Posts made by sgtwiltan

This is great. Italy get a period specific sculpt instead of the M15-42 which was mostly used by the Germans. More modding to do. Yay!! (i’m not being facetious either) This was exactly what I was hoping for. Gotta say though that not using G40 pieces seems kinda stupid but I am extremely happy at the old Italian tank. I also noticed the italian cruiser looks different from any other sculpts. I am not as well versed with ships yet but is it truly an Italian cruiser?

One other detail I wanted to clarify. The German artillery is not an 88. It is the 105 AA gun which is a mid to late war model. The 88 used as AA in G40 is the ground version and unusable for AA duties due to the changes in sights and the fitting of the heavy armored shield. Just some details overlooked in development. It would have been perfect without the shield as AA. I’m either modifying mine to get rid of the shield or modifying the russian AA into a german 88.

HBG vehicles are scaled more to the 1/300 scale while CinC and GHQ are 1/285.
I was going to use the GHQ route but the noodle gun barrels, weight, and paint chipping made me scratch build my own in plastic. Loved it when HBG came along but their older pieces were a little hit or miss in detail and scale. Their newer stuff is fantastic. I have tons of HBG pieces and modify the crap out of them as well as the out of box pieces. Look at my thread in the customization forum and you can see side by side comparisons of HBG, GHQ and OOB pieces and you can see the size relationships.

I also weighed OOB pieces against GHQ metal and found that the GHQ tiger weighs as much as 8 OOB tigers or 6 HBG Tigers. Think about that when you have lots of those metal pieces in you game box. That is why I switched to plastics.

Yes. There are so many. Trying to get one thing done at a time. I sent back some pieces and have started on a big batch of artillery which he loves. I’m amazed at his patience. Still have a lot of pieces he sent me and was able to find and keep them in a box so I know which pieces are his that I need to work on. They had been lost in multiple boxes from when I moved 4 years ago. I’ve also redone literally hundreds of PZIIIs including some all of the painted ones. One of these days…… I’ll get them done.

You can make cheap functional ones with the quart size milk cartons and just paint them to dress them up.

I think I got the pictures working again. Just need some verification.
Yeah some of those picture threads were very good for ideas and simple paint mods that made the pieces much more realistic and fun to play with. Shame we cant see them anymore.

Stupid PhotoBucket. Can you guys see the images?

My grandfather fought against the Japanese in the Philippines as both a 1st Lt and later as a guerrilla after the Philippines fell. I lost more members of my mothers family due to my grandfathers involvement in the guerrilas and no doubt to the fact that he was an officer in the territorial army.

Happy 240th Birthday Marines and happy 100th to Parris  Island, the land where I come from!!!

Hoorah and Semper Fi

I’ve recently have more time and have been hard at work on some more mods. Stay tuned.

My deepest condolences to you Paul.

Thanks Coach for the opportunity to acquire those pieces of History. The original signed Rulebook was really the one I wanted and I have no problem donating to the cause of the Charity you chose. How about doing a Toys for Tots one?
That was one I was personally involved in for many years as well as the POW/MIA group.

“Retreat hell!!! We are just attacking in a different direction.”

I think this was a quote from Chesty Puller out of the Chosin Reservior during the Korean war.

I made the mistake of thinking Leningrad was a northern port. It was a Baltic port.

SHUT UP!!! I know my geometry!!! :evil:

Good catch.

Hard to say. Leningrad was the old Russian capital of Petersburg and a major port to be used in the lend-lease shipments.
Stalingrad was a major rail and industrial city that was the only tank producer as the industries moved to the urals and was close to the oil fields of the caucasus. Moscow was simply a prestige city. Napoleon took it but it did not stop the russians. You’d have to capture the whole head of the government to end the war politically but as the Priepet marshes showed, you don’t need a government to continue fighting a war. Same went for the japanese in the phillipines when they took it. It was still a very active war zone up until the US took it back.

You’re absolutely right. Marines were and are used to establish the beachheads so that the superior numbers and equipment the Army could bring to bear wore down the Japanese.
We are the Marine Corps, by definition 2 or more Divisions. I agree that Marines have been made into some Super Human war machines in the popular imagination. Being one, I know the reality. It’s not easy becoming one but popular perception is above and beyond reality. Just look at the games and TV representations. Our promotion dept does a good job promoting our worth because many times in our history, we have come under the gun for disbandment and it was popular support that kept us in existence. Our rep is part real and part self promotion but all necessary for self preservation. My grandfather fought as part of the US Army when the Phillipines were a US territory in WW2. It was the Army that bore the brunt of the Japanese invasion forces. The rivalry between the Marines and Army are simply because of all the services, we are most alike. Friendly but a rivalry none the less.

Semper Fi

You’re correct about the current world we live in. I went to war to help our economic trading partners whose economies affected our own. Kuwait’s occupation did not directly affect us and despite the peaceful embargo threats, Saddam continued to assert his claim of rightful conquest. It was also our military stance after the ceasefire that prevented Saddam’s expansion and the embargoes embittered the Iraqis against us when we finally decided to dethrone him. History does not only consist of WW2 as an example. the same thing has been happening for millenia. Tibet and Kosovo are polar opposites of bellicose decisions. Rome fell from internal dissension and civil war when those energies could have been better spent keeping the borders secure in offensive actions. The problems we face now have always plagued empires. We just happen to be lucky enough to be somewhat isolated an our economic empire is falling apart due to our society’s inability to adapt to the fact that the world is changing.
We have to protect that empire and a soft and weak military will cause that economic empire to be taken advantage of. You can use post war Germany and Japan as examples of weak military and economic growth but remember that their economies were heavily subsidized by our military might protecting their trade from others who would take it from them. I’ll just mention the Ukraine for a contemporary example and you can research the history, both economically and politically and come to your own conclusion.

