Historic Battle of Tegula (Zulu Wars)

Editoral note: originally written in September 2015 (!) this post was overlooked but the project still holds interest for me. As I have had nothing to post for awhile I thought I should fill in the gap....

Have no idea why my interest in the Zulu Wars but probably because I watched Zulu and Zulu Dawn movies in my early days and kept those images in my head.

Thus any magazine article about the Zulu and warfare involving that South African tribe strokes my interest.  An old wargame magazine description by Ian Knight [ Miniature Wargames  No.25 ] of the engagement between the colonists of Durban, Natal and the Zulu in 1838 had me thinking. (oh, oh, here we go off onto another "project" !! )

The abbreviated history goes something like this:

A Voortrekker deputation to Port Natal to ask the English Settlement for assistance against the Zulus was met with success. In 1838 John Cane and Robert Biggar with 14 other English settlers, 30 Hottentots and over 3000 native levies went as an expeditionary force in support to the Voortrekkers Commandos of Uys and Potgieter. (who were attacked a day before and were soundly defeated) After crossing the Tugela River the Expenditionary force came across the Zulu military kraal (camp) Ndondakusuka at the foot of the mountain but the lack of full resistance soon indicated that this was a trap and as dawn slowly appeared some 10,000 Zulu warriors appeared on the scene and fierce fighting ensued. The line of retreat across the river was cut off and the expeditionary force was surrounded. Thus on the 17th April 1838 ended the battle of Tugela,  Few of the expeditionary force escaped from this battle.

To distinguish the supporting Port Natal native troops, they were given white cloth head bands.  These "Hottentots" and some 400 of the natives were trained and armed with muskets, while the rest were armed as native warriors, some of which were Zulu expatriates.  This made the selection of figures easy and I simply added a green-stuff headband to those Natal allies. It was said that the natives would wind yards of cloth around their heads so the resulting headwear resembled a turban! This certainly helped in my modelling efforts as it is quite easy to apply too much green stuff to the small 15mm chaps.



 As with all my wargaming with the Zulu I use a heavily infused DBA style rules  (...thus far....) , so each force is of 12 elements - the Zulu look more numerous as I use double sized stands for them.  As I have yet to play this scenario I may indeed have them twice as large to equalize the effect from the Natal musket armed troops.   Because of the disproportional effect of firepower in the battles of this era, the Natal 'army' has 5 of its 12 elements as "rifle" armed, with the warriors equal to those of the Zulu.
The deployment is conjecture of course but does follow the DBA mandates.  The kraal starts with one additional defending element.  I may make the mountain smaller and closer to the Zulu side with the Natal army closer to the centre of the table.  In light of the historical battle, perhaps tell the Port Natal player that the idea is to save the army and not fight the Zulu....but the Zulu won't know this of course!
Not really pleased with the look of the table/basing and may change all this in the future but this small project is an interesting one for me.

Medieval Irish for DBA

My new part-time job as a charter bus driver is quite the time-eater with lots of time away from the house and more importantly the painting table!
Having downtime between delivery and pickup during the day, sometimes I can get a bit of basic painting in while sitting in the cramped seats of the bus.  With only poor natural lighting and poor positioning hunched over as I am, no great detail can be done as you can imagine;  and for my version of the Irish with their rather plain dress and, well knowing that many poor brush strokes can be covered up by a heavy wash of paint, I set about doing this army of 15mm for my DBA collection.

lots of painting gaffs but really I couldn't see a lot of the details sitting on a bus.  Even with my reading glasses on.  Sigh.

These are converted Corvus Belli Numidians - which were needed for the bare Irish legs - on which I added "green stuff" cloaks

Corvus Belli Irish Kerns from their old HYW range. The first strip has been given a wash stain already.

The completed army. Yeah, well it's DBA ain't it!

Close up of the spearmen

Close up of the General as a light horse element

Shaka Zulu defeated!

Oh my, I can read The Times of London headline now....
A minor tribe of Southern Africa defeated
Reports have arrived that a small tribe led by Shaka have been defeated by the Ndwandwe near Gqokli Hill thereby altering the future history of this nation by not allowing it to have a glorious defeat some fifty years in the future as a result.

Andrew called me and said he was on vacation and wanted to have a game, "something in 15mm". 
Not having done anything with my Zulus for awhile, I pulled them out and using a modified DBA rules and used a scenario from the details by an old Wagames Illustrated article by Ian Knight on the historical battle of Gqokli Hill.  This battle brought the Zulu under Shaka to prominence with a defeat over the Ndwandwe in the year 1818.
 
The scenario had Andrew commanding the Ndwandwe to divert troops to burn the Zulu krall (homestead) and gain a moving herd of cattle. ( I also had the provision for a roll each turn to have part of that army, based on the actions of some of the thirsty troops of his army to move to back to the river but totally forgot that once the game had started! Would have changed things a bit I would suggest.... )  The rolls was random and thus the very large Ndwandwe army would be broken up as it crossed the river.

