The Battle of Astrakhan (part 5)

Continuing the battle played by email with 54mm toy soldiers using the "Big Wars" rules devised by Stuart Asquith and Jack Alexander.

The Russian infantry column masses for an assault in the centre.

The Turkish line holds steady........

........... as the attack of massed Russian infantry gains momentum.

The Russian guns soften the enemy line in support of the main assault........

.........but the Turkish guns reply...........

.........with deadly effect.

The Russian column veers to the right to avoid the marshy ground around the bend in the river.

On the Russian right the cavalry have reformed and prepare to charge across the valley to support the infantry attack

The Turkish infantry moves forward.

While the Russian column takes a punishing fire from the Turkish line.

The Russian column finally reaches it's goal.........

............but as the cavalry charge uphill to distract the enemy attention..............

...........they receive a withering volley which wipes them out

The Caucasian Rifles and Montenegrins advance but become disordered moving through broken ground.

On the hill the Russian staff watch in horror as the cavalry are blown away............

............but then a cheer goes up on the left as the infantry final charge home...........

........and overrun the Turkish guns.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Pirates of Marx pirates!

More new 54mm plastic toy soldiers from China, these are hard polystyrene copies of the old Marx pirates, the mouldings aren't too crisp but they are passable and quite useable.

Coming soon to a cake shop near you!

This looks to me to be a copy of a plastic Elastolin figure, I bought it in a local baking shop last week and it is part of a set of cake decorations which mostly comprises copies of Britains Wild West series. This example stands (or lays) about 60mm in size and is made in a slightly bendy but acceptable PVC, it is clearly marked "made in China". While we all naturally abhore the practice of pirating or copying another companies products, would I like to see the venerable inheritors of the Hong Kong trade make copies of say..... the Elastolin Huns? You bet I would.

Musketeers by Guilbert of France

Guilbert didn't make a lot of stuff but what they did was very good, these were some of their early production in an acetate material which generally doesn't stand the test of time very well.  These examples have the name marked on the base but many don't, they are distinguishable by the hats and plumes which are moulded seperately and glued on, also the swords are just a length of wire, originally I thought that this was just a case of somebody repairing a broken figure but all the early examples I have seen are like this and it was a common practice with a number of early French plastic manufacturers.  Later production was in white hard polystyrene and I'm not sure I've seen any of these with the manufacturers name marked underneath.  I do think they have a certain elan.

Q. When is an Airfix not an Airfix?

  A. When it's a Hong Kong copy.  I've been having an off-on tidy up of my toy soldier room for several months now, it's not that it's a big area but that the concept of "go tidy your room" does not become any less tedious or disheartening just because you've left adolescence far behind!

Anyway, in the darkest corner of a long forgotten cupboard I discovered an old shoe box which I'd quite forgotten about.  Way, way back in the days before ebay, and toy soldier shows plastic figures could be quite hard to find, you could get plenty of hollow-cast Britains or "connoseur models", if you had the money, but plastics were considered to have no intrinsic value and consequently there was no market for them.  It was in this period of plastic austerity that I started collecting pirated copies (or knock offs if you prefer) of mainstream products, mainly out of desperation to collect something, and that long forgotten period came back to me when I opened the shoe box.

Of course the copies weren't all made in Hong Kong, that bastion of enterprise which we Brits rented off the Chinese for the better part of the last century, but they were by far the most prolific.  The most commonly copied figures were Britains, particularly the Herald Khaki infantry but in fairness the British companies making copies of these were legion: UNA, VP, Johilco, Benbross, Tudor Rose etc.  From the shoe box I've pulled a few of the figures that I found amusing in the hope that someone else might feel the same.  First above is a copy of an Airfix footballer, nothing special about that just that the originals are not that common.  The Japanese rifleman standing firing has been made in two parts, he swivels at the waist to make him a sort of swoppet.  The manufacturers really went out of their way with the grey figure in the middle, he's a copy of the Airfix WW2 German infantry running with rifle at the waist but he has been made as a swoppet with six parts.  Like the Jap he swivels at the waist but he also has a plug in base and head (the head is copied from the first version Timpo German with a press on helmet, helmet missing here) but the great thing is that they've made a belt for him in brown plastic with bayonet.entrenching tool and gas mask canister.  Rarely can anyone have gone to so much effort to make something infinitely inferior to the original.

The next bunch I pulled out were two of the Airfix HO (1/72nd) scale WW1 French which have been pantographed up to about 40mm scale.  Pantographing figures down in size and is quite common and in fact most modern 54mm figures are sculpted three times larger than the final finished product and then pantoed down in order to creat a mould with sharp detail.  How great would it have been if they'd worked this magic on all the Airfix WW1 ranges, 40mm is just ideal for table top wargaming.  The two Napoleonic British infantrymen are nice crisp 54mm copies made in Poland and I've included them mainly to give an idea of scale.

My favorites have to be these Airfix American Revolutionary figures, again they've been pantographed up from HO scale to about 40mm, in typical Hong Kong fashion they have taken the American infantry and painted them up as British but retained the stars and stripes on the flag!  These were being sold as cake decorations when I got them, I'd love to get more.

The day I found VICTORY in the bottom of a bottle.

I admit I had been drinking..... but not that much.  I blinked in the January sunshine, opened my eyes and it was still there.  I could hardly believe it but it seemed such an amazing thing that I felt I must share it with you dear reader (whoever you may be)

Since I no longer work in town I avoid going up into London (because it can be a bit of a nightmare) but a few days ago Mrs C needed to visit Chinatown so I went along as her bagman.  After a pleasant lunch we headed back towards Waterloo Station via Trafalgar Square, the later is of course a tourist destination of International renown with Nelson's Column in the centre surrounded by four podiums.  The thing is that only three of the podiums have statues on them and the fourth stood empty until a few years ago when someone came up with the idea of using it to showcase modern works of art, some of which have been quite controversial.  This particular work has had little or no attention from the media and has nothing to do with collecting toy soldiers, except that it is a model even if it does weigh in at a whopping 4 tons and 15 metres long, so it just had to go in the blog.

I've never heard of Yinka Shonibare but anyone who can make a four ton model of HMS Victory in a bottle has earned their MBE in my book.

Latest Plastic Warrior and Figuren Magazines now out

In the last few days the postman has brought me the latest issues of Plastic Warrior and Figuren Magazines. 

Plastic Warrior number 146 has articles on: The Crescent story, Very early plastic warriors, Where did the toy soldier go?, Book Review, Britains stuff, Wild Young Dirky, UFOs, Auction Review, Cherilea Commandos and Minor Makers - BMS

Figuren Magazin Nr. 4 2011, has articles on: Erich Leistner - Master diorama maker, Bad Nauheim 2011 figure show, A hundred years of Hausser, Pfeiffers 11cm military figures, Gulaschkanone by Metall-Spielwaren Weimar, German made Indian canoes, "Winnetou" boardgame, Modelling book review, Nativity figures and 32nd Herne figure show.

Both magazines are available by subscription direct from the publishers and in my opinion are indispensable if you are a serious collector of old toy soldiers.