Reichsarmee completed!

Yes, it was a 2013 goal…. the last batch of Imperials is finally completed! Now I have all the unit of the Reichsarmee (minus the elusive Sachsen-Gotha dragoons, 200 horses, so well below the Volley and Bayonet scale).

Going into detail we have:

the Pfalz-Zweibrucken regiment (33 distinct contingents), rated “poor” by Soubise. An uneventful career, probably present at Korbitz, 1759.

The Nassau-Weilburg regiment, from the Upper Renish District as the previous: 9 contingents, first battalion captured by Wunsch at the surrender of Leipzig, most of the rank and file preferring the Prussian service to captivity.  The remaining battalion took part in 1761 campaign in Saxony. The flags are completely speculative:

The Ernestine-Sachsen regiment. A composite unit with one battalion from Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, the other with contingents from Sachsen-Gotha-Altenburg, Sachsen-Coburg-Meiningen, Sachsen-Coburg-Saalfeld and Sachsen-Hildburghausen. It joined the Reichsarmee in November 1758, the various Dukes being unwilling to fight against Prussia. It was at the action at Zinna, 1759. Again the flag is completely speculative but is based on the Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach flag in the WSS that I saw here:

The Munster regiments, Nagel (red facings) and Elverfeldt (white  facings) each one battalion strong. Rated “good” by Soubise and captured by the Hereditary Prince of Brunswick at Meiningen and Wasungen in 1759. No further actions are recorded.

The other Lower Renish-Westphalian regiment is the Mengersen regiment from Paderborn. It was only one battalion strong. I was in doubt if paint it or not: then I  read some lines in Kronoskaf regarding the 1758 campaign: “The regiment acted as a Free Battalion and took part in several skirmishes”. So I crossed the Rubicon and decided to portray it as a skirmisher base for V&B. The regiment was rated “mediocre” but had nonetheless a long and eventful career being at the siege of Sonnenstein, at Korbitz, Strehla and Saalfeld in 1761 when it was annhilated in a 5 hour long combat.

In the meantime I was left with some red-coated Hannoverian Garde du Corps. Since I have already them, I converted them into red-coated french cavalry regiments, adding the trumpeter and the flag-bearer. So, based by three for each brigade, the  regiments Colonel-General (with the trumpeter), Harcourt (with the flag) and Noailles:

Since I have already done regiments Fitz-James and La Reine, I have all the red-coated french heavy cavalry regiments so from here to now on only a lot of white-coated, red faced regiments with some sparse blue one....

The castle in the first picture is made from paper, found elsewhere in the web:

More Hanoverians

To complete my Hanoverian Army the multicolored Geyso and Wersebe grenadier battalions:

and the heavy artillery:

The last two regiments of Heavy cavalry, namely 3C-B Hodenberg and 4C-A Breitenbach

so only Dragoons are still missing. To deal with the "kleiner klieg" the 4th battalion of the Legion Britannique, one of the two red-coated:

To command such a reinforcement, Lt. General Christian von Zastrow, with a Garde du Corps orderly:

Busy painting more British legion, Grenadiers and at least a Dragoon regiment. Then I need to place an order to H&R to get Brunswick and Hessians…..In the meantime I completed the ReichsArmee which will be the object of a “Grand Parade” post in the next future.

Nec Aspera Terrent

I finished the rebasing of my Hannoverians, so I proudly present my Hannoverian contingent which represents a small but reliable force of 16 battalions and 24 squadrons commanded by Lt. General Von Sporcken.

The Hannoverian heavy cavalry regiments are on 3 squadrons, so I based them in pairs; for the history and the war records of any regiments, their name is linked to the corresponding entries in Kronoskaf:

1A Leib Regt. Reuter/3A Grothaus.

1B Zepelin/2B Hammerstein.

2A Dachenhausen/4A Walthausen.

The Garde du Corps and Grenadiers a Cheval mustered 2 squadrons altogether for a full-strenght total of 374 rank and file: however I decided to represent them as a regiment since they were present at Hastenbeck, Krefeld, Minden, Vellinghausen and Wilhelmsthal. The two units were amalgamated in 1763 and disbanded in 1803.

