A Streetcar You Too Will Desire

Monday Knight Productions makes a street barricade of junk cars and a streetcar for Berlin. How cool is that? The Battle of Berlin has taken on a life of it's own with several companies now making items specifically for the battle. This position has a nice little emplacement, shown here with our two HaT Germans.

From the side of the barricade we can see the front of the street car, which has been filled with debris to prevent Soviet tanks from rolling down the streets of miniatre Berlin.

This view shows more broken windows and debris flowing out of the side of the streetcar. Roadblocks like this one took a heavy toll of Soviet tanks in the last few days of WWII. One or two brave men or even boys armed with a panzerfaust could kill a tank or two until they too met their fate.

The areial view shows the general layout to good effect. This is a heavy resin items and comes just as shown here. MKP does a great job of shipping products out quickly and there was no damage in transit. This item was about $12 and well worth it.

Christmas on the Ost Front

I have a friend named Bill who frequently says, "Hey, Mike I bet you don't have that in your collection." Typically, he loses. Not long ago he asked me about sled in the Wehrmacht. Well, of course I have those, and this is a good time of year to build up this type of unit too.

Go to the craft store and check out the Christmas stuff. This is the time of year the Christmas decorations start appearing because craft people need a long lead time to get their crafty things finished in time for Christmas. I found a few little sleighs and reindeer years ago at a craft store. Cake decorating stores sometimes have them too. This is one of my favorite types of projects; you get something very unique and it costs almost nothing.

For about a dollar I got all these reindeer. So I rounded up a few sleighs and attached them and the reindeer to sheet styrene bases, and instant Ost Front transport. The Russian winters would get so cold that anti-freeze and motor oil would actually freeze. Gasoline is not supposed to be slushy. So that is one reason why the Germans and the Russians maintained thousands of horses until the end of the war, animals were just more reliable in the harsh winter conditions than the machines.

Out of the spares box came a few aircraft drop tanks. I used each half to make a quick sled. A good uses for an otherwise useless spare part. As this picture shows a part of a headquarters is being moved by reindeer. These animals could function very well in the long winters of Russia, that's why Santa uses them.

Cargo

An army runs on it's stomach and trucks run on gas and artillery needs shells, and doctors need medical supplies. My collection includes supplies of all different types. I got some resin supplies from Fidelis Models and then added additional boxes, crates, bags, and barrels to them.

Take a bit of sheet styrene and cut it to the size of a truck bed. Fit the styrene to several different truck types and make sure it fits into the narrowest trucks. Then glue supplies to these sheets of styrene so that your cargoes are "palletized."

The HaT WWII Germans are seen here with a captured American supply base. These supplies can be unloaded from the trucks and stacked up to make very nice looking supply dumps. This Opel Blitz cargo truck from Roco holds a pallet of cargo that also fits a Roco 2 1/2 ton cargo truck.

Once those Germans are out of the picture, these American cargo trucks from Roco in HO 1/87th scale are loading up. I have made up supply pallets and painted them in olive drab for US Army, and Panzer Gray and Yellow for the WWII Germans and also large numbers of them in generic bare wood colors to use with everyone.

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.