Celebrity Bakeoff? Field Kitchen, German personalities and more passengers with added boats

 I have 'needed' a Hitler figure for a while so I eventually took the plunge and ordered the QRF 'German Personalities set. I wish I'd bought the old Roco WW2 Personalities set when I had the chance, as it included Montgomery, Eisenhower etc.

To make up the order I also added in a 15mm WW2 German Field Kitchen and some Assault Boats. 

The Field Kitchen and assembled dignitaries. 

The horse drawn field kitchen is a lovely model, with the kitchen, a limber and four draft horses standing in suitably still poses. It also comes with a pair of cooks. There are a few pieces to assemble - mainly the spoked wheels, the lid of the cooker cauldron and the smokestack, but it goes together cleanly with very little flash although I had to trim a couple of the axle stubs. 

There are two cook figures, one thin man holding a loaf of bread and the other rather rotund! I'm sure I've come across these two in a novel, possibly The Good Soldier Schweik? Anyway, they are rather like Laurel and Hardy. I based the cooks facing away from the kitchen as they are greeting would be punters.

As it is a four horse vehicle the whole thing is quite lengthy once assembled. I painted the limber and kitchen in Field Grey (RAL6006) rather than Panzer Grey, so it has a distinctly greenish tinge and will do for many armies which feature a lot of horse transport. I did the cooks in the pre-1944 fatigue uniform which was a light tan unbleached cotton (you occasionally see photos of soldiers in the Caucasus wearing it as improvised tropical kit). As they ended up looking khaki-ish wearing sidecaps and rather grubby aprons, they will do for a lot of armies.

These guys are the German Personalities, and tbh they are a bit disappointing.

The left hand figure is Rommel I think, 2nd from left is obviously Hitler,  but the other two are just generic officers which are included in other sets and I've already got these figures. Or maybe these 'personalities' were included as officers? I've no idea who they might be, the guy in the greatcoat could be anyone and the figure on far right has wild staring eyes, so Model? Himmler? Goebbels? I'd be amazed if an army group commander would be wielding a pair of binoculars,, but who knows. I did them all in senior officer uniforms with red trouser stripes, gold braid etc. Hitler got his trademark red-brown cap and is moulded with a very obvious Nazi armband. His moustache is actually moulded on rather well. Rommel has a tropical jacket on, although it is hard to make out.

I got a pack of Assault Boats too, although I thought I'd ordered four of them, not two. These will do for now  though.

Very nice solid metal boats with well moulded shapes with little flash and they have very realistic looking grab ropes moulded around the lower hulls. I just painted these a generic dark green with a wash and drybrush and didn't bother to base them so they can be mounted on trucks to serve as engineer assault boats if needed. I can't possibly think of a game which might require those...

The boats also came with huge numbers of crewmen, seated figures which were far too useful to waste sitting in a boat. I cut down their paddles and turned nine of them into more passenger stands for my German trucks. Three figures per base looks more like it I think. I did them in greenish Field Grey, and the cut down paddles look reasonably like rifles.

As  was doing some passengers anyway, I painted up a pack of Peter Pig Russian Tank riders. You get 12 figures in four strips per pack, and very nice they are too. I put them on small bases for stability and they will fit nicely in the back of my Zvezda trucks or balance on the deck of a larger tank. The bases can be wedged under the turret rear for more stability. The strips are too long for the PP Gaz trucks unless you wedge them in diagonally, but I already have passenger stands for those vehicles.

My older Russian passenger stands only had two figures on as I was a bit short of suitable figures at the time, so I painted up three PP seated US figures as Russians and added them to the existing stands too. The PP figures are certainly much better fed than the PSC ones who comprise the existing passengers. I had to cut their feet off to make them look even half sensible, and even then, they seem to have eaten all the pies (first dibs at the Field Kitchen?). As a group they look OK though and they are fine in the back of a truck.

Just a little reflection on '15mm' figure sizes with some stands arranged in height/bulk order The leftmost stand are the QRF Assault Boat crews, then we have PSC and PP passengers, PP Tank Riders, the QRF Rommel and finally the PSC Early war German Infantry, who haven't just eaten all the pies but the entire cook wagon. The variety of sizes is quite remarkable, although it matters less for seated figures and in many ways I prefer vehicle crews to be on the small side as it easier to get them in.

Anyway, I'm pleased with that lot (and delighted with the Field Kitchen). A much easier job than painting all those Persians.