Early War Miniatures may be best known for their unrivalled catalogue of obscure military hardware (I mean, who else does Norwegian field and mountain guns, in any scale?), but their vacuform terrain pieces aren’t half bad either. Being made of plastic, these field fortifications are incredibly light, a welcome difference from the far heavier resin emplacements available from other manufacturers.
First up is a large infantry strongpoint with “built up banks, piled sandbags riveted with wooden posts and wooden wattling” in the words of proprietor Paul Thompson. They come two to a bag and admittedly don’t look like much in their natural state, but they do paint up quite nicely.
The trick is to lather all of the exposed ground with sand. This adds an extra layer of detail which can then be brought out via drybrushing. For painting I relied upon the emulsion equivalents of my go-to colours for bases, namely Vallejo Game Colour Earth and Bonewhite. Consequently a basecoat of Nippon Paint’s Friar Tuck was applied, followed by a dry brush of Natural Oak.
The pieces was then flocked with my own custom blend of “meadow” static grass from Noch mixed with a potpourri of Woodland Scenics Fine Turf (specifically Burnt Grass, Green Grass, and Yellow Grass). Tajima 1 grass tufts were then added as a final touch to lend the pieces that extra bit of oomph.
The same method was used on the smaller sanger pieces, as the rest of the pictures will attest. For the gun pit’s wooden planks a basecoat of Foundry Bay Brown Shade was followed with drybrushings of Vallejo Gold Brown and Stonewall Grey, as per a tutorial from the Wargames Table. Sandbags were painted Vallejo Sand Yellow and washed with Army Painter Soft Tone inks.
So they you have it, smashingly simple readymade dug-in positions for those of us too timid to muck about with foamboard, mdf, and a modicum of imagination.
Motorisation was but a pipe dream for most WWII armies, including Hitler’s, but where the Thais differed was their heavy reliance on bovine forms of transport for the ferrying of supplies. The invasions of Indochina and north-eastern Burma were sustained by long columns of bullock carts and pack oxen; mules on the other hand appeared to have only been used for battalion infantry guns while elephants were a rarity despite their prominence in the logging industry.
The water buffaloes pictured here are from Platoon 20’s Vietnam range and were given succeeding coats of VMC Black, VMC German Grey, and a 2:1 mix of VMC German Grey and VMC London Grey. The intricately sculpted pack loads — one of which features a Vickers machinegun, which thankfully was part of the Thais’ inventory — are also Platoon 20 and can be found in their otherwise horrid Chindits range.
In a moment of absentmindedness I’d glued the horns on backwards and didn’t realise the mistake until the figurines had all been fully basecoated. Clearly I don’t get out into the country much! I may yet call upon the intervention of some acetone if this reminder of human frailty gets too irksome.
The drivers (or whatever the bullock equivalent of muleteers are) are by Elhiem and Early War Miniatures and were painted using my usual triad of VMC US Olive Drab, VGC Caliban Green, and VMC Russian Uniform.
Right then, on to the next set of four-legged beasts: horses!
February saw the completion of two more of the Thai House Model kits. You’d have thought assembling them would be a breeze by now, but in my misguided complacency I actually ended up breaking all three houses’ roofing beams during their fittings, so delicate and paper-thin are the pieces. Which has naturally drained any enthusiasm I have for the other kit awaiting construction (oh, the things one does in the pursuit of accuracy!).
Though there is no question Tamiya Dull Red produces excellent results, they say variety is the spice of life and so two other of the company’s spray paints were employed. The two-house compound was sprayed with Tamiya Red Brown and given successive drybrushes of VPA New Wood and a lighter 2:1 mix of VPA New Wood and VMC Desert Sand. The roofs were doused in VMC Orange Red, after which a wash of Army Painter Strong Tone ink was applied. A final highlight of VMC German Orange was then drybrushed on to bring the tiles into relief.
By contrast, the poorer man’s house is a monotone affair with no attempt having been made to distinguish the roof. A different spray can was used for the basecoat, namely Tamiya Linoleum Deck Brown, though the subsequent highlights utilised the same Vallejo colours mentioned above, which probably accounts for why the difference between the two schemes is so negligible.
Fans of Rapid Fire! will be pleased to know that the smaller house is capable of, er, housing an entire company of Japanese. No mean feat, given the beefed-up size of such units at the start of the Pacific War.
Sarissa Precision’s Far East huts are all the rage these days, but while they may be well and good for semi-isolated jungle dwellings in the middle of nowhere, I wanted something a little more refined and affluent, the sort of well-off housing you’d expect of a market settlement laying astride a trunk road leading to somewhere.
