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. 

More engineering goodness

My 1981 East German pioneer company is now complete. My previous post, "Bridging the gap" (March 8, 2015) was the beginning of this unit, showing a TMM-3 bridging platoon:

The other platoons of the company consisted of BAT-M bulldozers:

MTU-20 AVLBs:

A twin-treadway, cantilever-launched, box girder bridge 65.5 feet in length (20 meters) and capable of supporting 50 tons, all mounted on a modified T-55 chassis. 

MDK-2M trench diggers:

Actually, East German engineers in 1981 were more likely to be using the MDK-2Ms predecessor, the BTM:

But I'll have to use what Marcin has provided. I'll just consider my engineers to be extremely well equipped. 

Also IMR obstacle clearing vehicles:

Forgive the last two photos

Photos of the real IMR in action seem to be nonexistent.

IRM "Zhuk" (meaning "beetle" in Russian) engineer reconnaissance vehicles:

Which were specifically designed to reconnoiter riverbeds for suitable sites for bridging:

but also for detecting mines, either on land or on the riverbed, the underwater mining of potential river crossing points being common on modern battlefields:

The engineers themselves were generally mounted in obsolete APCs cast off by the infantry. As my company is to be attached to a motor rifle regiment, the APCs would be wheeled, so I'm using BTR-60Ps:

although BTR-152s or even BTR-40s would be possible for engineers in a reserve or training unit. For a company attached to an armored unit, BTR-50PKs would be the most likely. 

Each divisional pioneer company had its own reconnaissance platoon of BRDM-2s (or possibly BRDM-1s) for scouting and screening:

which for my purpose, is more usefully cascaded down to the regimental level, which is how I represent it.

And finally, the commander of a pioneer company required only a single radio for contact with higher command and so was usually mounted in a 4WD. I chose a UAZ-469:

But other similar vehicles were just as likely. 

And now here is my company:

Engineers, even more so than other types of support units, were prone to have a whole gaggle of various sizes of trucks accompanying them, so to represent that, I added a URAL-375D and a KrAZ-255B to the transport vehicle stands. 

Not a bad weekend's work. Now on to the next project!