Danger Danger - Partisans !! Bulgarians !!

Company of the Day

Something completely different today - I picked up some Soviet Partisans and WW1 Bulgarians from Eureka, and had an absolute ball painting them up.

What nice figures they are for 15mm scale !

These are from Eureka's 300 club, filling in a little touched gap in the WW1 market. I have painted these guys up for use as Polish troops or paramilitaries during the long and often crazy 'interwar' period of 1919 - 1930 something.

The whole period is filled with a distinct lack of uniformity, so you can easily throw a number of figures together to represent all sorts of interesting forces involved in this period.






To name but a few, you can do :

• Polish, Latvian, Lithuanian, Czech, Bulgarian, White Russian, Red Russian, Albanians, Turks, Macedonian, Greek, etc, etc, etc.
• Bavarian Red Army, Spartakus Revolutionaries, etc.

So, I want to have a bash with some old school rules such as Triumph of the Will from the TooFatLardies, and thought these would make an excellent start to such a project.

Throw in as well some Eureka soviet partisans, mix and match, maybe chuck in some Serbs with French helmets ... and a small figure collection like this should be versatile enough to represent all of the above forces with reasonable accuracy.

Anyway, on with the pics, hope you enjoy a this little diversion from my Napoleonics project :

Eureka Soviet Partisans .. the rifle armed figures would make perfect Spartakust Bund revolutionaries, or even Latvian Freikorps, or Polish 1920's paramilitaries.

There is also a selection of partisans with SMGs - being a mix of PPsH with drum mags, and some with curved mags.

During the interwar period, and indeed WW1, all types of SMGs were used in numbers, some with designs that look very similar to these later Russian SMGs.

Although they tend to look all grey and drab, on closer inspection you may notice that every piece of clothing - jacket, hat, pants, etc .. is all a slightly different shade of drab.

Quite nasty to paint with these subtle variations ... but an absolute nightmare when it comes to shading the paintjobs !

So I ended up cheating with the shading a little - I created 2 shades of lighter grey, and 1 shade of lighter brown ... and applied these as needed.

However, on some of the personality figures, I wanted to really push myself here and shade them individually.  This unit is a dry-brush free zone .. its all freehand highlighting.

OK, Ill admit .. this figure from the catalog got me thinking about this side project in the first place.

One look at him, and I had to find a reason to build a force around just this one figure.

So then I need some opposing forces, and some rules as well .... and so another project begins. Just because of this one figure ... hmmm.

Picked this figure out for some detailed freehand shading as well.

Partisan group on the move ! 

These are 'true 15s' as well - could pass the photo off as 28s on a good day - credit for that goes to Eureka for such excellent sculpting and casting.

Look Out !! - Its the Bulgarians !!  

Eureka WW1 Bulgarians, posing as 1919 Polish paramilitaries entering Upper Silesia.

Wearing a mixture of British WW1 hats, various bits of ex-German, ex-Russian, ex-British kit .. and bearing French weapons.

A Polish nationalist political leader drives the men forward - Upper Silesia is to be Polish !

Absolute pain to highlight and shade this guy !

However, the casting and sculpting is soooo good, that the figure demands it.

Anyway, its not so painful if you take your time, and use a wet palette, its not too bad really.

What I found though, was to pull off a paint job that is 10% better than your regular effort, you need to put in 100% more care and time over it. Great learning experience though.

After a little practice on the partisan leaders, I took some time over the Bulgarian officers.

Starting to get the hang of this freehand shading now. This is an excellent figure - Eureka really did a great job on this range. Could pass for a half decent 28mm figure this one. I have certainly seen worse.

The other Bulgarian officer gets a similar treatment.

Bulgarian regulars. The blue collar tabs are plausible for the actual Bulgarian units (for some regiments). Its also plausible for Polish paramilitaries during the Upper Silesia campaign in 1919.

Bulgarian Maxim Gun. This is one brilliant little model .. love it.

So there we go - something completely different from me !

I hope to do more interwar companies soon, including some good old fashioned Freikorps for mixing up some different scenarios, and doing some old school Lard-style gaming with Triumph of the Will.

Early in the new year should see the first game with any luck.  Hope you enjoyed that diversion.