Anti-Aircraft Defense Soviet Style from Flames of War
July 15, 2014 by stvitusdancern
So what do you get when you combine a 1920s Soviet truck with oh say 4 Maxim machine guns? A really bad day for anyone on the receiving end. Battlefront Miniatures has announced their new model, the Soviet Quad Maxim AA MG.
This quad mount was built upon the ZIS-5 and could easily get around on the battlefield. While this mobile wrecking crew offered little in the way of armour protection, it definitely could lay down a carpet of unrelenting machine gun fire.
Knowing that the Soviet Army believed in mass quantities you know you will be able to field several of these to not only wreck havoc on aircraft but on ground targets as well.
Will you be adding some good old fashioned machine gun fury to your army?
Improvised air-defense weapons as these were, they’re a great selection for early war “Barbarossa-era” games (which lines up with Battlefront’s “E” period class). When those Stukas start screaming down, you’re gonna be glad you have four old water-cooled Maxims to at least give you a chance! Not sure how these would work in FoW, but the drawback historically was the non-existent armor combined with short range. These are basically .30 caliber rifle bullets, so by the time anything’s in range, you’re also in the gun sights of enemies with much thicker hides than yours. 🙁 Still, a must have for… Read more »
This “converted truck” seems to be common in WWII Russian armies. This looks exactly like the katyusha rocket launcher.
Makes sense. It’s the same ZiS-5 as the early BM-13 Katyushas. I can’t be 100% if subsequent versions of Katyushas were also mounted on the same truck (the rockets grew much larger)
Some times that’s all you have against aircrafts. Four Maxims and truck were you can mount those to.
The helmets look suspiciously like french adrian ones and not the russian ones…
Looks like the Russian M-36 helmet.
Good catch. Wow, these really are early war vehicles. These helmets get phased out by the end of that first terrible summer (41).
http://www.nyc-techwriters.com/militaria/images/soviet_m15_big1.jpg