Banzai! The Road to Art of War III - Part One

Hello All,

As you may know from listening to the podcast myself and Adam were picked to play for team Scotland at the ETC. We set about planning armies for the event and looked at which tournaments we could go to to get some much needed practice in. Well unfortunately I'm now not going to the ETC for personal reasons, but I still have a Japanese army that needs painting! So the new focus (if you hadn't worked it out from the title) is the Art of War III in April.

While I have always thought the Japanese army looked a lot of fun to play, Bournemouth has been overrun with a number of Japanese armies my regular opponents are using. So I wanted to do something different, something that would make my army stand out from the rest - while researching the Japanese I came across Mike Haught's post on the Special Naval Landing Force on his blog. From this I picked up the Osprey Men-at-Arms book on them and I had found my army!

Although there is no list for them at the moment (once the Pacific gets it's own books we'll see them
for sure), the core list from Rising Suns works very well with almost no adaptation. But you may ask what appealed to me the most about the army? Well I think it mainly boiled down to colour scheme, I love the green uniforms over the beige of the Japanese land forces, this coupled with doing something very different from your normal Japanese FoW army sealed the deal for me. I'm also planning for this to be a 1941/42 army (1941 is still Early War even if it would be December 1941!). I have chosen this for a few reasons; the main reason is the Japanese expansion after Pearl Harbour for me is the most interesting part of the Pacific war, but the other reason is I wanted to have a Zero in the army as I have always wanted to paint one.

So the army list; well this is where having so many local gamers playing the army become a big help, I got to learn from their mistakes. The tank support seems to be the key to the list, they go after the HMG's, artillery, mortars, etc while the infantry hunts down the tanks and AT guns that will cause your tanks trouble, Of course this is just a theory and I'm sure after a few games I'll see I was completely wrong.... anyway, here is my list as it stands right now.

Fearless    Veteran	Hohei Chutai (7th) Infantry Company	Japanese Early-War
Infantry Company

Platoon	Qty	Unit	Points
Headquarters
Hohei Chutai HQ (7th)  p.21	1 1	Cmd Sword team 2iC Cmd Regimental Standard Sword team	125
Combat Platoons
Hohei Platoon (7th)  p.21	1 9 3	Cmd Sword team Rifle team Light Mortar team Banners	360
Hohei Platoon (7th)  p.21	1 9 3	Cmd Sword team Rifle team Light Mortar team Banners	360
Regimental Support
Hohei Rapid-fire Gun Platoon (7th)  p.22	1 1 1	Cmd Sword team Type 94 37mm gun Captured 45mm obr 1937 gun	110
Divisional Support
Medium Sensha Company  p.19	8 2	Type 89 Chi-Ro Type 94 TK	545
Air Support  p.31	7	Priority Air Support Zero	50
Company Points:			1550

www.EasyArmy.com

Source document: Rising Sun book

Painting wise I'm hoping that the PSC Soviet Infantry spray is a pretty close match to the uniform colour, I plan to spray them that colour, give them a light dry brush of Green Grey, pick out the details and then use Army Painters Dark Shade. It's what I have done for my US and British and I love the results vs how long the army takes to paint.

The tanks also have a far simpler colour scheme than the Army versions, From what I can tell they look like a pale green, no camo, no yellow stripe, just plain old green. I'm going to try and work out what colour it is but I'm also trying to think of a way of making them a bit more interesting (maybe foliage?).

Now I just need to find some time to paint them before April while trying to paint British Infantry for the Tale of Four Gamers Challenge and my US....

Thanks for reading and until next time

Ben