@CWO:

@DarthShizNit:

It’s illegal to hunt wales in the state of Utah.

Considering that Utah is a landlocked state, I’m baffled by that one. Is this along the lines of Arthur C. Clarke’s joke about the incompetent army general who should have been put in charge of the coastal defense of Wyoming?

Sort of like giving up circumcision for lent.

@Jermofoot:

I think this is a good thing.

We spend way too much on the military, and I find it unnecessary.  We need to lean on diplomacy and international, unified approaches to issues/crises more and breaking out the guns less.  Economic measures can be effective weapons as well.

I’m a bit sad some people want to take the A-10 away, though.

That’s what happened in WW2.
If the allies had used force to keep Germany from growing there might have never been a WW2.
“Peace in our time” didn’t work then and the US wasn’t even a player in those discussions since we felt that the Europe’s problems were not ours. And that doesn’t even take into account what was happening in China. We punished the Japanese by withholding metal scrap shipments.

My grandfather who was an LT in the US territorial Philippine army became a guerrilla after McArthur abandoned his troops. The Japanese troops captured one of his fellow guerillas and skinned
him to draw them into a trap. They couldn’t rescue him but they saw the results. The Japanese would also burn houses and wait for the occupants to jump out while they were waiting with bayonets to impale them. Apparently, Some of my relatives died this way in an attempt to flush out the guerrillas. Unfortunately they knew of my grandfather from his service record from the surrender.

@Gargantua:

“You may be a WWII Junkie if … You can identify random silhouette’s of WWII vehicles, and know exactly what they are, when they were produced,  what country(ies) they were manufactured by, what theater’s they fought in, and how many may still be running today.”

That be me

And you can ID tanks used in WW2 movies like PATTON, Battle of the Bulge and Kelly’s Heroes from what they really are and scream Bull-Shitake at the screen.

@Redleg13A:

@CWO:

@Redleg13A:

I have a lot of devil dog buddies and whenever they start talking “hoorah” and patting each other on the back with how great they are I like to point out that the Marine Corps may win battles…but the Army wins wars!

Here’s an anecdote along the same lines that I mentioned in an earlier discussion:

Back during the First Gulf War, I saw a news item on television in which a reporter spoke (on separate occasions) to a guy from the US Marines and a guy from the US Army.  When he asked the leatherneck why he was in the USMC rather than the Army, the guy answered (as I recall) “Well, I think the Army is kind of ordinary, and I think of myself as somebody who’s more than just ordinary.”  When he later asked the GI why he was in the Army rather than the Marines, the soldier answered, “I know some guys who are in the Marines and they’re all crazy.”

LOL, and that’s basically the crux of it. Marines revolve their lives around their Marine identities it seems. For instance, you’ll see MANY more Marines/former Marines wearing their respective Marine shirts, hats, jackets, license plates, etc than you will for soldiers. I think it is great that devil dogs are proud of their service and want everyone to know it. At the same time, I believe soldiers are just as proud, they just don’t feel the compulsion to let everyone around them know how proud they are. I think soldiers simply prefer the quiet professionals approach.

When I got out of the Marines my office was in an old WW2 barracks. The building across the street was being demolished so was used by Force recon for a live fire urban assault excercise.
We are rah rah about being Marines because we have the scraps of the navy budget and at the time of my exit, deployable Marines were expected to deploy 7 months out of each year and that was a peacetime commitment. We’re good cause we have to be to crack the defenses. There are not many of us so once we’ve made the hole, the army with more and heavier equipment takes over for the long haul. Combined with the Navy’s air assets and our rides, our mission is offensive power projection. We were tasked with attacking the the Iraqis head on to fix their units in Kuwait during the 1990 gulf war. We attacked exactly where they were expecting us to attack so the rest of the coalition could take them from behind. Out of ~500k US troops in theatre, there were 80k of us. That head on attack was however helped by the Army’s Tiger brigade since our armour assets were not enough and the original British armored division allocated to us were reassigned for the encirclement. Hell even our armored battalions had to borrow Abrams from Army units since we took M60A3 tanks with us to war. ( Not to mention the vehicles we unofficially borrowed from the army)

I’m proud of what we did since we did it with with what we had. That was just an example of why we are so proud. We do a lot with less. Pride is the only that drives us since we get the scraps of the military budget. If you want to mention Peleliu then let me bring your attention to Kasserine. By the way the officers and Staff NCOs from my unit went to war with .45s since we hadn’t been issued the Berrettas yet.

Also on topic, There were Marine contingents in Normandy in the Battlewagons. The were scraped together as a secondary assault force for the point du Hoc attack since the rangers were getting splattered. However the assault succeeded so the Marines were never used in Normandie and why we don’t have that Battle honor.

If you want to know if I am talking out of my ass or from experience, check out my thread here and make your own opinions.
http://www.axisandallies.org/forums/index.php?topic=28013.0
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Semper Fi and Hoorah