This wasn’t as tall an order as you would think. As it turned out, there are certain benefits to living where I am, even if a jar of Branston Pickle does cost thrice as it would in Blighty: safety from the pandemic’s worst ravages (with the death toll currently standing at 61) and, more pertinently, a thriving cottage industry specialising in miniature houses that cater to doll collectors and spirit worshipers(!).
I had initially intended on getting custom-built structures that would only require a paint job to bling things up. But incredibly enough, none of the many makers I contacted had any opening in their commission queues. Which meant turning to kit manufacturers.
My first port of call was Art-Dee, a one-man band (aren’t they all?) from whom I had previously sourced a train station. But despite my entreaties, the proprietor saw no point in scaling down his line of easy-build houses, which, being 1/50 scale, are more suited to 28mm.
With prices upwards from £34.50 they are by no means cheap, but in addition to the uniqueness factor (always great for rationalising a purchase!), there’s also the fact that the kits are made of actual teakwood. In other words, the mithril of wood, prized for its durability and imperviousness to termites. And as anyone who has tried to procure teak furniture will let you know, this material will cost you an inheritance. Now whether that justifies the kits’ price tags is debatable, but it’s not like one is spoilt for choice…
Equally debatable is the quality of the instruction sheet. Personally I would have sworn a lot less had the individual steps been broken down further as I repeatedly discovered that some pieces would have fitted more snugly had it been made clearer that another combination ought to have preceded their positioning. Combined with the multitude of pieces, this was nothing short of an arduous build, the model house equivalent of religious self-flagellation or those fiddly resin AFVs produced by obscure European brands. That being said, the result is nevertheless well worth the effort.
The assembly having greatly tested my patience, I could not wait to move on to other projects and so opted for a simple paint scheme using Tamiya’s Dull Red spray, a near-match for the “barn red” employed by the Jim Thompson House in Bangkok. This was followed by a quick wash of Army Painter’s Dark Tone, topped with a generous drybrush of a light sandy colour whose identity I have forgotten.
Basing was a similarly simple affair. A piece of hobby foamboard weighed down by washers that also helped make up for the uneven stilts (damn the instructions!) was cut to size, bevelled, and textured before undergoing a base coat of Tamiya JGSDF Brown and a drybrush of VGC Bonewhite.
Livening things up is a pair of water jars which I have placed out in the open, by the staircase. Though today’s pollution has made their function decorative, “back in the day” these earthenware jars were used to collect rainwater from which one could either drink or shower.
For pots there is an anonymous Chinese line of architectural accessories readily available on ebay and AliExpress. These are neither cheap nor spectacular, requiring some effort to touch them up. Well, a lot of effort actually, as what I had in mind are dragon motifs not unlike the ones below.
But as luck would have it, Traditional Thai House Models unexpectedly released exactly what I needed while my ebay order was slowly making its way from Shenzhen. Clearly targeting railway modellers, they come pre-painted and are of a dragon-bearing design ubiquitous to landed properties in Thailand.
In the end I decided on making use of the aforementioned goodies I had ordered from China to add an extra dash of colour to the house. Thus began my first and near-disastrous attempt at Ming pottery: a basecoat of VMC London Grey followed by drybrushed highlights of VMC Sky Grey and VMC Cold White. For the pattern — intended to portray a never-ending tree branch but which instead ended up vaguely suggesting mythological beasts (at least to my charitable eye) — an unshaken bottle of VMC Dark Blue was relied upon. Unshaken being the operative word, as it’s the watery thinness we would otherwise curse that’s key to a passable mimicry of blue and white porcelain.
As a finishing touch, a flowery tuft from another local firm, GG Diorama, was added to the vase in imitation of the amazing work done by The Tactical Painter.
Originally meant to house a clothesline, the corner patch in the back was requisitioned for banana trees that Traditional Thai House Models had gifted me in recompense for a misplaced order. Though they are much too flimsy to last long on a tabletop battlefield, the inclusion of fruits on some of the trees was too good of a thing to shelve.
A quick word on usage: as each of the six countries that make up mainland Southeast Asia has its own distinctive style of architecture, versatile this building isn’t. Using it for games set in Burma, Malaya, or Vietnam would be akin to plopping a Russian orthodox church into the middle of Oosterbeek. Or populating a Normandy board with Mediterranean houses for that matter. Thankfully there’s much of an overlap between the Thai and Cambodian vernaculars, so that’s me sorted out.
And last but not least, some propaganda shots featuring some Elhiem Thais.
So there you have it, the beginnings of a village. That is, if I can work up the courage to put together the three other kits awaiting my attention.
for a few rounds more 