H&R Paras

Following on from the Heroics & Ros LRDG in the last post, I have now painted the UK Paratroopers I bought at the same time. These are new figures, and like all of the later H&R releases they are very nice. They are much "slighter" than the likes of GHQ, Baccus or Adler, and as such they are probably closer to true scale humans. In theory that might be a problem, but in practice I have no qualms in using these in the same force - when you are looking down on them from a scale thousand feet in the air, the differences are unnoticeable. What they do have is very nice animation and good character, and they add a new set of options to the other lines.

In this case that's exactly what I am using them for. I already have a reasonably sized force of UK Paras from Baccus, so what I ordered from H&R was the oddments around the edges. I got recently landed men gathering their chutes, and men getting kit out of drop containers. There are some riders on tiny "Wellbike" motor cycles, and a variety of combat engineer types - flamethrowers, satchel charges, pole charges. There are a variety of jeeps, and some "cut down Morrises". There are in fact the well-known Quad tractor, used with the 25lbdr gun, with the bodywork removed to make it light enough for a glider. H&R do two versions - one has a tarpaulin over the load, the other has a group of men sitting on the tarpaulin, hitching a ride. This is a good example of the "character" I mentioned earlier. The last items were some command figures - some pointing, some with clip boards, radio men, the usual mix.

All in all a nice little batch, fun to paint, and they'll fill out my Para forces nicely.

Baccus Paras

At Joy of Six in July I picked up a number of packs of Baccus British Paratroops - two of the standard infantry packs of about 100 figures (one each of Advancing and Firing) plus some of the support packs - MMG, PIATs, 2" Mortars. The support items come based on small discs about the size of a 5p piece, and I left some just like that, while others I based on my usual 1" square steel. The individual infantry come as strips of four figures - you get four command strips and 20 line strips in each pack. The command strips are the same in both packs, though the line strips are obviously different (one firing, the other advancing). So in the two packs I got 32 command figures in four poses, and 160 line figures in 8 poses.
It would have been nice to have a little more variety, though the figures themselves are very well sculpted, perhaps the best at this scale I have tried (competing for that honour with GHQ and Adler). For the basic infantry this wasn't really a problem, but I wanted a little more variety for the command, so I ordered a couple of Para command strips from Adler (as well as some other command figures, for which see another post). All told I made seven 1" square Command bases, and 23 infantry bases. I painted them in a three colour camo pattern - a base of khaki with spots of desert sand and a terracotta brown.
In addition I had been playing some IABSM, which really needs individual Big Men. So I made a dozen single figures, mostly command but also a few from the basic infantry, based on 5p pieces. Previously I had thought that single figure bases in 6mm was a bit too far out, but in fact with the quality of these figures it works perfectly well. This opens up the possibility of skirmish games at this scale, which I had previously ruled out.
Overall I would rate these figures very highly. Slightly more variety would be nice, but that's not a big gripe. There were a few casting problems with figures having one leg gapped at the ankle, and I lost 2-3 figures that way - not a high percentage. I have a lot more Baccus to paint - British and German infantry - and I see that they have just released a range of German infantry in the smock.
The pictures show a variety of the units, support weapons and single figures, and at the end a couple of pictures of the whole lot in their container.