Accuracy Drift - The Spanish Army

Since I am now closing down the Peninsular War Unlimited Expansion Project, I am trying to get things finished off fairly quickly, thus the flow of figures to and from the painter is faster than ever, which seems a bit strange, but no matter. Next batches will be 60 Falcata guerrilleros, which I hope to clean up and send off by Tuesday if possible, and 6 battalions of Spanish line infantry, for which I'll need to do some conversions for command figures, so they'll be a few weeks in preparation. [One of the line infantry units is to replace a Warrior battalion that I've always been uncomfortable about. I think Warrior are fine if your whole army is Warrior, but I find they don't fit in well with my armies, either for size or animation. A pity, really, because they are absolutely lovely people to deal with - and they are in Glasgow, of course, so they deserve all the support they can get.]

And in odd moments I'm picking away at limbers, carts, generals and similar - I still enjoy painting single items or very small groups, but nowadays I can't be bothered with a row of 24 identical infantrymen - my eyesight isn't terrible, but it isn't as good as it was. A daylight hobby lamp and a jeweller's optical loop have been a big help (the jeweller was furious, of course), but I have to make sure I only take on painting that I want to do.

The extra Spanish line units are planned to become Morillo's Division from Pedro Agostin Giron's "4th Army" around 1812-13 - the only detailed OOB I know of is in Nafziger's treasured collection and - as usual for Spanish records - it is full of typos and misunderstandings. Part of this is because there is always a little loss of accuracy in translation, but it's also because his sources were slightly careless army archives compiled from handwritten returns 200 years ago, and some of these returns must be a record of what somebody thought somebody else said. The scary bit is that, since information is scarce, this stuff gets recycled and requoted, and fresh typos get inserted as time goes on, and we get Accuracy Drift. I've spent a fascinating couple of days cross-checking lists in Nafziger, JM Bueno, Oman, Esdaile's book on the Spanish army, the Spanish notes in Mike Oliver's Napoleonic Army Handbook and some typed stuff I got from a friend in Madrid some years ago. This is not straightforward, since many of these sources quote each other, but I think I have now pretty much identified all the infantry units in the 4th Army. I haven't started on the cavalry yet, but the infantry is pretty tight, and I even have a good idea of the uniforms. I am so enraptured with my own cleverness that I shall have to go and lie down for a while.

I fear I may have passed the limit of your interest in this subject some lines ago, but it is easy to see why duff info gets passed on and why so many wargames armies are a bit unhistorical (is there such a word?). The said Morillo's Divn, for example, contains the line regiments of Leon, La Union (Morillo's own regt) and Bailen - that's all easy, and Nafziger gets that spot on. The roughnesses sneak in for some of the less regular, newer units. Nafziger's "Regimiento de Legion" turns out to be a light unit called the Legion Extremena, which was formed in 1811 - I know who was the colonel and have a good idea of their uniform - and his "Regimiento de Vitoria" (i.e. regiment from the city of Vitoria) turns out to be the Voluntarios de la Victoria (Volunteers of Victory), another light unit raised in Galicia in 1809. And so on.

If I get a suitable burst of enthusiasm, maybe I should stick my updated OOB in a future post. If, like me, there is anyone reading this who gets a bit frustrated by the lack of quality information about the Spanish army in the Guerra de Independencia, please make yourself known!

Solo Campaign - Week 5 & part of Week 6

Two weeks' manoeuvring and I have two battles to fight - one big'un, one tiddler. I'll insert the batreps when I've fought them. This post has now been edited to include a photo of the map - the map shows the position around 27th of the month - before resolution of combats.

Week 05

Housekeeping

The 3D3 activation throws give Allies 4, French 3(!), so Allies have initiative. From this week, modification to rules requires a specific Order for scouting of adjacent Areas to take place, apart from Spanish irregulars, who will always scout without orders.

Moves

Allies (4 allowed)

1 – A (Wellington) at Salamanca divides to split off new Group E (Cotton – with Sixth Division and Le Marchant’s and Otway’s (Ptgse) cavalry bdes)

2 – A (Wellington) marches 1 step from Salamanca to Zamora...

3 – ...and forced-marches from Zamora to Leon, which requires a test:

2D3 = 6 +3 (Wellington’s rating) -1 (forced march) -1 (winter conditions) = 7     which is OK – great marching!

