Painting Challenge Submission Nine - Cold War Canadian Infantry, and Bonus Leopard C1

More Cold War Canadian troops in 15mm!

Hello folks! It's been a busy couple of weeks with with 1-to-1 scale activities, such as a nice vacation, and then a bunch more work.  These are all good "problems" of course, but it has been keeping me away from the brushes or even staying updated with progress in the 8th edition of AHPC! To help get back in the saddle, here is an update - my ninth submission (posted two weeks ago), with a continuing 15mm Cold War flavour.  This is an infantry platoon of Cold War-era Canadian troops in 15mm, with a bonus additional Leopard C1 tank.

Platoon command stand - officer pointing, radio operator beside him

Tanks are a tonne of fun, of course - in the case of the Leopard C1, about 40 tonnes or so of fun! But it is the hard-slogging, ground-pounding, digging in-and-assaulting-and-hunkering down infantry that take the ground and hold it at the end of the day.  The Canadian Battlegroups of the 1980s would be counting on their Leopard C1s, but the mechanized infantry were the heart of the effort - troops from the Royal Canadian Regiment and the Vandoos.  So I wanted to add some infantry to round out my preliminary Canadian "Team Yankee" forces - plus they paint super-fast, which is a nice bonus!

Here is a bit of a retro item - a .30cal MMG in support of the platoon

The infantry figures are from "Armies Army" (now part of the excellent Plastic Soldier Company).  And they are a treat! Just wonderful castings, made from metal, as all proper wargames figures should be.  They are sporting Canadian infantry weapons from the 1980s cold-war era - FN rifles, Carl Gustav anti-tank weapons, and support from a .30 cal MMG and a 60mm mortar.  The latter two elements are sort of retro-classic weapons, but it seems the Canadian Forces tended to make use of older weapons for quite a while longer than some other NATO armies.

Three sections of infantry - and the 60mm mortar is on the right at the front - poor chap, has to carry it by himself it appears :)

As appropriate for Canadians, the infantry are sporting colder-weather jackets - an excellent touch, in my opinion! I can't say enough good things about these castings.  I purchased an entire companies' worth of the troops, and look forward to painting them all up.  Huge kudos to Keith at Army's Army for making these a reality - for a nerd like me, it is exciting to have the chance to collect these lads and game with them.

View showing some of the webbing - note the Carl Gustav AT weapon on the one base in the foreground

Of course, these chaps will need some M113s to ride around in - those will hopefully appear on the painting table soon.

Another Leopard C1 - this one from the Plastic Soldier Company

The tank model is a 1/100 plastic Leopard C1 from Plastic Soldier Company, with an FN MAG from Peter Pig swapped into the cupola MG.   This gives me 10 Leopard C1s...on my way to having a whole squadron for the gaming table. These fellows have already seen some tabletop action - with many of the recently-painted tanks suffering the fate of all newly-painted models - it was a rough "win" for the Royal Canadian Dragoons!

More Canucks ready to chip in for NATO

Points-wise this managed to gather another 64 points toward my total goal of 1000...slowly but surely, I'm closing in.

I'll leave you with a photo from Palm Desert, California, USA - we did a six-mile hike in Joshua Tree National Park a couple of weeks ago! The landscape was beautiful and surreal...so glad to have a chance to visit...

The Palm Oasis in Joshua Tree National Park, California, USA

So now that I am back home a little more consistently, I hope to have the paint brushes firing up once again - stay tuned for more!