German Pak 40 and field fortification.

These have been a lot of work and cost just to put two guns on the table!

I already had a Peter Pig Pak 40 painted to my older style and basing scheme but wanted at least two guns with tows and, whilst I was placing an order with PSC in their sale saw that they had a box of 4 guns that could be assembled as Pak 40 or Pak 38 along with the appealingly eccentric looking Raupenschlepper tractors for considerably less than it would have cost for another Peter Pig gun, a bag of crew and a couple of Sd.Kfz. 10s from Skytrex so I added them to the order without much thought. I later realised that the Raupenschlepper wasn't much used in Normandy and the supplied crews were rather flat so I ended up buying a bag of Peter Pig gun crew anyway and, later, a couple of Sd.Kfz. 10s off Ebay. The PSC Pak 40s are very nice but I'm not sure what I'll do with the Raupenschlepper tractors or the spare couple of sprues.

Another issue was what size base to use, as none of my existing sizes were suitable - the usual squad base at 30x50 fitted lengthways but would have required a very narrow trail leg angle. I initially tried 50mm square but that had a lot of empty space and had a knock-on effect for the emplacement so I eventually settled on 40 wide by 50 deep as a compromise.

I thought it would be nice to have some dug in emplacements for the guns. This brings up the usual problem for more modern periods of not being able to dig in to a plywood table so we are left with trying to create a terrain piece to place on top of the table that gives some sense of an excavated position.

I started with 2mm mdf, made the inner-face of the dugout from card and built up the front from layers of mdf, glued together. I had the front corners of my dugout overlap the gun bases slightly which took a bit of fiddling about to get right.

I added some detail of posts and planks from plasticard and plastic rod then smoothed the outer slopes with repair plaster.

I used my usual basing scheme and added bushes from rubberised horse hair, sprayed black, dry-brushed with browns and with the 'leaves' made from cork granules coloured with green acrylic paint. On the latter point, a big thank you to John Boadle of the excellent Hand Built History blog for kindly giving me a big milk carton full of cork granules and explaining the process he uses for trees and hedges.

The Pak 40 bases fit in well - as I mentioned, the front edge and corners disappear under the "wooden" bank reinforcements.

Next on the table is a project to make new hedges and I'll use the same cork granules, in a couple of different colour mixes, for those so the idea is that these will match in. I'm also going to do some smaller dug-in positions for machine guns and the British 6 pdr guns. These will be of a more hastily prepared design, as a contrast to these which have obviously been prepared some time in advance of the battle.