4 – Sp B (Espana) marches from Zamora to Salamanca, to reinforce E

 [Intelligence step –

• Nothing – no scouting orders]

French (3 allowed)

1 – N (Marmont) holds position at Valladolid – order to hold position allows tired troops in Foy’s Divn to recover

2 – N (Marmont) sends scouting patrols from Valladolid into Leon

3 – S (Joseph/Jourdan) at Madrid scout area of Avila

 [Intelligence step -

• Br A (Wellington) and Fr N (Marmont) both have cavalry – thus Marmont receives Fragmentary Report – he is aware that there are now enemy forces at Leon, but has few details
• Fr S (Joseph/Jourdan) at Madrid has no cavalry – Sp D at Avila has irregular infantry and some cavalry, so French have No Information about forces in Avila, other than the fact that Spanish mounted guerrilleros have been seen there]

Supplies

No supply problems, all LoC open and defended.

Contacts

None.

Random Events

None.

Narrative

Detaching Cotton with a division of infantry and two cavalry brigades to cover the Duero crossings, and reinforcing them with Espana’s Spanish force, Wellington force-marches the remainder of his army through Zamora to Leon, threatening Marmont’s right flank and (by a potential move through Sahagun) his rear and his line of supply through Burgos.

Joseph is concerned that sending so many troops to reinforce Marmont at Valladolid has left the Madrid area vulnerable to attacks by the irregular troops of the Junta de Castilla, who have forces at both Avila and Ocana. He is short of cavalry, and spies sent into Avila have not reported back – perhaps they are roasting over a fire somewhere. The separate irregular Spanish forces may not join together, but will share intelligence, and all Spanish irregulars always have good information about neigbouring areas.

Foy’s infantry (with Marmont at Valladolid) have recovered from their fast tour of Central Spain.

You want the artillery up where?

Week 06

Random Events

French again get interference from Paris – once again an instruction that the army needs to be more aggressive, this applying to the most obvious critical area (“dice if in doubt which one” – can’t believe the Emperor really said stuff like that?). Marmont’s situation in Valladolid is pretty much self-evidently the hot spot. Since he is not sure what force is in Leon, he would prefer not to attack at present, but needs a test to ignore the instruction. The test requires him to add his rating (3) to 2D3. A total of 7 or better and he can choose to ignore the instruction – 6 or less and he has to comply.

In fact he throws 3, so the total of 6 means he has to attack if he can.   

Housekeeping

The 3D3 activation throws give Allies 5, French 7, so French have initiative and choose to move first.

Moves

French (7 allowed)

1 – N (Marmont) splits off new Group H (Clauzel – with his own division, Picquet’s dragoon bde and the reserve arty) – this group is to hold the bridges on the Duero at Toro (Valladolid)

2 – N (Marmont) takes the rest of his army from Valladolid to attack the allied force in Leon. [Intelligence step -

• Marmont is aware that there is a major Allied force at Leon, but underestimates strength]

Allies (5 allowed)

1 – A (Wellington) at Leon also underestimates opposing force, so opts to stand firm – specific Order allows selection of ground

2 – Sp D (mixed irregular force under Don Alfonso Maceta – “El Achaparrado) moves from Avila into Madrid Area to attack French Group S

[Intelligence step –

• Nothing new – no scouting orders]

Supplies

No supply problems, all LoC open and defended.

Contacts

Two.

(1) French Group N (Marmont), with a total of 28240 men, marches along the only good road from Valladolid to Leon, passing through Benavente. On the night of Thursday 27^th February the French army camps around Benavente, while Wellington, with 23300 men, is camped in the area around Villamandos, with his advanced outposts at Villaquejida. Shortly after daybeak, the Allied army takes a defensive position in an area of rolling hills to the south-east of the little village of Villaquejida. Their left flank is on thick woods on the bank of the River Esla, which is not fordable. The so-called Battle of Benavente takes place on Friday 28^th, the weather is cold but dry and there is a slight mist, which disappears as the sun comes up.

(2) Spanish Group D (Maceta) have established themselves in the mountains near Guadarrama, where they are causing havoc for French communications and supply trains. Marshal Jourdan sends the Badener, General Von Neuenstein, up into the mountains to deal with this problem. Neuenstein’s brigade is all German – the 2^nd Nassau, Regt de Frankfort and the 4^th Baden – a total of 5 battalions plus a small unit of the converged voltigeur companies. He also has a battery of French horse artillery from the Madrid reserve – all told, some 4300 men with 6 guns. Maceta has around 4700 – including a few cavalry – plus a volunteer company of foot artillery. The Spanish troops are well suited to the rocky terrain, but they include a number of units of infantry supplied by the local partidas who have little experience of formal combat.

