When I was doing my 15mm desert project I bemoaned the apparent lack of Italian 75mm guns and ended making do with 100mm howitzers instead. Nigel Drury very helpfully pointed out the Italian artillery range that Skytrex do. Now, I haven't bought any Skytrex stuff since the original owner sold up and it was briefly taken over by someone else. There are more new owners now but I'd always thought Skhtrex stuff was massively overpriced (a tenner for a Hetzer?).
I had a chat with them at Partisan though and they seemed to be sensible and well organised people so I put in an order. Although their vehicles remain very expensive, I discovered their guns and figures are good value.
And here they are, two 75mm howitzers.
And lovely models they are too. Very crisp castings with nice sharp detail. Unfortunately assembly is required, and regular readers will recall how much I hate sticking metal guns together, especially when there are no locating pins for the trails, just smooth metal such as these had. Eventually small blobs of blu tak slathered in superglue saved the day and they went together fine. At least the wheels and trunnions fitted well.
Regular readers will also recall I am short of gunners, but Skytrex also do very reasonably priced packs of gunners, rather more reasonably priced than certain other 15mm metal figure manufacturers, so I bought a pack of Italian gunners. And what lovely figures they are, slim and well proportioned with finely moulded details
I did the guns in Desert Ochre and the crews in Dark Sand with ochre helmets, grey puttees and brown boots. Various photos showed that generally these guns had rubber tyres, despite the spoked wheels, so I did the wheel rims dark grey. As these are quite small pieces I just allocated two gunners each.
Very pleased to have got those, which brings the Italian artillery total up to eight towed guns and five self propelled.
While I was doing some artillery, I added a couple of gunners to my 105mm Autocannone insert piece as it looked a bit bare without them. I took the opportunity to improve the gun fixing too as it had come loose during the Crusader game, but I managed to break one of the elevation wheels off in the process although it stuck back on OK. Brittle resin I guess.
I also bought an extra Shariana artillery tractor from BPM as they make useful light wheeled transport. The extra one was resin not APL and the new one is on the left, you can just see that the bonnet is smooth as opposed to the visible striations on the one on the right.
I'd planned to add drivers to all three as well and converted three seated PP British drivers into Italians by filing down their headgear. When it came to it though, it was an utter pig to get them in as the space was so small (and the figures are so big). I had to cut this figure off at the waist and remove his arms from the elbows to get him in, then buld some 'legs' out of filler. It just wasn't worth it, so I only did one as I'd already cut out the moulded steering wheel. The other two drivers will come in useful for something else.
Lastly I picked up a couple more German motorcycle combinations. These are also Skytrex and similarly priced to the Peter Pig ones. I re-deployed the existing 'Italian' PP motorcycle combo to the Afrika Korps, repainted the crew in DAK uniforms and the bike in German desert sand.
For these 'Italian' ones I left off the MGs (which are supplied seperately) to distinguish them from the DAK ones.
These models also have separate storage bags so I stuck those in different positions to the German ones. The bikes were done in Desert Ochre which is noticeable different to the German sand colour and the crews are in Italian coloured uniforms.
I toyed with the idea of adding Bersaglieri feathers to their helmets made out of filler but didn't do it. I shall think on that. I know there are a few people who make actual Bersaglieri motorcyclists, but I'm not too bothered about using substitutes.
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