Monday 12 March 2012

The Battle of Astrakhan (the end)

Continuing the battle played by email with 54mm toy soldiers using the "Big Wars" rules devised by Stuart Asquith and Jack Alexander, this is part 6 of 6 instalments so if you have just joined us dear reader you may wish to start reading at Part 1.

Click on the pictures to enlarge, click again and they're even bigger!
Players notify their orders by email, the moves are then carried out on the tabletop by the umpire and the results are returned to the players by email photos.

After suffering under a punishing hail of fire, the Russian sledgehammer has broken through the Turkish line......

.............fights off a savage counterattack...........

...........and clears the hill at the point of the bayonet.

The entire Turkish line advances on the thinly held Russian right wing. A Line Regiment and the Albanians have been marched in oblique order to shield the guns and the Command from the new threat.........

..........while the Montenegrins and Rifles stand fast.

Another melee breaks out in the centre

The guns maintain their fire on the enemy line but it has little effect.

The Turkish attack presses forward oblivious to the desultory Russian bombardment.

The Montenegrins and Rifles dress their lines and steady themselves to deliver a volley.

The Turkish advance is set to envelope the Russian line on both flanks.

The Turkish Staff discuss their options with the Prussian advisers.


Each unit of 10 infantry has an officer and a standard bearer, the players get a very limited view of the battlefield from the photos they are sent and also do not know the size or composition of the forces that oppose them.  The standards are quite visible in the photos and aid the players to keep track of where friendly forces are and assess the size of opposing formations.  When removing casualties during the game I have retained the standard bearers on the basis that if they were hit another man in the unit would pick up and run with the flag, thus continuing to aid the players with unit identification.

 The only rule for morale in  Big Wars is that when a "unit falls to one figure under half their original strength they must retire"  I didn't think of it a the time of the game but going forward I plan to use the officer figure as a unit casualty marker - in the example above, when 5 of the rank and file have been removed, the 6th casualty will be the officer, a unit with no officer will thus retire.  If there should be a 7th casualty inflicted it will be the standard and the remaining men will then break and rout

Also going forward I would like the Staff to have a more active role than eye candy so may allow them to rally retiring units and combine them to make reformed composite regiments. 


The Turkish line charges home on all sides.........

.............they take a fearful salvo from the Russian guns on the heights...........

.........and a salvo from the steadfast Montenegrins and Rifles..........

........but they charge home and fall on the enemy with the bayonet

The overall view shows the Russians attempting to role up the Turkish line while desperate melees continue in the centre and on the left.  Meanwhile the Turkish staff take the opportunity to slip past on the road to Astrakhan with the gold.

Finally, the Montenegrins and Rifles have been overwhelmed by superior numbers.  The remaining Turkish infantry form up to fight a rearguard action and follow their officers on the road to Astrakhan.

THE END

Umpire's note.
The introduction scenario would have made a good Campaign and even now could be continued, with the loss of so many troops and their artillery the Turks may not have the strength to take Astrakhan but they still have the gold so could recruit tribesmen from the Khiva Khanate or attempt a seaborne evacuation by the naval flotilla originally intended for the joint attack on the port.

In reviewing the actions it was interesting to follow the effects achieved by local concentration of force on the battlefield, first by the Russian infantry in the centre then the Turks on their left, in both cases their assaults took a fair amount of punishment but overwhelming numbers won through and annihilated the opposition.

The terrain and obstacle modifiers are very simple - troops move at half their normal distance in all cases, for the players with a limited view of what is happening this can make things difficult to judge.  On several occasions troops emerging through woods were so disrupted that they needed to halt and reform their lines before advancing further.  The difficulty for the Russian units in the village on the left wing moving back to the centre across the bottleneck of a single narrow wooden bridge could easily have spelled disaster.

The final charge of the Russian cavalry against the Turkish infantry on the hill before the ruins was very much a "thin red line" moment and was a good illustration of the outcome one might expect when cavalry face a volley from a solid formed up rifle line.

Although the artillery didn't have a significant impact on the game, due to the dice modifiers, I could see that they would have a devastating effect on cavalry in a Charge of the Light Brigade scenario (compared to their effect against and infantry charge) due to the combination of the cavalry lower unit strength and the rule requiring units with 50% casualties to retire. 

A good fast flowing game, simple rules ideal for playing by email or solo, intended for Colonial campaigns they are equally suitable for larger conflicts........I think I may try Crimean next or Russo Japanese or whatever.

Friday 9 March 2012

Marx tinplate western town buildings

Over on the Marx Playsets Yahoo Group a member asked a question about the Marx tin lithographed western buildings, by coincidence I had just recently photographed a western diorama containing some of these buildings as part of the never ending tidy up of all the junk which represents my life's work.  So Scott these pics are for you, I hope they are helpful but they may not be what you need, click on the pic to make it bigger.





Tuesday 6 March 2012

More Authenticast semi-flats - Holger Eriksson?


This is the second set of Authenticast semi-flats that I've unearthed, the standard bearer looks like an Eriksson design to me but I'm not so sure about the two arabs.  There is no indication what these are supposed to be on the box so I am assuming them to be arabs but exactly where from and what period I couldn't say for certain.  The standard bearer has a very Ottoman look to him and I think he may have lost a bit off the top of the standard.



I'm not sure if it will show in the photo but the green standard above has a Union Jack engraved on it so i'm guessing tht this figure also did service as a sepoy at some other time in some other set.


