"Aussies at Bardia"

One of our latest projects is gearing up to run some scenarios from Mark Fastoso's new scenario book called "Aussies at Bardia." It covers the three days in January 1941 in which the the 6th Australian Division captured the fortified town of Bardia, Libya from its Italian defenders. As usual with these things it will take a while but we are making pretty good progress. Like almost everything elso we do, being huge gluttons for punishment, we will be doing this in glorious 28mm which of course always requires the expenditure of a significant amount of money for vehicles in the 1:48 to 1:56 scale range; and it can be very difficult to find them. Fortunately we have hit a recent bonanza in the form of a company called "Company B." They have been cranking out a large selection of Italian tanks, trucks, and armored cars that have hitherto been non-existent. I have been buying mine from Brigade Games at the HMGS East conventions in Pennsylvania. One nice thing about the Bardia book is it is mostly infantry on infantry so you do not need a huge amount of tanks. A couple of British Matilda IIs are indispensible to this book. "Army Group North" has some very nice Matildas in resin plastic. I got mine from Brigade games also. There is only one scenario where the Italians are counterattacking with seven M-13 tanks, uh, we are probably going to want to do that one in 15mm. I have acquired some very nice Italian Bersaglieri infantry figures from Askari Miniatures. We will be using these to represent the Italians troops even though none of the scenarios call for Bersaglieri. The Askari Bersaglieris were not really designed for WWII gaming, they are more appropriate for the 1925 to 1935 colonial campaigns in Africa, nevertheless, they will work just fine for WWII. The only concession I had to make was to acquire some Italian machine gunners from Artizan Miniatures to go with them. At this point my Italian infantry are almost ready to go. Speaking of Artizan, I got the British/Aussie infantry from them and they are painted and ready to go. So, with just a bit more work on the tanks, and then some anti-tank guns (not easy to find either), and then some scenery; it will all be ready to go!