It has been approximately three years since I started my winter Grenadier (or rather Füsilier…)  army set in the Ardennes -44-45. I painted it in a smaller composition for FoW European GT 2013 and planned to expand it to a full Volksgrenadier army later. As I managed to win the coveted Best Painted Army prize that year, it suddenly became very hard to add anything to the army. The pressure was high to get the additional troops painted to the same standard. In the end, the army ended up sitting on a cabinet for two and a half years, but now the time has come to get the boys out in the field again!

There was an FoW-tournament in Helsinki, Finland at the end of January 2016. The tournament was a winter themed one, so I decided to field my Ardennes force, as they would suit the theme extremely well. However, my army was originally built as a 1780 point force, and the Finnish tournament was fought with 1750 pts, so some adjustments had to be made. I tweaked the list a little bit here and there and ended up with ditching the Hummels from the original list and replacing them with some extra teams of Füsiliers and a platoon of leFh18-howitzers. The guns would fill the same role as the Hummels, but not so effectively.

Here’s the platoon I came up with.

I tried to emulate the snow-making process I used back in 2013 (and with the Kampfgruppe Peiper army in 2012, too) as accurately as possible. I will be detailing the process further in an upcoming post, as the Ardennes army will definately be fattened up even further and therefore it’ll be snowing a lot around here.

I am quite pleased with the result, especially because it has been a few years since I last worked on this army. Also, this time I used completely scratch built bases instead of Kerr&King’s, so it is nice to see how well this platoon sits with the earlier elements of the army.

By the way, I think the platoon actually almost looked better without the snow… What do you think?

Paint on!

 

Anton von W