The Luckner Hussars, four squadrons in 1760, here in its first green uniform, changed into white after 1760:

The Hannoverian regiments were 1 battalion strong, only the Garde being a two-battalion regiment: accordingly I based them in pairs, the coupling being selected at random. Again the regiment names are linked to Kronoskaf.

From left to right:

First line - Garde; 5A Von Grote/9B Jung Zastrow; 6A Hardenberg/2A vonSporken; 7B Hauss/13A Fersen.

Second line- 6B Halberstadt/8B von Block; 9A Sachsen Gotha/11A Dreves; 1A von Scheiter/4A Bock; 5B Behr/11B de la Chevallerie.

The command base represents Lt. General Friederich von Sporcken (1698-1776):

A close-up of  the 6A Hardenberg/2A von Sporken base:

To complete my Hannoverian contingent I need a couple of dragoons regiments, the field and heavy artillery, the converged grenadiers battalions and some light troops like the Legion Britannique with its multicolored battalions.

Star Fort

Everybody needs a “Star Fort” for his minis: I found this for free at the Mondorfer Bastelbogen site. It is the Festung Pfaffenmütz, built on the Rhine by the Dutch in 1622 during the Thirty Years War and besieged and conquered by the Spanish in 1629. It doesn’t exist anymore, its trace lost in the whirlwind of Revolutionary Wars.

It is an easy model to build: I simply flocked the glacis to give some uniformity with my terrain and with the regimental bases. In the future I plan to add some ravelin and maybe an hornwerk. No idea how to use it in my wargame, but I felt that my collection wouldn’t be complete without a fort…

Month of May painting frenzy - Part II: the bad boys in blue

This time the “Bad boys in blue”. First of all I bolstered my Fusilier Regiments by adding three of them. The choice was two regiment present at Strehla, namely the FR 44 Grant  and the FR 48 Salmuth and the “Pink regiment”, the FR 40 Alt-Kreytzen, unique in its pink facings, smallclothes and trousers. Accordingly the ratio of fusilier regiments in my army is 6 against 20 infantry regiments (the others are FR 35, 41 and 49), whereas in the reality the ratio was  16 against 33.

I was in a “Yellow mood”  and accordingly I painted the KR7 Driesen (one of the unfortunate Maxen regiments, distinguished at Kolin, Leuthen and Kunersdorf) and a battalion of the HR7 von Malachowsky, half in mirliton and half in the busby used at the beginning of SYW.

Still with the Saxony theatre in mind, wishing to emulate Finck, Wunsch, Hulsen and Prince Henri, I decided my army needed some more freitruppen. The first one is the Frei-Battalion 12 Heer, (Schweizer Voluntaires), raised in 1761 from Swiss deserter from the French Army. Its records are unenviable: wiped out twice in 1761 and 1762 and soon reconstituited. However it was unique with its grenadiers in austrian fur caps with coat in reversed colors (light blue with blue facings).

The next step was to complete the Kleist Freikorps, namely with the two battalions of Kroaten, with tricorne and mirliton caps mixed, the Freikorps artillery and the Uhlans:

The Hussars and the Horse Grenadier were already painted and appeared here. The following is a drawing I found somewhere of the Freikorp artillerymen uniform:

Month of May painting frenzy – Part I

The last month of May I had what I call a “Painting Frenzy Attack”. Beware: I am fast as a sloth so don’t imagine the hordes of 6mm you can see elesewhere in the web. However, for my standard, it was a fruitful month.

What I did was to paint units which can be used to fight battles in the Saxony theatre. Accordingly I started by beefing up my Reichsarmee with two units of combined grenadiers, a real patchwork of blue and white uniforms and Prussian mitres with Austrian bearskins.

To command the whole bunch nonetheless than Friederich-Michael von Pfalz-Zweibrucken-Birkenfeld (1724-1767) Oberbefehlshaber der Reichsarmee , with an orderly hussar from his personal escort:

This is a well-known portrait of him as an Austrian Feld-Marschall:

this a lesser-known and more “gaudy” juvenile portrait, painted probably when he was at  Versailles…

and these are his hussards (60-70 troopers altogether):

From the Austrian side one composite grenadier regiment (based on the Wurben Grenadiers in the Corps Loudon, 1761) 

and the Loudon Freikorps with its russian style green uniforms:

More Prussian, mainly Freikorps, in the next post.