Belgrade Or Bust!

Following my very brief post showing the two tanks I’d managed to get painted for the Neglected But Not Forgotten challenge, I thought I’d try and get some more pictures taken and some words to go with them!

The two tanks painted for this challenge are shown above, a Czech S-I-d tankette on the left and a French R35 light tank on the right. The S-I-d is 1:72 scale and the R35 is 20mm (1:76), so they’re similar scales and both reasonably small vehicles.

Actually, I painted two S-I-ds (both shown above) but only the one on the left qualified for the challenge (I bought it in March 2019, while the other one was bought in February this year). Both are Shapeways 3-D prints, but in the time since I bought the first one, the model has been upgraded and the material changed, and this brought with it some decisions on how to paint them. The older model (on the left) is in the grainy strong, white and flexible material (which I like) and the newer model is in the fine detail material that I’ve had issues with in the past! To be fair, though, the detail on the new one is nice and this presented me with a problem – it has very small rivet detail which the older model lacks.

I’d normally shade around rivets, but in this case decided not to and just let the drybrushing pick them out. This proved the correct decision I think, since the two models look fine together (although the newer one is fractionally larger). I had to add vision ports and a machine gun to the original model and would have modified the new model to match, but I thought that might damage the rivets so I didn’t bother. They’re painted in similar colours to my 1940 French tanks, but with a green ochre shade representing the cream colour used on Czech pre-war vehicles.

Eight S-I-ds were delivered to the Yugoslav army and they saw service during the German invasion of that country in 1941 (actually, the 80th anniversary of the start of the invasion is tomorrow, so this is quite a well-timed post). Some photographs show them without machine guns fitted, but I’m unsure whether they were delivered in this condition and had guns added, or vice versa.

The other model that qualified for the challenge was the R35 (shown on the right in the first picture). I can’t remember how long this model had been sitting built and primed, but it’s a few years at least. It’s a metal model (from SHQ I think) and one of the nicest models of this tank that I’ve seen. I opted for a plain olive green finish without any markings, since that lets me use it as a later French vehicle or a Yugoslav one (again, these saw action against the Germans in 1941). I wasn’t sure about the monotone finish at first, but I quite like it now it’s done. I’ve also got a Paint & Glue Miniatures R35 still to paint to go with it.

Last vehicle shown here is a Russian BA-27 armoured car (shown above). This is also a Shapeways 3-D print. The model comes as one piece, with the turret attached to the underneath of the hull. After I clipped the turret away from the connecting piece, and put it in place on top of the hull, I thought it looked too small so I trimmed off the gun mount and added plasticard sheet to the turret base and sides to bulk it all out. A bit of filling with greenstuff and some filing to shape got it looking about right, so I glued the gun mount back on and added a machine gun from scratch. The turret shape is not quite regular, but it’s not obvious unless you look close and overall it’s a nice model. The BA-27 was still in Russian service in small numbers at the start of WW2 and makes a nice change to the heavier BA-6 vehicles.

Since a lot of the scatter terrain I use in pictures is in use in a game that’s set up at the moment, I’ve just dropped these models onto some small spaces in that game and taken pictures as best I could. I haven’t actually got any 1941 Yugoslav infantry figures to go with the S-I-ds and R35 to show their sizes, but the S-I-ds are very small models as far as tanks go!