French gun crews

[LightningLewis]

Im considering building a French WWII army. Do the GHQ Artillery and AT guns come with crews? If not can anyone suggest substitutes?

Thanks

[Mickel]

Sadly, the 75s and 25s don't. Don't know about the 105s because I don't have any yet. One infantry manufacturer is intending to release some at some stage. When I last talked to them about it it was going to be some time this year.

[LightningLewis]

A related topic! Is GHQ planning to produce on of these, or is there a decent substitute?

[Mk 1]

A related topic! Is GHQ planning to produce on of these, or is there a decent substitute?

I believe there is no current solution available, nor in the offing, from GHQ.

So much the pity.

You won't find another vendor with infantry of equal quality. But you do have some choices, giving you a variety of alternative compromises ...

- You could use GHQ artillery crew from some other nation's figures. For French, I would recommend choosing WW2 Russian or Italian individual artillery crew. The helmets are pretty similar in both cases. Unfortunately, the uniforms aren't. French greatcoats were pretty distinct. Also, unfortunately, you don't get crouching crew figures, so you have a good selection for the 75s or 105s, but a pretty poor selection for the 25mm ATGs.

- You could try to kit-bash some gun crews from the French individual infantry. You get some knealing and crouching figures to work with. But the poses need a fair bit of fiddley work.

- Go to another brand.

I don't normally discuss other vendor's products here in this forum. But since GHQ doesn't make any French ATG crewmen, perhaps on this occasion I'll break my own self-imposed restriction.

-- I know several gamers who mix Adler figs with their GHQ vehicles. They seem to mix pretty well, as they are scaled almost exactly as the GHQ figs are. I've only played with Adlers once, and haven't bought any myself up to this point. They are often described as suffering from "big head" syndrome, and to my observation so far that's true. But many gamers don't care. Unfortunatly Adler may make Soviet gun crews, but no French. But they do have French mortars, which may well come with crews that could serve for gun crews as well. Don't know, as I've never seen those particular units.

-- You won't find much to choose from at CinC on this. No French gun crews. You could try kit-bashing the CinC French infantry, as they have a knealing pose too. Their figures are notably less sturdy than GHQ (I have a fair bit of experience with CinC figs), so you will find them easier to re-pose, but also easier to crush or break. If you have a delicat touch, they might work for you.

-- I personally use a lot of Heroics-Ross figures. They have French gun crew figures, but as far as I know they only come with the HR French guns. HR models are generally a bit smaller than GHQ, both in vehicles and in infantry. Also HR figures suffer from "ugly" syndrome, when compared to GHQ figures. They are just not anywhere near as nice. They lack the level of detail, and the quality of molding is much less consistant. I often wind up with several figs per set that look like space-aliens from Close Encounters (their heads are just non-descript blobs, often no thicker than the figure's arm or wrist). But the variety is good, and for many years they were the only guys I knew of that made decent individual figs.


These 25mm ATGs, crew, and Laffly combat cars are HR. Not up to the levels of GHQ at all. But two of the three items shown aren't available elsewhere, so that's where I went.