There's always more for the Far East

It seems there is always more that I can add to the Far East collection. That's not a complaint, in fact quite the opposite, I'd hate to think that any project is ever truly 'finished'.

Recently I’ve been playing the Driving Charge campaign set in the Far East and representing the British Line of Communication marker with a model of a truck. That worked well enough but I thought it could benefit from a few figures to add more life and narrative. I was looking at the AB Figures range and realised an easy solution would be to repurpose their set of western desert tank crews refuelling to the Far East (after all the desert uniform was essentially the same tropical uniform).

Given the LoC marker is normally placed on a road it made sense to base the figures to match.

The truck is a Chevrolet metal kit from SHQ.

Generally the Line of Communications markers are more a feature of the early part of the war to reflect the way the heavily mechanised allied forces were so dependent on the roads. However, that changes as the war progresses and the allies shift to the offensive. That’s when the need for Japanese LoC markers can arise. For those I’ve decided to create two options, mainly because I had enough in the spares box to indulge myself. 

The first are a team of pack horses. These are a blast from the past for me as they are figures from the old Airfix Jungle Outpost set. I picked up two of those on eBay a few years ago and the huts were the first of my Far East buildings. I wasn’t sure what to do with the figures so they languished in the spares box. It wasn’t until publication of the Far East Handbook and the concept of Line of Communication markers came about that I could see a use for them. I thought they might also come in handy as an objective or as a target for Chindit raids on Japanese communications. While the poses of both horses and soldiers is repetitive I think they make for quite an atmospheric group.

I built a Hasegawa model of an Isuzu TX40 fuel truck for use as scatter terrain or another objective for Chindit raids, but it will also work well as a LoC marker. As I’ve done for the British the addition of a figure adds more to the narrative and brings the setting to life. This figure comes from the Orion Japanese tank crew set.

It’s a very useful set of figures.

It includes four identical sprues each with twelve different poses. They’re all well sculpted and offer a good variety of poses.

It includes a couple of figures that could be used to represent crew members bailing out. I’ve found similar sculpts of German and British crew figures from AB very useful for the game reports here on the blog and so it was an easy decision to paint up these two to serve the same role.

The US Marines sets from Eureka Miniatures make up all the figures for my marine platoon and I like them a lot. However I needed more BAR men to be able to field the late war platoons. Eureka very kindly allowed me to order specific figures rather than the sets of whole squads, so I took the opportunity to add a few more poses.

The main objective was to add the BAR gunners. Another six should give me enough even if there is little variation in the poses.

I wanted a couple of men throwing satchel charges and so ordered a few of the grenade throwers and converted two of them. I used Milliput and carried out a bit of very basic sculpting but they serve their purpose.

On the subject of knocked out tanks I haven’t had enough figures to represent Japanese tank killer teams. The one figure I do have is a good one and he is a man carrying a pole charge that comes with the Waterloo/Italeri Type 92 70mm battalion gun set. However it’s the only figure I have that’s specifically made to serve in that role. 

Simons Soldiers sells a good set of Japanese tank killer teams and they have a number of figures in dynamic poses that work very well. It’s probably given me more than I need but there’s nothing wrong with that.

While I had the order in with Simons Soldiers I added a command group. That provided a FOO operating a field telephone with an assistant as a wire layer. It’s a great touch and helps illustrate the point that Japanese FOOs are restricted to much less mobile means of communication.

The set also includes a couple of additional figures suitable for senior leaders.

I took the opportunity to also grab the last two 8th Army casualty figures they had in stock.

They will come in handy as currently I have only a couple of plastic figures that I converted from the old Matchbox 8th Army set.