Crazyredcoat's Crazy Compendium of Collected Creativity
Jerry appears to have fallen out of his plane!
Next up is a Luftwaffe Officer! I have rather a lot of German Officer models lying around here and there so I thought I may as well experiment with different branches and colours (you may see a Sturmgeschutz Officer appear at some point…). Of course when dealing with historicals it never hurts to do a bit of research (see ‘The Blanco Problem’ below…) and so a bit of research was done!
Very historical research, as you can see! Jokes aside, Hogan's Heroes actually seems to have gotten the uniforms of Klink and Schultz pretty well, even if there are some minor issues such as Norwegian/Danish rifles... (We could argue that they are Stomperud Krags, I guess.)
The general colours of Officers and ORs in the Luftwaffe are the same, and this (almost certainly Osprey) art nicely agrees with the colour of Klink's uniform which is always useful. Made my initial choice of The Fang from GW my final choice after double checking.
I decided that I wanted a Junior Officer, so the badges that Klink, the Iron Colonel, wore were not going to cut it. It actually took me a while to find a reference image I was confident in here, but this one served well enough and explains the white epaulettes that I went with in the end.Some final notes before we get to the mini himself, starting with the helmet. Normally, the Luftwaffe would wear helmets in the same blue-grey as their uniforms, or they would camouflage the helmets like the Heer. For some reason, I decided that I wanted an un-camoed (I swear it’s a technical term) helmet then discovered that I didn’t have the right badge for the side…so I decided that this chap accidentally forgot his helmet when he showed up to the front, so the local quartermaster just gave him an old helmet from the stores. It probably happened once, right?
Secondly is the brown leather. As the artwork of the OR above shows the belting in the black leather it might seem odd, but he is a member of the Luftwaffe Feld Divisions which we, later in the war, equipped by the Heer and so had a lot of the same kit. However, a lot of images of Luftwaffe Officers show brown leather, that I wanted to replicate for a bit of contrast and to add just that bit more to the idea that this poor chap arrived at the front thinking he would be in a plane only to be told that there’s not enough of them and he has to use this MP40.
Anyways…ON TO THE MINI!
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