Bombed Out but Not Knocked Out

Often when the cities were bombed out, the Germans continued to use the buildings, if they were not in immediate danger of falling down. I have taken my J&R Miniatures building and built two rooms of furniture to continue to use the damaged structure. This is the office. Included is a safe. Ration coupons for fuel to fly the planes, money from people buying plane tickets all have to be safeguarded. Sometimes I like to toss in a role playing element or two and so such details can be very useful in an otherwise standard wargame.

I took sheets of styrene and cut them to fit around the bombed out rubble inside the two rooms. The front room is the lobby with polished wooden floors. There are benches for people to wait on and a ticket counter for them to buy tickets from Luft Hansa. As you can see the floor sits on top of some of the wreckage, but it is flat and it simulates having either a crawl space or basement.

These are the two inserts standing alone. The one of the left is the office. I painted the floor gold to simulate a gold carpet and then dull coated it so it looked more like fabric and less like metal.

Here is the lobby from the outside looking in. I made the furniture on styrene removable to make the use of the buildings more flexible. Of course the Nazi posters will tend to make it a WWII European building, but I can use if for more than just a Luft Hansa office. Note how good the 1/72nd scale figure looks with the 15mm scale building. I try and keep my eyes open for buildings of all kinds because often you can use buildings that are not the exact scale. I have buildings that are HO, 15mm, O scale, and 25mm and 28mm in size and they all work together well.

Luft Hansa and Furniture and Walls

As part of my Battle of Berlin and Luft Hansa project, I had to build a ramp to get the passengers on and off the airplanes. I scratch built this ramp using some fencing, sheet styrene, and some resin cast jeep wheels. I like to develop a theme and carry it forward. My Luft Hansa has figures, security guards, luggage carts, waiting rooms, offices, mechanics, aircraft, all the things a small terminal might have to service the customers and planes.

I made a guitar out of resin and placed it on the luggage wagon. If you go on line you can find places that have photos of propaganda posters. Then you can downsize them, print them out and glue them to your walls. They are glued with regular white glue. Just a tiny drop and then paint it on like paint.

The luggage is a collection of Preiser luggage, Roco packs and bags, and various other boxes, crates and containers.

The figures are a mixture of Preiser and others. I gave a couple of the security guards MP40 SMGs. The radios are standard WWII era German radios. The interior doors are the same material as the floor. Sheet styrene with a wooden board pattern, just a closer pattern, and painted a darker color.

The compressor and some of the other tools are from Roco. The prop is from the spares box. The poster is common for WWII from both the US and German, it shows scientist and laborer working together fighting the industrial front while the soldier fights in the field. This room interior will go into one of my hangers. Building interiors are easy and very cheap to build. Sheet styrene does not cost much and the other bits were mostly from the spares box. The luggage and luggage carts were from Airfix and Prieser and others. Model train shops are great places to go to find models of tools and luggage and industrial commercial items. The main thing is don't throw stuff away, you will almost certainly use those left over model parts for something eventually.

Luft Hansa AA Guns

The German Labor Front in WWII organized German workers into anti-aircraft units to help defend their work places against air attack. I have organized my Luft Hansa employees into crews for two 37mm AA guns.

These positions are dirt, sandbags, and wooden crates with a wooden base for the guns. The guns are Roco from the SWS halftrack kit. I have a zillon of them and dismounted these two and added a bit of styrene plastic to make seats for the crew.

These two guns will be located on the edge of the airfield, near the Luft Hansa facility. In the event of an attack, the Luft Hansa employees can scramble out to the gun pits and defend the airbase.

One of the things I have tried to do for my Battle of Berlin units it to obtain a flag for each one. This is the Luft Hansa flag. The pole is from the Alamo Accessories set. Print the flag, wrap it around itself, and glue with white glue. I fold a bit of the middle flat so it will fit on the flagpole and glue it with CA glue.

Luft Hansa with Posters

Luft Hansa Airline operated out of Berlin until almost the last day of the war. Their last plane left Templehof on April 22 and the Russians captured the airfield on April 24, 1945. I have been working on a building interior for Luft Hansa. It is not based on a particular building but it is typical of the type of services that an airline would have to provide to operate. This photo shows the dispatch office, and you can see the corner of a desk and the chair. You can see the bunk room with bunk beds for aircrew to sleep between flights with a quick turn around. There is also the restroom. The two silver blades are in the repair room, they are propeller blades.

