Run up to Biazza

 First scheduled scenario from the Soft under belly book is Biazza Ridge. I've ended up taking the side of the axis in the campaign so thankfully I had a great deal of WW2 Germans in 28mm. mostly because when I first started playing Bolt Action in first edition I had purchased a massive amount of them in lead from Black tree design. these remain one of my favourite armies as I painted them very early on and played with them so much. 

it was quite a shock to find that despite having what I thought was a massive German army was in fact not enough for scenario. The scenario calls for the German Force to be from the Kampfgruppe East HGD selector whilst is a largely infantry based selector. I could have used a Tiger to bulk out the list, but the scenario calls for two tiger tanks already so I had to get a couple of squads fleshed out. I had decided early on that any scenarios were to be played with nice and fluffy lists as much as possible, this largely meant that squads were to be full and contain LMGs, which in this case, meant two LMGs per squad. This was to be an issue as I was short a fair few LMG teams. luckily I had a fair few unpainted Black tree LMG teams and was able to scavenge some more from plastic warlord kits. this was the perfect opportunity to paint some objectives too for a little bit of battleground story telling. 

I tend to use plastic shot glasses blue tacked to bases for holding models whilst I batch paint large amounts of figures, seems to help stave of hand cramps and meant the model can be manipulated much easier

I chose to include a PK40 as i needed a bit of antitank punch, I thought I'd try and paint the crew separately from the gun and combine them later. I'm not sure if this added any time savers but I think I'll try again

After completing the infantry, I realised I was very short transport as the scenario would call for my force to rapidly reinforce the ridge so quickly painted up two trucks. Also just for fun, I added an AA truck to the list of things to do. Thankfully I had a tiger Tank and Commander Roy had a second.

My Opponent for the Campaign, Mr Commander Roy, had the uphill struggle in preparing for this scenario as he had very little in the way of US forces and the book calls for quite specific forces