"The Battle of Keren at Salute 2014" Topic

Yesterday, James M, James W, Tom, Steve, John, Matt, Martin and myself put on our rather vertiginous Battle of Keren 1941 game at Salute.

I've done a blog update with loads of commentary and photos over on Scrivsland link

Incredible terrain! Thanks for sharing this.

Looks stunning. Nice to see a 'proper' hill in a wargame.

Whoa! The lads have gone hardcore!

Incredible! Well done.

excellent..from years i'm thinking about this battle…my sources are mainly Italians, except the British Official History small book and the Indian Official History that could be find on line….did you use some updated/specific source and maps?

Wow.

It looked stunning. As I told James, my jaw dropped when I saw how tall it was!

That is a HILL……..I'd seen it in several other 'photo spreads' and it really stood out (up?) in the sea of amazingly detailed terrain set ups on display……is there a 'how we did it' page somewhere?

Amazing work and great game.. Thanks for posting the pictures..

Thanks all. It was a long day but very rewarding with so much interest. Highlight for me was meeting an Italian and a Brit who had had relatives (great uncle and father respectively) fighting on either side. Puts it all into perspective!

Italwars, I used the official HMSO maps, plus the maps from A.J Barker's book 'Eritrea 1941' which has some of the most detailed. I also bought a 1954 contour map of the battlefield (found online at a bookseller's) which was essential for creating the small 'sandtable' map that you can see in the photos of the display table. Google Earth wasn't much good as that area is, unsurprisingly, not available on streetview yet!

However, having done all that, the final gaming model was not based on an exact section of battlefield (apart from having the fort at the top.) It just had to look steep!

Gaz0045, there was a 'How it was made' section on display at the event (and will be at the next shows we take it to), but I'm also going to pen an article on the subject for Wargames Illustrated, so I shan't be putting it all online.

One of the best terrain setups of the day, I thought!

The hill evoked the photos I've seen of the actual battle. And I liked the view from your 'viewing platform'! The chairs weren't very wobbly at all…..

Enjoyed that game a lot, East Africa is too often ignored in WW2 in my opinion. (I'm building the S African / K.A.R force – gotta love all those Marmon Herringtons…)

It was a lovely table. Very impressive. I bumped into James, who I hadn't seen in years and didn't realise he was wargaming, so that was an added extra.

A stirling efforts by the group and thank you for explaining it all to me. Cheers. It was seriously impressive.

Fantastic, absolutely superb. The table showing how you researched it and built it was a brilliant idea also. Congratulations – definitely "best in show".

Hello Freecloud
Yes it's a neglected but fascinating side show front.
me too i'm building troops for East Africa WW2…my scale is 20mm/1:72…may sources on Italians less on South Africans…we can correspond about that?
regards

Thanks for all your kind comments, both on the day and on the blogs and forums afterwards.

Martin has also done a great report over at Tabletop Mog, he does not get a lot of traffic, but I'd recommend you take a look at it: link

The table looked great. Really looking forward to photographing it 'in-studio' for the article in Wargames Illustrated.

Alan asked if he could take some macro images of our game and has sent me a copy to use on the blog.

Check out the extreme close ups on Scrivsland:

link

@Italwars – happy to correspond, you should read this though – its a history of the SA forces in the East Africa campaign

link