Flames of War: My plunge

...into World War II.  I'm not a huge WWI or WWII buff, the Crusades, Viking, and Roman history is more my thing.  That said a couple of people that I game with talked me into trying out Flames of War.  So on we go, I'm planning to do a U.S. Force.

What I did was purchase the FoW Open Fire box set.  That is a pretty good buy for the entry level.  I traded the German Infantry out for more Airborne Infantry. So now I have a bunch of English Shermans and a pair of Fireflies.  The Shermans I will use for the U.S. forces for the time being.

I've worked with a lot of bad plastic kits over the years, I must say Battlefront's plastic Sherman kit ranks right up there with the worst of them.  Not very impressive at all.  The right set of tracks are warped on all of the sprues. The tank chassis does not fit together well at all without lots of clamping and filing.  After doing one of them with a minimal gaps, I decided that was just too much work for a 15mm miniature, so I just glued the rest of them together and filled the gaps with greenstuff.  For more Shermans in the future, I will probably try the Plastic Soldier Company ones.

The kit does have some nice stowage, and there is enough left over that I will save that for the next batch for variety.  The turrets are definitely nicer than the chassis. Above and below are the first batch of three.
And below is the next batch of three.

I'm not sure how I'm going to paint these yet.  I was thinking of priming them in some sort of olive drab color from a rattle can if I can find something from Testors.  Don't know yet.  I do plan to avoid using metallic paint on these, as at this scale I think the metal flake in the metallic paint will look odd.

Below are the Firefly tanks.

And below are all eight of the tanks, ready for paint.