Project WW2 Pacific

While talking about miniatures and gaming with a fellow wargamer, he mentioned something like "WW2 pacific theatre Australians would be nice"......

These words combined with the news (at that time) that Toofatlardies were going to produce the Far East handbook for Chain of Command, led to (yet) a(nother) project forming in my brain. I got some Warlord plastic Japanese, but was not sure how to represent the Australians. Reading about the New Guinea campaign I decided to go for a late war force. At first I thought of modifying the Perry 8th army plastics like John Bond showed on his excellent blog. After buying the Perry box I changed my mind. Mr Bond's green stuff skills are superior to mine, as are his scratchbuiling skills (the man scratch builds his own 28mm Owen guns!).

When I saw pictures of the Warlord Commonwealth infantry sprues I decided to combine the Aussie heads, short sleeved arms and some of the bodies of this set with Warlord US marines bodies and short sleeved arms. I also received 2 complimentary Warlord British & Canadian infantry sprues in an order I placed which provided even more bits. Pictures of Australians in the New Guinea campaign show soldiers in shorts, trousers with anklets, trousers with US gaiters, long sleeves, short sleeves, hats, helmets and berets. I understood that the change in uniform was gradual and that supply problems and extreme wear and tear in the jungle environment were common. So, a "mixed uniform" Australian platoon wouldn't be historically inaccurate and could be used from the Kokoda campaign till the end of the war.

The boxes quitely waited in the pile of shame for the Far East handbook to arrive.

When the Chain of Command Far East handbook was finally released, it unfortunately didn't contain the Pacific war forces. However, the Toofatlardies forum had a thread with an Australian 1943 onwards basic platoon TOE. "Had", indeed, because the entire forum vanished during the recent IT problems of a wargame websites provider!

Fortunately I had copied the TOE into a backup file. While hoping the Pacific war handbook will be released soon, this is enough to start with the basic force and some very likely support options (3 man engineer team, sniper, vickers, medic). Deciding to not wait any longer and start this project, I built the first Australian section.

Rifle section LMG team:

Rifle section rifle team: