British Para Bren teams

 When I bought my 15mm British Paras a few years ago, I unaccountably forgot to get any Bren gunners. Now in the sorts of games I usually play (Grand Tactical, Operational), it doesn't really matter what weapons are on the infantry bases, but it is always nice to have the option to do something tactical with guns groups and rifle groups.

I was getting some stuff from Peter Pig anyway, so I got a pack of Para Bren Gunners too. You get eight Brens in a pack, which I didn't realise (I thought it would be four gunners and four loaders), so I mixed and matched them with some other figures. The gunners themselves are in walking or kneeling poses, no prone gunners, which is fine as it happens.

I prised some of the standing riflemen off some of the existing bases to use as loaders. 

I made up a couple of bases with just pairs of figures, one Bren and one loader.

But mainly I put the Brens on the existing three figure stands in place of one of the riflemen, so they still look like 'rifle' stands but I can use them as Bren teams if needs be. Overall the rifle/bren stand count went up to sixteen, so I can do an Airlanding Battalion with platoon elements now (four companies of four platoons ea, those Battalions were big).

Sorry, this is a really blurry photo, so don't look to closely.

An oddity in the 'gun crew' pack were three guys clearly loading mortars, or something. Anyway, they look awfully like they are throwing grenades, so I just added them as grenadiers to some of the existing stands. This left me short of kneeling gunners (the sort of figures you actually need for gun crews, such as for last week's 75mm Pack Howitzers), so I chopped the Brens down into shells on a couple of the kneeling Bren gunners and it all ended up OK in the end.

The DPM para smocks I did in my usual manner - sand base, red/brown stripes and then careful application of green stripes to get the overall 'tone' right. Unlike the German Paras, I didn't make the mistake of ink washing the whole thing and ruining it, but instead ran a pinwash around the webbing, packs etc to get into the cracks, then a light tan drybrush brought out the highlights. I always do the British webbing in raw tan for the contrast, even though in 1944 it would have been blancoed in KG03 Green. Maybe they are in Italy where the 'D Day Dodgers' liked to scrub their webbing.