole, his goat Retrokit

Goumier support

 Mule Packed 75mm pack Howitzer

Due to work commitments back in Wales, this is my first painting and modeling since June.

As you will remember a few months back I read Edward Bimberg`s "Mountain Warriors" about the Morrocan Goumier in French service during WW2.during the fighting in Italy 1st Battalion, 69th RAA (Regiment Artillerie d`Afrique) were part of Gillaume`s French Mountain Corps (see note at end), this unit had mule packed 75mm pack howitzers.

So I decided to create a gun section.

I started by looking at 75s and decided the easiest starting point was the plastic set by Waterloo 1815 (set APO38), which gives you 4 nice hard plastic gun kits, perfect if you only need parts 😀  

Next I needed mules, Ian @ Shellhole Scenics does some excellent supply mules with his range of Goumier, he was nice enough to supply me with a couple of unloaded animals for this project. 

Now a brief bit of internet research showed that in reality you needed seven (7) mules to carry a 75mm, but now frankly this isn`t practical in wargames terms so I decided to go with four mules for my gun section.

This illustration is airborne loading, but it does show the gun split into seven loads, if you follow this link you`ll see the mule loading: 

https://arsof-history.org/articles/v1n2_mules_and_men_page_1.html

Upon the two unloaded mules, I built basic load frames using matchsticks and plasterscene. On these I mounted the two-part trail, gun and wheels, once painted and washed I added rope ties (cotton) - whilst not accurate I think they look OK.

I then split Ian`s general stores mules set (FRE 10) and matched one of my mules with one of his to create a 2 mule base, these along with the handlers make up my moving packed 75 team.

A better photo of the handlers in djellaba

The whole team together

End note

Only when re-reading the chapter on Italy in Bimberg`s above book did I spot a howling error (at least to me). He referred to the artillery unit part of Gillaume`s French Mountain Corps as "1st Battalion, 69th Algerian Artillery Regiment"! This struck a nerve and I quickly did a bit of back-tracking, which led to the discovery the unit was infact 1st Battalion 69 RAA. This is the second time in a few weeks I`ve stumbled across authors not understanding French unit abbreviations - silly clumsey errors 😔