Early War Poles

With incoming release of Too Fat Lardies new Chain of Command ruleset this summer, my willpower to resist early Second World War was defeated in a titanic struggle.  With that, I started looking which period / campaign would be interesting to game and paint.  One of the few campaigns in the Second World War that has not been done to death is the 1939 Invasion of Poland (the other that I really spent a long time contemplating on was the Pacific).  One of the great questions became, which manufacturer actually does Early War Poles in 28mm and good sculpts to boot?

I fired off a message to Dave asking his opinion on the matter and it just so happened that he had an entire infantry platoon from Warlord Games laying around in a box.  With an unspoken condition that I paint them up to play with him, Dave gifted them to me.

Over the last two weeks I started working on the first section (of three) of this platoon.  Information regarding the TO&Es of Polish infantry platoons are somewhat murky at best.  I like building a full strength platoon and then reducing that strength depending on the scenario used, so I amalgamated the different TO&Es found on the Internet and Osprey's.

A Polish platoon is made up of three infantry sections, a mortar section and a headquarter section.  With the figures provided in the warlord games packs, it is possible to assemble all three infantry and the headquarter sections.  The mortar is another story as no manufacturer that I know makes the 47mm mortar used.

Anyway, I finished the first infantry section.  Polish sections are enormous, having between 18 and 19 men each, broken down into three squads, two rifle and one LMG.  The rifle squads are both seven men, including a lance-corporal in charge and a four-man LMG team.  The entire squad is commanded by a corporal.  The first sources I used to understand the make-up of a Polish platoon quoted that the infantry section was 18 men, so I painted up 18 of them.  I do have the extra models to add a model to each section and bring them up to 19 each.

With this project, I purposefully started using 25mm hex bases for the command figures of each section.  I decided against putting the squad leaders on hex bases, but I used identical models all of them.  The hex bases make it easier to spot command figures on the table.