The dispatch office from a lower view. The gray wall has the door to the restroom. The door on the right is to the repair room. The door on the left is the bunk room and then the door to the public area.

This is the public room. It has space for buying cigarettes in a machine, insurance from a machine, and posters that encourage people to mind their talking because the enemy is listening and two posters that advertise Luft Hansa services.

This is the repair room. The door leads to the dispatch office. We can see the propeller blades from a better view. There is an air compressor along the wall, a vice and tool box and engine part on the workbench. The poster shows white collar and blue collar workers toiling together as part of the DAF, German Labor Front. Not visible is a welding kit off to the right.

All of this is HO / OO scale made from sheet styrene for the floors and walls. Some of the furniture is Roco, Airfix and resin and scraps. The tools are Roco, the propeller is a broken prop from the spares box. I got the posters off the internet and sized them to fit the walls. In reality some of them may have been even smaller, but I wanted to be able to read them! The woodwork was painted with Floquil and the other items were Tamya, Gunze Sango, and Testors.

I will have more photos of this office, figures and accessories to go with it in a few days.

More of my Battle of Berlin game items. This is the office for my Luft Hansa company building.





The furniture is resin, metal and styrene. The floor is sheet styrene painted gold and then dull coated to look like carpeting. Figures are various Preiser in HO scale. I like to mix HO and 1/72nd scale figures to get greater variety. A thick base can help the HO figures look a bit taller and since they are usually civilians they look smaller since they don't have helmets.







The furniture was painted dark flat blue, but the "wooden" parts were then coated in a gloss coat. This technique makes the cloth look like cloth because it is not shiny like the wood.

Airport Fuel Storage Depot

The airline Luft Hansa operated until April 22, 1945 with one last plane flying out of Berlin's Templhof airport two days ahead of the Russians.

I have been building a small Luft Hansa operation for my Battle of Berlin game. Naturally, for airliners, fuel is an important aspect of getting planes ready to fly.

This little fuel storage shack is made up of bits from the spares bin. The floor is sheet styrene with a pattern of squares on it for concrete. The verticals are H bars from Evergreen Plastic. The roof has been sitting in the spares box for about 20 years, who knows where it came from. The barrels are from several companies, including Roco and the fuel pump and hand truck are from Roco. The figure is Preiser.

Lufthansa

One of my Yahoo groups recently had a discussion of transport in wargames. This is part of my transport for my WWII Germans. It is the interior of a Lufthansa JU52 airliner. Civilian transportation was important to Axis and Allied powers in WWII. The airlines contributed greatly to the war effort. Lufthansa operated right up until the end of the war, with one plane shot down as late as April 21, 1945.

Civilian airlines can travel to and land in neutral foreign nations, something that military planes normally can't do. I painted up a group of civilian passengers to represent the businessmen, government officials, and foreigners who may be found on such a plane in late WWII, in Germany. To paint a group of civilians I start by gathering at least four flat colors that work for clothing, yellow, light blue, dark green and gray. Each figure is two parts, shirt and pants or skirt. At least one quarter of the figures get painted on at least one of the two parts in the first color. Then at least one quarter of them are painted the second color. Then at least one quarter of the figures are painted in the third color. All the remainder of the shirts, pants or skirts are painted in the final color. I then paint half the figures with brown shoes and the other half with black shoes. Last, I paint the skin.

Since these passengers will only be visible through the windows of the airplane, I don't really have to bother with tiny details like eyes and belt buckles. On the pilots I did paint gold buttons, wings and sleeve stripes. Lufthansa colors are blue and gold so the pilots and stewardess are painted in a sky blue with black leather and gold trim.

Each figure was carefully positioned to fit properly in the seats. Arms had to stay inside the cabin so those with an arm extended had to be on the correct side so the arm is on the isle side of the seat. I selected about half men and half women on the assumption that near the end of the war men would try and get their mothers, sisters, daughters and wives to safety in a neutral country. I also figured that diplomats, foreign industrialists, would also try to leave Germany while they had the chance so the other half of the passengers are men.