The troops meet in very hilly ground near San Rafael around midday on Thursday 27^th. There is some snow, but not enough to hinder movement.

Narrative

Reports for the actions at Benavente and San Rafael will appear as soon as they have been fought. The Benavente combat appears to be too large for normal CCN rules, so will use the Grand Tactical variant.

Last Word on Fonts - for a Bit - maybe...

Well, I'm back using Firefox this morning, because Blogger and Internet Explorer aren't playing nicely together again - ho hum.

I had a couple of emails about the bastardised font I produced for the Spanish flag in the previous post (my email contact address is back in my Blogger profile - if you can get that to display properly...) - so here it is - just in graphic form - to download if it's any use to you.

The original font is TrueType JSL Antique, and I have mucked about with it (to use a technical term) in PaintShop to make the characters more like those in the flag. Individual pieces of text can be produced for a flag just by copying and pasting, and resizing as necessary, and any slight unevenness in the layout is all to the good.

I am quite pleased with the result, though probably more pleased with demonstrating that this is a good, flexible approach - if crude - which will work with any suitable donor font I can find. The alphabet here includes a few letters which may not have been in use in 18th-19th Century Spanish, and I have not amended any letters I did not find in the flag.

I have squashed the O, P and R a bit, given the S the odd slant required, shortened the middle horizontal stroke in the E and F, shortened the riser in the G, produced a nice quirky(!) Q by reversing the P, added the dot over the I, substituted the Latin V for U, and maybe one or two other tweaks I can't remember. Bear in mind this character set is intended for a rather rough battle flag for an irregular Spanish nationalist (i.e. anti-Bonaparte) unit around 1809, and may or may not be suitable for anything else! The reversed version of the N appears on the flag - maybe a bit of artistic licence?

I'll be working on flags for more of my 20mm guerrilleros, so some images may well appear here before too long. I think that is probably more than enough about that for the time being!

A Little More on Fonts

I really haven't got much further, but here's a sample of what I've been doing today. I've attempted to produce an approximate simulation of some of the text in the flag shown in the photo (which seems to belong to the 4th battalion of the Guards of Spain(?) - seems a very informal flag for such a formal sounding unit..).

My first line below the photo is simply added using a standard downloaded TrueType font, JSL Antique - exactly as the characters come. I also printed out a complete alphabet on a very large PaintShop 'canvas', and manually edited certain letters in the alphabet to make them more like the flag. The edited alphabet thus exists at present only in a graphical form on a very large jpeg file. I produced the second line of text simply by copying and pasting individual letters from my edited alphabet - this is childishly crude, but in fact doesn't take long to do, and has an unexpected advantage in that the manual placement of the letters gives a pleasing additional touch of shabbiness - makes it look less like a machine font (I think).

Next steps? - no idea - I suppose I might be able to create a new TrueType font based on my edited version of JSL Antique, or it may be that what I have done here is versatile enough and sufficiently useful to provide all I need without going to the trouble of producing actual fonts - I'll still require a variety of starting fonts, but I have a few of those now, and it's not bad for 5 minutes work, is it?

The laugh, of course, is that in 20mm scale you can hardly see the text anyway...

Hmmm.

Fonts for Flags

This is a plea for a bit of help - it's not a critical matter, by any means, but it is possible that someone who is interested in printing military flags may have some useful suggestions.

As one of the sideshows of my wargaming, I enjoy researching, designing (or "laying out") flags with PaintShop and printing them up in the correct size for issue to the 20mm troops. In an ideal world, I would like to be able to hand paint my flags, but I don't have the skill and the results would disappoint me, so I print them on the posh graphic printer, using posh photographic paper. Works fine, and if they fade I can always re-print them.

Recently I've been looking to produce some more examples of convincing-looking flags for Spanish irregular units in the Guerra de Independencia (Peninsular War). Of course they are going to be fakes - no-one has an exact idea what most of these flags looked like, so my aim is to produce something which looks fairly convincing, and is generic enough to allow the unit to change its identity to suit the scenario!

Here are three reproductions (not mine) of some real flags. I am interested in the style of the lettering - the guys that made up these flags were not necessarily sloppy or lacking in taste - they wanted their flags to look good, and the lettering presumably looks like what lettering was supposed to look like on such flags. In other words, what you see here was to some extent constrained by lack of money or time, but it represents a contemporary style.

