Troop Organization

 Most of my 1/72nd scale figure collection is unpainted plastic figures that are not based.  It consists of well over 100,000 figures. Maybe double that many.  It's a lot.  I store most of them in plastic underbed storage boxes.  Those boxes are housed on shelves under my wargame table.  That way they are handy when I need them.  Each underbed storage box is labelled with the era and the figure or vehicle types.  here WWII German Inf stands for World War Two, German Infantry.  They may not actually be infantry or even solders, but they are from the World War Two era and they are Germans.

  

 Inside the underbed storage box I have two rows of boxes of figures.  In this case the boxes are short enough that they can be stored on their side making it easy to read the contents.  Most of these boxes originally held lunch meats.  Note they are all red, I mostly use red top clear boxes to store my World War Two German figure collection. It makes it easier to keep track of them.  While the underbed storage boxes cost between $12 to $15 dollars each, these boxes are free with the purchase of the cold cuts.  We eat about two to four of these boxes worth of lunch meat per month.  So I get about 25 to 30 boxes per year.  So in ten years, I get about 300 boxes.  This underbed storage box has two dozen food storage boxes, each will hold several hundred figures.

 

Since many battles in World War Two were fought in Germany itself, I have included a box of German political officials.  Each of these is a political district from a large apartment building to a large region of the country.  They were expected to organize the Volksstrum in their jurisdiction.  So they functioned as military commanders in some areas.

Often these boxes will contain a specific brand and type of figures.  These are the World War Two German Paratroopers set by Pegasus.  Sometimes other bits of equipment or figures will be included in the box that are part of this unit.  So there may be heavy weapons in metal, or plastic tents, or other items to help flesh out the unit.  Typically I just flip over the label and mark on it the contents of the box.

Over the past few years I have been working on bringing greater organization to my German Armed Forces.  The post it note indicates this box contains troops from an Eastern Front division, it is an infantry company, from the third battalion of the second regiment.  This is the second of three for that companies for that battalion.  It is the first box out of four boxes that contain this group of Caesar and Ykreol figures.

These Caesar Miniatures Panzer Troops are part of my SS Panzer division, it is the 5th motorized infantry battalion.  My collection has no fewer than four under-strength divisions so far organized into two corps as one SS Panzer Army.  Sometimes I use the cardboard figure box lid as the box cover for the food storage box lid.

The organization process continues.