As some of you know, the latest book in my Great Martian War Series featured a battalion of Australian troops, the 15th New Castle. So I decided to add that battalion to my All Quiet on the Martian Front game armies. And here it is:
It consists of four companies. Each company has four platoons of riflemen, each platoon has an attached Lewis Light Machine Gun and one of the crazy Australian inventions, a crossbow Mills Bomb thrower.
There is also an attached weapons section with eight machine guns and four 3" Mortars.
They are led by their colonel and his headquarters section.
The figures are almost entirely Battlefront World War I British. Really nice figures for the most part, although I had some quibbles with the mix of figures that come in a pack: lots and lots of guys with slung rifles waving other men forward and only a couple of men actually firing their weapons. Still, on the bases they look nice.
Of course, I wanted my troops to be Australian rather than British, so I have about one man in four wearing the distinctive Australian bush hat. At first I did this by mixing in some Australian figures I found on Ebay, but I wasn't really happy with them. They were too small, many were wearing shorts, and despite the claim of the seller, they were WWII figures rather than WWI. So after doing one company with them, I decided to replace the headgear of the other ones I wanted. This involved carefully grinding off the helmets and then making the bush hats to replace them. This proved easier than I feared. I just made a single master out of green stuff and then used this to make about a hundred impressions in a slab of modelling clay and then I poured in casting resin and I had my hats. A lot of clean-up was needed, but the results turned out very well.
So now I have all the infantry I need, but I will be adding a lot of artillery, tanks, and other vehicles.
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