Genesis of an Army: The Irregular La Nueve By Mike Haught This week I had to make some decisions about the army. I definitely will not be able to get everything done I wanted to before the tournament. So, I had to let something go. The plan is to let the infantry slide off the schedule and use my US armored rifle troops from my 2007 WCP army. Without the infantry to worry about, I can focus on the remaining platoons, some SPAA and the Organised Partisan platoon. I will still finish the infantry for La Neuve, but this buys me some time so I can field the list at the GT! In the end, the partisans remain my greatest obstacle. There is a lot of conversion work to be done and I’ve got a very clear plan in my head how I want them to look. The one distinguishing thing about partisans is that they rarely fight protracted battles in ruined towns. So I didn’t want to have them fighting through a freshly ruined town. I plugged “French Partisans” and “FFI” into the web search engine and got several great pictures and some inspiring ideas for my bases. After some time reading about the FFI (Forces Françaises de l'Intérieur, or French Forces of the Interior) I couldn’t help but get into the story! But keeping on point, I found several great pictures to work with.

For the core of my figures I’ve used the new Soviet partisan figures. With a few modifications, they will make excellent French freedom fighters. I also found Wayne’s article on modelling partisans quite helpful. Wayne's Modelling Partisans Article ... It gave me some things to consider such as weapon and head swaps. In preparation for the project, I raided my extra bits and found a handful of really old French figures. I figure they will make great donors for head transplants! I also found some weapons I could “liberate” from a few figures.

Obviously, I've still have to actually transplant the heads! So, I had to get started, after many distractions. I decided that the bases would have to include a healthy amount of prefabricated terrain put on the bases, however al I had was some ruined buildings. How do I get that to work? I decided it was entirely possible that there would be parts of the cities ruined in the earlier days by bombing, demolition, or something similar. These parts would be largely overgrown and abandoned. Hopefully they won’t look too odd!  I wanted to put a few barricades on the bases as well with the figures making rather shoddy use of cover, reflecting their lack of training.

Again, I looted the various bits and pieces in my metal box and grabbed out rifles, wagon wheels, building bits, barrels, boxes and more. I’ve stacked them into barricades and added some sand bags for extra protection. In the end, I was happy with how the barricade bases worked, but not so happy with the others. Oh well, in the future I’ll spend some more time bringing the others into line. Well, obviously these are not painted, so that’s tonight’s project. I’ll get them done and move onto the SPAA half-tracks. The next time I post a La Nueve article, the tournament will have passed and I’ll have some post-action info. I’ll work on the infantry to complete the project. Until then, happy modelling!

Appendix  I thought I would add some photographs below that I found useful while working on this project.

Related Links: Week 7: La Nueve: The Spaniards ...  Week 6: La Nueve's Light Support ...  Week 5: La Nueve's Heavy Support ...  Week 4: "La Nueve" Gets Some Detail ...  Week 3: Basecoating "La Nueve" ...  Week 2: Assembling "La Nueve" ... Week 1: Mike's "La Nueve" Company ... Dash For Paris ... Free French 2éme Division Blindée History ... Free French 2éme Division Blindée PDF ...