The mounted figures are in scale with the foot but I think  the horses might be a tad small.  Eriksson is probably best known for fine sculpting of his horses and to me these don't cut the mustard on that score so either they were done by someone else or they are very early examples before he refined his skill.

Monday 5 March 2012

Authenticast 40mm semi-flats - but are they by Holger Eriksson?

Back in about 1966, so when I was 10, my dad decided to build a new wall for the front garden of our house in Chiswick, West London.  In digging up the area to lay the footings he unearthed a Royal Horse Artillery cap badge, 2 live rounds of .303 ammunition and a white plastic toy soldier of a highlander standing at ease.  How this cache came to be there is anybodies guess.  Now if I'd found a couple of live rounds I would immediately hand them over to the police but for reasons best known to himself  my dad decided to store them in the cupboard under the stairs next to the gas meter! but the important thing is that I got the cap badge and the highlander. 

By that time I was already an avid collector of plastic toy soldiers and was well versed in the products of all the major UK manufacturers but I'd never seen anything like that highlander, he'd lost his base and rifle, he wore a quirky uniform almost Crimean but certainly pre WW1 and was very well detailed.  I always felt there was something special about him but it would be another ten years before I was able to confirm that he was made by Malleable Mouldings from a design by the sculptor Holger Eriksson for Authenticast, a firm in Galway, Eire (where my dad was from).  That was the start of an ongoing love affair I have had for the works of Eriksson, a most prodigious sculptor for Comet, Authenticast, Malleable Mouldings, SAE (Swedish Afrikan Engineers), Spencer Smith, Prince August and his own Connoisseur range.



In the never ending tidy up of my toy soldier room I unearthed this old box of Authenticast 40mm semi flat figures of British infantry from the 7 Years War.  On the base they are marked Eire and a number has been scratched on each one but there is not the distinctive HE found on the majority of Authenticast's 54mm figures, denoting that they were designed by Eriksson.  Of course HE wasn't the only sculptor for Authenticast and it may be that they simply didn't mark the smaller sized figures so perhaps we can only go by the general style, which I would say is very HE particularly the man advancing at the ready which has that "purposeful stride" so typical of Eriksson. 


Despite the fact that they were in production for a relatively short time Authenticast 54mm figures are fairly common but these smaler semi flats are much less so, I have one other set (which I'll post up in a day or so) and I recall seeing a box of Napoleonics at a Phillips Auction about 15 years ago and that's about it.  The other box that I have is identical except that it carries the original price: 2/11 (two shillings and eleven pence. which for those not conversant with British pre-decimal currency would now be fourteen and a half new pence)


The standard bearer has his head turned to look back at the rest of the troops, a small detail that adds to the charm of the set.  Were they the forerunners of the Prince August range?  It's possible I suppose, these are much thinner than the PA figures.

Saturday 3 March 2012

Q. When is buying junk you don't need or want acceptable?

A.  When you can honestly claim that it's actually a contribution to charity. 

Growing up in London in the 1960's I recall that every town had a cluster of "antique" and "junk" shops wherein the Faginesque owners scratched a living haggling up the price on stuff they had acquired for nearly nothing.  Today they are all gone, where did they go and when did it happen? I don't know, but their place has been taken by a new burgeoning industry, one that is impervious to recession, the Charity Shop.  Do they have such emporiums in other parts of the world?  I have fond memories of "thrift shops" in the US when I visited back in the 1970's, were they the same thing? or is it just us Brits that have so much excess stuff we don't need but can't bear to throw away that we sooth our collective conscience by donating it to charity?

Now I'll be the first to put my hand up and admit that I've never been known for my philanthropy but there is one charity that I regularly support called PAWS which seeks to reunite lost pets with their owners or otherwise rehome animals.  Our local branch is run by two nice ladies who invariably get stuck with the pets no one else wants, the ones with only three legs or no tail. and for that they deserve my support at the very least.  They also run probably the most interesting charity shop in town, which I never pass without popping into and where I found this...........



It's a hippopotomous, a rather stylised Japanese smilling hippo but what was interesting to me is that it's made of celluloid, which is a little unusual.  Celluloid is not an ideal material for making toys, in this case the plastic shell is thinner than you would find in a ping pong ball but the figure has been filed with plaster to give it support.  I already have a few pieces in celluloid, some toytown style guardsmen in bearskins plus a squadie in khaki battledress, the latter is also filled with plaster.  Celluloid figures mostly tend to be made in Japan, all of the above are, the hippo and the squadie are both marked with a chrysanthemum flower and the word JAPAN underneath, you can just about make it out in the second picture, and I think these probably date from about the 1950's.  I have seen Japanese celluloids marked "made in occupied Japan" which I guess would date them a bit earlier, maybe the late 1940's.   I've also seen larger size (maybe 120mm) toy soldiers that were made in France during the 1920's in celluloid and I have a few smaller animals from France or Germany, one is marked "Loris" but I know nothing more about them at this time.

The hippo has a broken right foreleg which has been very badly repaired, rendering it valueless as a collectable, would I have bought it if I'd seen it at a toy soldier show?  Probably not but I am very happy to have been able to salvage him to a place among other celluloid toys and at the same time made a donation to my favorite charity.

In recent weeksI have been running a "play by email" wargame set in the Russo Turkish War using the "Big Wars" rules devised by veteran wargame author Stuart Asquith and Jack Alexander.  I've never done anything like this before (by email I mean) and it has worked quite well so there will no doubt be reports on several of our blogs in the not too distant future.  Either way, next post will be back to toy soldiers.  Promise.