I don’t need an excuse to start a new army, as the newest shiniest thing is enough to get me salivating at getting models stuck together. Sadly, finishing them off can sometimes be my downfall. My desk at work is a testament to this and on a regular basis is littered with projects, units half completed and what not. However, with the implementation of Rolling Lockdowns here in the UK in April 2020 I made it my mission to finish as many of my Flames of War and WWIII: Team Yankee projects as possible; and all the while juggling the joys of working from home, homeschooling the kids and staying safe.
The hobby lockdown competition over on the Flames of War website was a great help to my motivation seeing everyone’s projects, checking in with the Flames Facebook groups, and even keeping in touch with friends and acquaintances the world over on message groups and Skype chats! My biggest project was by far the Bagration: Soviet Tankovy list in early 2020. This kept me going until nearly February 2021 and by then I was done with green tanks. So I busted out the M1A1 company which I’d started for my USMC army, but never completed. So sandy hues and Desert MERDC became my new obsession to anyone who would listen. And that is where the West German book found me when it dropped into my lap a few weeks ago. I was tempted by the Leopard 2A5 calling my name, and the Glory and Uncle Sam for courage and resistance. It is far easier to find an excuse why my USMC would be fighting Gareth’s West German tanks in the 1980s!
Gareth introduced me to another novel by Harold Coyle (writer of Team Yankee novel) called The Ten Thousand, which in a nutshell is about the Americans teaming up with some disenfranchised Soviets, to steal Ukrainian nukes and get them toward France, fighting through a revived Greater German Reich. I was hooked.
So not only did I start putting together a 120-point vehicle-based list designed around speed and aggression, but I painted enough extra army choices to increase my overall points or easily swap out for actual games, rather than skirmish-style scenarios as we were hoping to play in our lunch hours. In addition to this, I went a bit chop heavy on my Humvees and removed the hardcover at the back, and created some open-backed versions to carry extra equipment. I also managed to scrounge the office for some pieces to ‘beef up’ the HMMWV including bull rams on the front, hazard warning lights, and a Nuke in the back of one of the Humvees for our scenarios!
All of this meant that I had the inspiration for my project, motivation from Gareth to complete it, and a cool themed force to take into the brave new world we are entering, for when tournaments restart and games are replayed. Plus, for the first time ever, I had a finished WW3 Army to join the plethora of Flames of War Armies I got done in 2020 (but that is a WHOLE other article) The only thing next is to get some Apaches and paint them up as the Longbow variant from an Allied British Army Air Corps unit so that they can join the long march from Eastern Europe, through Germany toward France. And then turn on their heel and play some scenarios against Matt’s Soviets in a traditional game…
~ Chris Potter