From MartinN - 28mm German Support Weapons & HQ (38 Points)

I'm still adding to my Blitzkrieg Germans and this week saw me finishing two more Support Weapons teams and some HQ selections. All figures are Warlord Games again. Beeing metal figures they originally feature heads from Warlords 'Seperate Head System' but as I didn't like them, due to their over exaggerated facial expressions, I used left overs from my plastic Blitzkrieg Germans.

First of all is the "5cm leichter Granatwerfer 36". This light mortar was introduced into the Wehrmacht in 1936 as platoon support weapon. Production was stopped in 1941and officially removed from the frontline as it's general performance was deemed to be insufficient. Still it was pretty popular with the common soldiers and therefore  remained in active service till the very end.

Second is the MG 34 Heavy Machine Gun. The MG 34 was also introduced in 1936 and was superseded by the MG 42 which was both cheaper and easier to manufacture. Both weapons were so called multifunctional machine guns.

For the light machine gun role they were mounted onto a bipod and used as squad support weapons. In this role it had a maximum range of 2000m.
For the heavy machine gun role however it was mounted onto a tripod and had a range of up to 3000m respectively 3500m for indirect fire.

While the MG 42 had a theoretical rate of fire of 1500 rounds per minute the MG 34 was 'only' capable of 800 - 900 rounds per minute.

Next is the Zugführer (Platoon Leader) and his personal aide. The latter will be promoted to Truppführer (Squad Leader) once I paint up another squad.

And last but not least are the Arilleriebeobachter (Artillery Forward Observer) and the Sanitäter (Medic). For each of them I plan to paint up an assistant in the future.

If I'm not totally wrong this entry should give me 37.5 points to add to my tally.


From Curt:

Stunning work again Nick (and interesting info on these German light squad weapons). Great job!