After being recently sucked back into Flames of War, I became incredibly interested in the Romanians. It started when I picked up a copy of Red Bear with the intent of building a Soviet armored force. That's still happening...but I noticed something interested with the Romanians. Not only can you take them as Axis, but since the country switched sides in late 1944 you can also play them as Allied forces. I was drawn to the versatility of this idea...and I was hooked.
As such, I've just finished my first Romanian platoon. It consists of three TACAM T-60 tank destroyers. Romania lacked a solid industrial base and had to be creative when it came to armor. This particular vehicle utilized captured Soviet equipment: T-60 light tanks and dismounted M-1936 F-22 field guns. Records show that 34 of these were completed between 1943 and 1944, seeing service until the Soviet Union repossessed them after Romania defected to the Allies.
Battlefront, the company that produces Flames of War, made these wonderfully detailed models. My local game shop had a discount bin of older products and so I was able to pick these up for $7.50 per vehicle. Score!!
Here's a view of some of the crew before I glued them into place. It's been a long time since I've done an entire 15mm figure and I was worried that I'd gotten really rusty. Thankfully this was not the case. These Romanians were a breeze to paint up!
A view of the tank hunter platoon from the front. Note the different positions of the crew inside each vehicle.
The platoon from the rear. Although Battlefront makes some spiffy Romanian decals, I opted to not to put them on the vehicles. Of all the period TACAM T-60 photographs I examined, only one vehicle had any sort of national markings. This leads me to believe that the practice was quite uncommon (but I will be including them on an objective marker I'm working on...but more on that later).
So that's my first Romanian platoon! After the Soviets repossessed the TACAM T-60s in October 1944, the country once again needed to find an adequate tank destroyed. The solution? Take an old R-2 tank - better known to the world as the Panzer 35(t) - and replace its turret with a Soviet supplied ZiS-3 field gun. The result was the TACAM R-2. This will be covered in a later update.
