Over that past year or so we’ve seen a major move forward in the number and variety of kits suitable for doing Western Desert themed builds and dioramas. Until this rash of new/newer kits the desert war hasn’t really been that well served. The selection of Italian vehicles is still pretty much limited to Italeri productions and Italian figure sets are even rarer. Though for three years the Western Desert was the scene of major battles involving large numbers from most countries involved in dubbya dubbya two.
I just today started reading a new publication from The Oliver Publishing Group called “First Blood – U.S. 1st Armoured Division In Tunisia” and it made me acutely aware of how little ( in modelling terms ) we see devoted to the Western Desert in general and the U.S. involvement in particular. We only recently got AFV Club’s M3 Stuart, a vast improvement on the old Tamiya one, and while the Academy Grant and Lee are okay there’s really no state of the art option for one, and U.S. softskins are very poorly served as well.
And that got me thinking that in general terms modelling WWII seems to mainly come served in two options, post Normandy Europe and the war in Russia. The vast majority of kits these days seem to target those two areas, and even the vast majority of dioramas I see seem to have the same influences. Certainly there are some Western Desert and Italian themed ones around, particularly locally due to NZs own particular involvment in those campaigns. But on the whole they seem to in the clear minority.
Then there are those that seem even less apparent, the war in the Pacific, and not just the islands, the battles in Burma and the rest of the asian sub-continent. Back in Europe there’s the war in Norway, the War in Finland, the Balkans, and don’t get me started on preliminary stuff like the Spanish Civil war and German armour from 1936-1939. For once I don’t have a theory on why those two particular theatres ( Post-Normandy and Russia ) are so predominent. Which is odd because those who know me know I usually have a theory for everything.
It just seems to be the way. And I can’t claim innocence, most of my builds fall into those two categories with a smaller focus on the Western Desert. I would do early war but no-one produces any decent kits for the period. Probably the same reason more people don’t build WWI armour. Because there aren’t any decent ones to build. Makes you think Kevin Costner might have been onto something with “If you build it they will come”. Because if you don’t of course they won’t.
But I think once I have cleared the decks I’m going to make the effort to build something from Fall Gelb, perhaps an Sd.Kfz.263, while I wait for someone to do a better Grant so I can build a Tunisian one. My campaign for 2011 will be to get everyone to build at least one kit that represents one of the lesser known campaigns.
So when you do come back here and tell us what you built.
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Good idea Dean,sea side,coastline,I like the hot glue water,
I have been a bit stuck on the sand,rocks bit boring,
I have 3 vehicles 2xhalf tracks and a sdkfz223,will have to include rommel,and africa korps figures.
I have been looking through a book about the nz RMT truck drivers over there,I need to do some research.
Yeah what I would really like to do is a scene of a Siebelfahre being loaded up as the Afrika Korp departs Tunisia. Of even some sort of makeshift ferry put together locally to get people off. That way I could just build what I want.
I am looking at building a german africa korps diarama,not sure where to start,
How big and do you want to use vehicles or figures or both ? I plan to do a series of Western Desert Dioramas that will use Italian vehicles as well. Most people tend to go for the PIII and PIV but I’d like to do something with one of the armoured cars or halftracks and a wadi or seashore scene rather than just sand and rock.
never really thought it through, but yes, spot on.
I would love to see some Burma / India stuff. Had visions of doing a Grant in Burmese jungle after reading something somewhere at sometime….!!
Like most I model Russian front stuff and yes, post Normandy.
Currently on a British Sherman in Italy, which might in fact get converted to a Kiwi one – did the Kiwis run any 105mm Shermans in Italy anyone…??
Yup we used the 105 apparently – check the photo references page under the site map for a link to a site on kiwi armour and it’s mentioned there. I want someone to do a decent set of Chindit or ANZAC infantry suitable for use in a SIngaporean, Burmese, or New Guinea setting.
My personal fascination is with pre- and early-war, when there’s this fantastic variety of shapes, styles, and sizes.
It’s deeper than just models, most other media (films, books etc) focus on the final years rather than the start. Maybe everything is simpler then, once the tide had turned against Nazi Germany.
Likewise, maybe it’s easier to produce late-war tanks, when there was much more standardisation – with only 4 or 5 major tank types.
Yeah I love early war and pre-war stuff. With movies it’s more understandable, you tend to only see movies where “we” are winning and in the latter part of the war that was more common, in the early part it tended to be limited to the odd victory like Tobruk and El Alamein, though even then there were plenty of other occassions worthy of a mention. I think events like D-Day and “The Bulge” became more common as people saw them as great victories for “the good guys”. Oddly though with modelling the focus on the Pacific that Hollywood had doesn’t cross over, and more oddly it would seem that the armour of “the bad guys” is more popular so you’d think modelling scenarios where they were victorious in France would be more common. Maybe it’s simply along the same reason we get endless PIV. PV and PVI variants, that being that it’s the late war armour itself that holds more facination and not the time or place.