The Romanians are coming!

Plans are afoot for a wargame set in the Crimea during WW2 using 54mm plastic toy soldiers, it's a way off yet but it will still need a bit of preparation.  Fortunately the game will require little in the way of air and armour units, but it will require some Romanian infantry and I can't think of any firm that made such troops, therefore some sort of bodge is called for.

 Taking the Osprey book as my source for uniforms I trawled through the mountain of junk figures I keep for such purposes and came up with several bags of these Hugonnet figures.  I bought them for a few francs a bag in a supermarket, on a booze cruise to Calais forty years ago, and they have been languishing in the back of a cupboard ever since waiting for me to come up with a use for them.  I've included the header card from the bag which shows the Hugonnet/Feral logo quite nicely in the bottom right corner.

The Romanian uniform comprised a full length jacket and short gaiters, so we're okay on that score, Mountain Rifle Regiments wore a large floppy beret, so that's good too.  Only problem is with the regular infantry units who wore a variety of helmets including the French "Adrian" and Dutch models, I have some metal heads in Adrian helmets so could do a few quick swops for a bit of variation but the current helmets are fairly indistinct so I may just leave them as they are.

Here are all the poses, Hugonnet were notorious for making piracies of other firms figures, mostly Starlux but also Cofalu and Cherilea.  The first three figures in the top row are copies of Starlux and the rest are all copies of Cofalu modern French army toy soldiers.

Moulded in green and tan these are very much the French equivalent of "Army Men" cheap toys in plastic, colour coded to provide two distinct armies.  They are crude, anatomically challenged and badly moulded, many carrying the deformity of being injected into an overheated mould.  But for all that I have a certain fondness for them, the poses are very dynamic and I've always felt they had potential, I just never figured out what that might be.  Well, we'll see.....

Still limping on the long road home from Moscow

For Napoleon's Grand Armee, the humiliating retreat from the Russian capital is about to turn in a nightmare of epic proportions. 

While the muffled boom from the Russian guns, harrying the rearguard, drifts across the endless plain, the Cossacks look for any opportunity to pick off stragglers or fall on unescorted wagons.

The Cossacks attack in waves but are easily held off by formed up bodies of infantry, or scattered when they come under artillery fire.  An unfortunate salvo from the rearguard falls near the wagons and sees a unit of Cossacks driven off by friendly fire!

The Bavarians trudge on, shadowed by the menacing Cossacks, they know their only hope of salvation is to stick together.  Ahead of them in the right foreground the Russian main army is approaching from the flank and has set up a Grand Battery to ward off any attempt by the French to rescue their supply train and come to the aid of the rearguard.

Unprotected wagons are easy prey for the Cossacks, who suddenly appear like ghosts out of the swirling snow fluries.

………and never miss an opportunity for plunder.

The Russian main army makes it's appearance on the field...….

While the Grand Battery prepares to face the French relief force, which has now been spotted racing to save the supply column.

The column escort has now splintered into isolated pockets of resistance which are systematically picked off one by one

A unit of Saxon infantry, allied to the French, take shelter in the ruins of an abandoned monastery.

The Cossacks continue to plunder the column.

Nearing the end of the game, the French rearguard, seriously depleted, stood it's ground heroically just as it did in 1812.  While the Emperor and his staff, in a moment of distraction, fell prisoner to a passing Cossack patrol, okay that didn't happen in 1812 (but it could have!).

And suddenly it was all over!  Time to pack away all the toys and sit down for tea.

The rules used for the game were a Napoleonic variant of Funny Little Wars which are as yet unpublished and are here being playtested.  One new development is the use of polystyrene foam balls impaled on a matchstick (shown here in the centre foreground) so they can be fired from a cannon, this makes their flight rather erratic but it also makes it much easier to see what has been hit.  The figures were drawn from too many sources to list, and included many conversions, but most sharp eyed readers will be able to guess their origin (and if you're really stumped you can always ask!)