French Armour

My French army for Chain of Command is fairly well rounded out for supports, with mortars, AT rifles, a small (Hotchiss 25mm) AT gun, and a tripod mounted machine gun. But it needed some armour. After all, when you're facing the Blitzkrieg, it's handy to have some armour on your side.

I was very tempted by the Warlord/Italeri Char Bis plastic kit - mainly because it's exactly the kind of thing I love, bizarre, clunky, flawed, and just generally cool. And in plastic, which I prefer to resin. But hey, it's just too good. It could be overly dominant on the table in an environment where infantry anti-tank capability is overall pretty much non-existent, and opposing tanks are likely to be PzII, PzIII at best.

Plus, in Chain of Command terms, the Char Bis will only get deployed very occasionally, as it is a high cost support option. You will only rarely have a scenario where you have enough support points to deploy a Char.

So when Warlord had a recent two for one resin sale, I decided I needed to get some French armour, and selected the Somua S35 (which incidentally, may also be too good to appear very often), but also a Panhard 178 armoured car. I like armoured cars, in Chain of Command, they can activate and move when deployed, unlike tracked vehicles, plus the Panhard was a pretty effective vehicle for its day.

So here they are:

Decals are from the Warlord sheet, except for hand-painted roundels on the S35. Not perfect, but good enough for me. I chose one of the most outrageous French camouflage schemes I could find for the S35, and didn't attempt to go for a historically accurate marking scheme, just one that was 'plausible'.

     
The Panhard decals are very simple as is the colour scheme. Bit disappointed that Warlord chose to use a 'stereotypical' French crewman fro the S35, complete with Gauloise and wine bottle, but at least they supplied crew figures, some other companies could take note.

Paint job was masking with blu-tac on the S35, then an airbrush, and a relatively simple all airbrush on the Panhard. Weathering was a wash with GW Nuln Oil, a very light drybrush with a dusty cream, with light chipping using a sponged black (not visible on these shots).

The Panhard has already proved its worth, and I'm looking forward to getting the S35 on the table too.