An SA-4 Ganef battery

This weekend's post is more antiaircraft for my East Germans; an SA-4 Ganef battery:

Marcin at O8 has very recently put out a pack intended to represent an SA-4 battalion, but I have no need of three batteries, so I'm doing just one. 

The Ganef medium to long range missile:

(Ganef being Yiddish for "rascal" or "thief" and predictably also for "lawyer") is called Krug ("circle") in Russian and it entered service in 1965. It was designed to fit inside an AN-22 Cock aircraft:

Yes, I agree. One of the most unfortunate of NATO reporting names.

The two versions operational in 1981 (the year my scenario is set in) were the Krug A (1971) and the Krug B (1973). The A had a maximum engagement altitude of 88,500ft/27,000m and a range of just under 45mi or 72 km. The B model sacrificed altitude and range for increased performance against lower altitude targets. The two types were visually indistinguishable from each other. 

A brigade (three battalions) of Ganefs would have been an Army-level asset and would have operated 6-15mi/10-25km behind the front lines. Each battalion consisted of three batteries and a technical (radar) company. 

So what should a battery consist of? Three TELs, two of which were armed with Krug B and one with Krug A:

four reload trucks:

and one Pat Hand radar vehicle:

Each battalion was also equipped with eight ZSU-23-4 self-propelled antiaircraft vehicles:

for close-in air defense, two of which accompanied each battery and two for the technical section. And finally, a BTR-60PU-12 antiaircraft battery command vehicle:

The separate radar unit, which served all three of the battalion's batteries, would have been a Long Track:

and a Thin Skin, with its accompanying generator truck:

I chose a simple UAZ-469 command vehicle for this one:

There would also be two ZSU-23-4s.

Unfortunately, some sources list only one reload truck per battery (only one reload missile for a unit that uses six!?!) and that's what Marcin has provided, but in reality, it was four trucks per battery. As the pack has only the three, I didn't feel it was worth $12.50 for a second pack just to get the one missing truck, so I'll just have to have three for my battery. And here it is:

Obviously, in reality, the TELs would never be packed in so closely, but wargaming requires some tweaks.

and the commander:

I added an MT-LB to accompany the Pat Hand, as the stand needed something else and I doubt the radar vehicle traveled alone. 

Here's my radar section:

a Long Track:

with an MT-LB for the same reason, and a Thin Skin:

with the generator truck and the section commander's UAZ-469. 

You generally see the missiles painted a light grey or left in bare metal, but as usual for me, I don't see this happening in real wartime conditions. You can see in the top photo of a TEL that they did sometimes paint the missiles green, which seems more sensible to me, so I have done the same.

That's it for this post. More next weekend!

It's not exactly M*A*S*H*, but it'll do

I bought some army-style tents off of Shapeways not too long ago (see my post "A Shapeways shipment arrived" 3/2/15), so I've been wanting to make use of some of them. What better way than to do a little vignette of an East German forward field hospital?

The tents are a basic military type:

The minis come as large rectangular tents and small square ones. In general, field hospitals are nothing more than quite a few tents, all connected together:

So I used an 80mm x 40mm steel base and constructed my own. It doesn't really have a legitimate use in a wargame, but it's a nice little bit of table dressing:

GHQ decals throughout. 

For vehicles, I put on a Trabant Kübel (with the top down) and a URAL-375D:

Just as miscellaneous staff vehicles. For the field ambulances that would have been constantly coming and going, I used an MT-LB and a couple of UAZ-452s, both having been used in reality:

As this will always be seen from above, I resisted the urge to put decals on the sides of the vehicles. Decals on 1/600 scale vehicles at all seemed lunatic enough to me, without pushing it any farther.

 

The UAZ-452, basically nothing more than a VW bus, was used in a variety of roles, such as post bus and for hauling light cargo:

But its main use was as a light field ambulance. 

Most forward hospitals had at least one helipad for medivac choppers, so I couldn't resist including one, especially when I saw this great camouflage scheme on a Polish Army Mi-2 Hoplite air ambulance:

Thanks to Wings Palette for that. Bright green and dark purple! I've got to have one of those!

As I said, I'll probably never have an actually need for this, but it was fun to create it. In future, I'll use the rest of the tents to do a West German hospital. This has helped me get the long Easter weekend's painting started (I don't have to work on Good Friday! Yay!!), so more as the weekend passes. 

Danish MANPADS and East German MT-LB's

I've been trying to finish off some odds and ends, so a bit of a mixed bag for this post. 

First off, Danish mechanized infantry units had no integral air defense, i.e. no MANPADS were issued to units below the brigade, or the independent regimental battlegroup, level. Each brigade held six 2-man Hamlet teams. Each team was mounted in a Land Rover, likely to be either an 88:

or a 109:

The teams were generally cascaded down, two to each infantry battalion in the brigade (two mechanized and one motorized). Two launchers are precious little air defense capability for an entire battalion!

The Danish Hamlet shoulder-fired missle was nothing but an American Redeye:

which was never known for its devastating effectiveness. Here's what my Hamlet teams look like:

I'll do three stands of two each to represent the six Hamlets. I've actually used O8's US two-man Stinger teams, but at 1/600 scale, it's impossible to tell one MANPADS from another. 

My second project is to provide some alternative prime movers for my East German 100mm antitank guns and 122mm D-30 howitzers. They were generally towed by a URAL-375D:

if they were attached to a motor rifle unit. However, if they were part of an armored unit, they generally would have had a tracked prime mover, which was most often an MT-LB:

Although Bulgaria used it as an APC, the East Germans seem to have used MT-LB's exclusively as prime movers:

All these are towing MT-12 100mm antitank guns. Given that the rear compartment wasn't exactly roomy at the best of times, I can't imagine that it could carry much ammunition with the gun crew already jammed in there. 

Here are my MT-LB's:

I'll do four stands, which is enough for two platoons of guns. 

O8's MT-LB isn't their best sculpt. As you can see from the above photos of the real thing, the MT-LB is quite squat and low to the ground. However, O8's version is noticeably too tall. Well, it'll have to do, but little details like that bother me. Damn that perfectionist gene!!

That's it for this post!!