As you may be aware I want to start playing a few scenarios based on the 1943 Swedish invasion plan made by Adolf Schell (that of course never happened). Part of this plan had two of the lines of advance going through Dalarna (the county where I was born) in Sweden and it would be interesting to place some of the action here – the first campaign will follow a mechanised infantry division and the other a Panzer division.

I only had early war Germans in 15mm so I needed to find some miniatures to build two regular infantry Platoons and some to do two Panzergrenader platoon.  I will discuss the regular infantry in this post.

One of the scenarios will be focusing on a river crossing and for this I needed to have some rubber boats.   Looking around I could only find one producer that make rubber boats with crew in 15mm and it was the Command Decision range from Skytrex (link here, I think these are sold by Old Glory in the US).   I also got enough squads for two platoons and some extra sections, some machine guns, mortars and stretcher bearers.

I painted them as follows (use alternatives as almost all manufacturers have had a go at some of the German colours) with normal Roll a One approach – splash rather than finesee:

1. Grey base coat, ink washed (diluted ink)
2.  Paint face, hands, paddles, wood on rifle, and rope around rubber boat in Beige Brown (Vallejo 875)
3. Paint uniform jacket and trousers in German Field Grey (Vallejo 830, it feels more green than grey), leave some of the blackened recesses shine through – I painted about half of the trousers with a normal grey colour (London Grey 836).
4. Paint helmet in Dark Green (Vallejo 979)
5. Paint Anti tank weapons with panzershrek and panzerfaust in Dunkelgelb (I have a MIG paint, called RAL 7028)
6.  Let dry and wash with GW’s Agrax Earthshade – a dark brown wash. This give a nice dark shine to the model.
7. Detail skin with flesh (I used Vallejo Sunny Flesh 845) – let some of the brown shine through.
8. Highlight uniform and helmet with original colour used as per 3. and 4. above.
9. Webbing black, breadroll khaki, brown for waterbottle, various brown for shoes.
10.  Highlight rifle and paddles with Light Brown (Vallejo 929)
11.  Vallejo Air Silver for spade, mix with black for rifle, smg and lmg metal.
12.  Paint the rubber part of boat in London Grey – leave some of the darker grey to shine through.
13.  Let dry
14.  Give it all a wash of Army Painter Soft Tone

Here is how they came out, although this is an old range I think there is a lot of character in these and I am very tempted to give their Afrika Korps miniatures a go just for fun.

/ Hope that was of some interest