Polish airborne troops

A few posts ago, a reader commented that the Polish 7th Lusatian Landing Division was, in reality, committed to the Polish/Soviet air and amphibious invasion of the Danish islands (the LANDZEELAND area of operations) and as such, would've been too closely engaged and/or used up to devote any forces to LANDJUT. This is entirely true. However, as I responded, I quite like the 7th Lusatian and so I'll "edit" historical reality a bit and keep the option of using them in my game. After all, since the real one never happened (yet), this is MY WWIII. 

However, the reader made an excellent observation. The Polish 6th Pomeranian Air Landing Division, which was also to be committed to LANDZEELAND, would've been much more likely to spare troops to support operations in LANDJUT. Again, entirely true. So I've decided to include a few stands from the 6th Pomeranian in my force, if for no other reason than they had very attractive dark red berets (I could only find a color photo of their beret from the back):

Of course in combat they would've worn helmets, but as with my Soviet VDV, the red berets help me easily locate these stands on the table. 

And here are some of my Polish airborne:

An airborne antiaircraft company consisted of six ZU-23-2 guns towed by GAZ-66 prime movers and a UAZ-469 command vehicle.

Here's a couple of real airborne guns:

The above happen to be crewed by Soviet/Russian VDV (and for some odd reason, by only one crewman each), but you get the idea. You can see the GAZ-66's in the background. 

There were actually two basic types of GAZ-66, the standard version:

(That's a towed 120mm mortar inside its protective canvas cover in the foreground), and the air-dropable version:

As you can see, the cab was fully collapsable as a space-saving measure. Once the cab was reassembled, it was pretty well indistinguishable from a standard GAZ-66, at least at 1/600 scale.

As an aside, while researching the color of Cold War-era Polish military vehicle license plates (white, by the way), I came across a number of photos showing GAZ-66's with gray canvas covers. Most militaries use covers of one variety of green or another (which may or may not have a camouflage pattern on it) or a multitude of differing shades of "canvas", but I find the gray quite nice looking, so I'll be throwing one in now and again. 

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