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.