Generic 'Pulp' Artillery

Gaming plans went 'aglae' over the weekend. Never mind, Picked up four Peter Pig 15mm WW1 Belgian guns on eBay that were going for a song. These are going to join my early C20th collection of artillery generica.

A couple of years back I gave up trying to get the interwar period artillery exactly right for a given conflict. Especially when it came down to Skodas, Krupps and the like.

You quickly find that the M05 of this is the export version of that and the thingy howitzer of this country ended up copied and built under licence by this, that, and the other country. And then there were guns that ended up as trophies or as war reparation and rebadged - arrrghh!

So, I opted for a more 'pulp' orientated collection of nondescript pieces that looked the part. Iron rim spoked wheels were a must. Anything that looked 'modern' was out. And definitely no instantly recognisable types such as the  British 13pdrs, German 77mm or French 75's.


Snowed in over the weekend I decided to try to overcome my inability to identify interwar artillery. I sat down with a list of SCW artillery and looked them all up online. The Italian and WW2 German stuff, pretty easy but with one or two exceptions all the artillery within a certain class be it field gun, howitzer etc looked pretty much the same to me.

For bespoke SCW artillery, a couple of QRF's British WW1 4.5" QF Howitzers are on the cards before their sale ends. The 4.5 was probably the most prolific field artillery piece in the SCW. Britain sent Imperial Russia 600 in 1916. Stalin's Russia would supply them in large numbers to the Spanish Republican government. 159 are recorded as being imported. Great thing is that they also fall into the 'artillery generica' category - they don't look particularly British and at a glance could be taken for a Skoda, Krupp, Ansaldo.

As for the Pig M05 well, it makes a pretty good proxy for various makes of Krupp export guns and will stand in for the Italian Krupp-Ansaldo Canone da 75/27 M06 (not to be confused with the 75/27 Modello 11) which saw service on both sides in the SCW.

Anyway, head down now in project delivery mode till the weekend.

Cheers
Mark