The League of Augsburg
Airborne Museum Oosterbeek
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| Memorial to the Airborne Forces at Oosterbeek |
This trip happened in November 2018 and for some reason I didn't get around to posting some of the lovely photos.
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| British Sherman in the museum forecourt |
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| I am almost certain this is a 17pdr. I don't think Urquhart's men had too many of these to hand. |
We spent an excellent couple of hours in this outstanding museum and finished our trip by crossing the...
The dust is settling.. With Talon and Claw reflections and a QRS!
The book reached its first customer on August 16th and now seems to have arrived in most corners of the globe. It was a massive relief to finish this project which had been all consuming for over eighteen months.
The final decision to print is always a bit like betting £50,000 on red. You know there is a risk that something will not be right but having checked and checked, you can't find it. It was...
Fate, Fortune or Faithlessness? Camaret Bay 18th June 1694: Part 5
Orders of Battle
The full English order of battle is as follows:
1 battalion of converged grenadiers (all musket), 2 battalions of Marines (all musket), 1 battalion of Guards, 11 battalions of Foot (pike and musket with the possibility that 3-4 could be all musket armed).Here are the battalions which participated in the expedition:
1st Foot Guards
John Cutts’ Regiment
Richard Coote’s Regiment
Samuel...
National Museum of Ireland: 17th/18th Century exhibits
A little lead in on the late Elizabethan period with this musketeer and then the display moves on to cover
the 17th/18th century exhibits. The section begins with a ' How would you invade Ireland?' map with some notations on it.
We them go into the period of the Confederate Wars and the Cromwellian occupation. The mannequins were particularly good.
I was very taken by the simplicity of the Jacobite...
Fate, Fortune or Faithlessness? Camaret Bay 18th June, 1694: Part 4
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| A map drawn up to wargame the action |
It does sound unmistakably like D-Day. It took place around 200 miles from and almost exactly 250 years to the day before Operation Overlord as, although the date is now noted at June 18th the old style calendar marks it as June 6th or 7thin most sources. The action can be fought in various ways; as a large scale battle, as a skirmish or...
Fate, Fortune or Faithlessness? Camaret Bay June 18th, 1694. Part 3
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| Possibly Lord Carmarthen running the Gullet |
Consequence of perfidy
When the Allied fleet arrived in Camaret Bay it immediately came under fire from the forts around Camaret village and those at Bertheaume Bay on the northern shore opposite. The plan was for men o’ war to run the narrow channel called the ‘Gullet’ between the two headlands and sail into the anchorage at Brest. This gap was exactly...
The National Museum of Ireland - a lovely wee surprise
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| The parade ground square at Collins Barracks which is an old British Army facility from the late 18th/early 19th century. |
I squeezed this in whilst speaking at a conference in Dublin. What a wonderful find it was. In this first post I thought I would trail the variety of fantastic and interesting militaria contained in a very substantial and well laid out national museum. I visited the Collins...
Fate, Fortune or Faithlessness? Camaret Bay 18th June, 1694 Part 2
The Mission – Destroy Brest!
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| D-Day 300 years before it happened. Camaret Bay was an exptremely ambitious plan |
The raid was a large scale affair for an action of its type. It was months in the planning with the objective of wreaking havoc on a key strategic anchorage for the French fleet at the port of Brest in western Brittany. Naval bombardments of French ports had been undertaken before, one such...
Fate, Fortune or Faithlessness? Camaret Bay 18th June, 1694 Part 1
This piece was first run in Wargames Illustrated in 2016. I thought it a solid multi-parter to run on the blog whilst I am holidaying.
Contemporaneous notoriety
The disastrous attack at Camaret Bay on June 18th1694 was a very English tragedy. From a distance of 322 years it is easy to understand that a relatively minor operation which went badly wrong and resulted in the death of a largely forgotten...
Tocht naar Chatham 1667 - The 28mm bit begins
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| The first unit of Dutch Marines - uniform colours from colonial naval infantry of the same period. |
Having co written Donnybrook and produced an as yet unpublished extension for Beneath the Lily Banners dealing with small unit actions it was always the plan to deal with some of the 1667 Medway fighting in 28mm.
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| Other units will have different flags |
There appears to be no concensus regarding the long...
Garrison Point Fort in 1/2400 completion
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| The finished piece is about 100mm square. |
I finally got a chance to build Sheerness today. It's not often you get to type that! Took about 90 minutes to finish the first major piece of terrain for the 1/2400 part of the Tocht naar Chatham (Medway Raid 1667) project.
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| Here is how it all started. |
I used some of the simpler country style buildings from Brigade Models lovely range to to this. These...
Dutch Fleet update and Medway 1667 mini campaign
To say I have been totally absorbed by my new obsession for 1/2400 scale 1650-1720 period ships would be the understatement of my hobby life time. Not since my Ost Front Microtanks phase of the late 1990s have I been this driven to finding information and being productive on an industrial scale.
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| 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th rates plus Fireship and Heoker - a cross section of my growing Dutch Fleet for the... |