I've spent a couple of interesting evenings searching for antique fonts on the internet (and that's free fonts, boys and girls), and I've found a lot of interesting stuff, but I find that it is very hard to get graphic designers or font specialists to stray far away from the Germanic "Olde English" lettering I used to see on marmalade labels, and in general their products are far too slick and far too marketing-oriented for my purposes. I understand that no-one is likely to make a TrueType font as crude as some of these, but any kind of unsanitised 18th-19th century lettering would be refreshing.

This is maybe a long shot, but has anyone got any ideas for sources for the kind of historic fonts I'm talking about?

Hooptedoodle #43 - Stories of the Old Lead Mountains

I read an estimate recently - in one of the wargaming mag trade pages, I think - that only about 10% of the wargame figures manufactured ever make it onto a miniature battlefield, and that much less than half, maybe as little as a third, get painted. It may not be accurate, you may have different thoughts on the numbers, but it's kind of interesting.

You realise what this means? If these probabilities have always applied, this means that something approaching two-thirds of the total historic output of Minifigs, Warhammer, Foundry, Hinchliffe, Marcus Hinton etc etc is stashed away somewhere - if we make a deduction for stuff that has gone to be recycled or just thrown away (not a very common fate, I think), that still leaves maybe half which is lying in spares boxes in lofts, cupboards, desk drawers, sheds, garages, jam jars and old suitcases. Quite apart from the waste of material and money, that is a remarkable vision - imagine it all heaped up in one place. I wonder how many guard mamelukes there would be in there...

Since I decided to start on a new period, I have a refreshed view of my own spares department, and I will be spending some of the forthcoming weeks applying a healthy dose of reality and disposing of things via eBay and otherwise. There is, of course, every likelihood that the majority of what I get rid of will simply relocate to someone else's loft, and the percentages will remain unchanged.

While trawling through the boxes - some actually labelled "GASH" or "INFANTRY SPARES - DUFF" - I am constantly amazed to think how or why I acquired some of this flotsam. OK - I accept that at the end of any project there is a little distortion caused by the fact that what you are left with is the stuff you couldn't (or chose not to) use, but a lot of the time I simply have no idea where it came from. In an idle sort of way, I decided it might be fun to consider a geologist’s view of the Lead Mountains, and try to identify some patterns, in an appropriately scientific manner...

This is essentially a subjective table. Unlike proper rocks, the categories of figures do not have the decency to form distinct chronological layers – they are all stirred together – so the following sections require a lot of tedious pre-sorting...

  

Classification	Description/Examples	Possible Origins
Extra-Terrestrial	Totally irrelevant – a complete mystery – e.g. figures in the wrong scale, or for a period/nation that is out of scope, figures for which you have no idea at all what they are	·   No idea ·   Things very badly described on eBay ·   Extra figures which came in mixed eBay lots ·   The results of being criminally misled about the true size of some manufacturer’s “true 25mm” range
Pre-Cambrian	Stuff that’s always been there – even pre-dates the last rationalisation and chuck-out	·   All suggestions welcome ·   In some cases, previous failure to categorise what it was or why it was there may have brought a stay of execution until next time
Devonian	Incomplete projects, or stalled good ideas that never came to fruition – e.g. large numbers of MiniFigs mounted RHA officers that never did get converted into Light Dragoons	·   Cousin Michael’s Crimean troops, that he grew out of before he painted them ·   Spanish Civil War – what a great idea! ·   Something that was going very cheap at the Bring’n’Buy stall ·   Look at that – WW2 Romanians
Permian	Useful stuff – relevant figures but need a few more to constitute a full unit	·   Usual channels – just short of a few FN22s to make another battalion... ·   This category is directly traceable to the emergence of eBay as a source for OOP and otherwise defunct figures. ·   It can get wildly out of control – this is the bit to worry about.
Jurassic	Flights of fancy – e.g. sample figures for the Lord of the Rings (can’t remember why) – superbly sculpted 18mm Zulus that don’t match anything in the known universe	·   Those 8 unpainted figures bought at a Wargames Show after watching a breathtaking exhibition game with 800 painted figures ·   Mystery parcels bought when drunk

Anglo-Portuguese Army - as at 18 Feb 2012

Wellington's army - from their right flank towards their left, you see here the cavalry, the 1st, 3rd, 6th, 7th and Light Divisions, with the siege train and supports in the rear.

This army is patently smaller than the French, but then the French have to fight the Spanish as well. "Anglo-Portuguese" is surely an overly simple description of an army which also includes Hanoverians, Brunswickers, and French royalists - not to mention Scots and Irishmen. Mind you, it's probably no worse than describing their assorted opponents as "French".

It will probably be a month or two before the photo of the Spanish army appears - there's a lot of work going on in that department.