As it were, the Krall and cattle were not taken and the diversions but held up the advance but little. Nevertheless the Zulu seeing some advantage to the scattered enemy, came off the hill to the attack.  The large leading Ndwandwe regiment was eventually seen off but the much smaller numbers of the Zulu lead to them being flanked and eventually defeated.

This fun game highlighting that the Zulu, both in their early history and the later 1879 era, still hold great interest for me.

My 15mm Zulu hordes (playing Ndwandwe) in front of my homemade krall.  The huts are solid wood for use as doll heads painted as thatch. The 'wood' fence is unwound copper cable wire. All of which is placed on an old computer CD.

The Ndwandwe file across the river ford and attack the krall defended by a few Zulu.

Andrew pushing in his troops once again as Shaka himself aids in the defense.

Spartacus and the Romans

This week seems to be the time when all these summer projects have all been finished seemingly all at once. One of these has been my 28mm DBA based Spartacus Servile War armies.

A little background first.  I have played DBA for sometime now but only once a year at the Enfilade convention held in Washington State.  No one up here plays it but I fell in love with the concept of the game. This being having all but 12 elements in a army, a maximum of 48 figures, but much often less, to paint yet with all the research and history to study which I enjoy.  The game rules themselves?  Well, it is quite arguably quite "dicey" and well, the dice often fail me.  I roll ones a lot.  Club champion at one time.  And while I did place 3rd in the Open Tourney one year - still befuddles me how THAT happened - I don't fare all that well in the tournaments.   Probably because I only play it once a year and never look at the rules?  Maybe.

Anyway, I have some armies in the preferred 15mm, with some more to paint, but my eyes are needing reading glasses to paint with, and all that detail I do paint on the 15's are lost when they are all far down on the tabletop.  So I have been concentrating on 28mm.  One of the boxes of lead sitting patiently in storage has been my 'Spartacus' armies.  These are the Romans and the slaves in revolt led by Spartacus.  I have always had an interest in the Romans and had fitfully collected some in a rather haphazard way through inexpensive purchases at bring and buys (ooh, a big bag for only....!) or by trades.  [as an aside, I consider traded figures to be free.  If that I have, I am willing to part with, then it has no value to me even if I had paid well for it years before when I thought it WAS important! ]  I usually asked of the trader, "So what do you have to trade."  If the answer was, "I got some Republican Romans" I said to add them to the mix.  The local store had one lone bag of Gauls on a good deal, so they were added. As were some old Gladiators.   So basically this force of almost 100 figures was gathered with no particular purpose in mind.  But the Gladiators were the spark as was flipping through an old wargame magazine on an article about the revolt. 

So I went into the box to sort out what I had.  Hmm, lots of Romans but some could be slaves with captured armor, yes?  But only these number of this type of scutum (shield) so those have to be for these guys.  OK, lets make the few gladiators as Spartacus's command.  Impetus rules are good.  Yes Doug, but you only have these numbers.  Well, if I add these Gauls to the warbands, I could get 12 elements a side. OK then DBA it is.  Good. Now organized.
...Then I put the box away for a long time.

With the thought of all that plain clothes and flesh on the ancients which frankly do not really fit my painting style, I did not have the interest to complete these. However the interest in the Dip method of painting and the use of Minwax and other inks and stains in painting of miniatures had me thinking this was the way to go.  A big departure in my usual method.  Dean's painting displays (see his blog at: WAB Corner ) was great encouragement. 

So I decided on several things for this collection.  I will get it prepped (knifing flash, gluing spears, primering) in the summer all of this outside in the sun. I think I may have a bit of Seasonal Affective Disorder and so just love the sun and high temperatures (and I live not in the climatic zone for it!) The primering in white to facilitate the type of painting; in contrast to my usual black primer.  I will conduct all the painting outside in the summer sun and so not on my nice high painting table with all the good light in the dark basement but on folding tables and chairs in the bright glaring sunshine.  This will mean inaccuracy in the painting, which I hope will be corrected in the staining stage but for which I was not overly concerned.  All this and I will want to be quick.  Really quick. Really really fast.  Heck I have a lot of other stuff to do!

Jumping ahead somewhat I tallied the number of hours I spent divided by the number of total figures and came to slightly over 5 minutes per. Wow, that's fast, even for me. At first that did seem to be a very short time, but big brushes, very few colors to be honest and ignoring all blotches did allow for speed.  I like the stain technique for this reason. It does seem to cover many faults!  Although I am of two minds about the overall effect.  The 5 minutes does not account for the terraining which frankly seems to take longer than the painting!!

Initially I tried Minwax but immediately did not like the effect or color even if it was the well used 'Tutor Stain'  Therefore I used the "magic wash" style using Future Floor wax and some inks thrown in.  I do not have the formula as I just kept adding amounts from a very old bottle of Winsor and Newton brown ink I had together another old bottle of GW to create the kinda red-brown mix.  Being a rookie at this technique I was not subtle about the application (remember, speed was the motivation) nor of the amounts and so lots of pooling can be found on many of the figures especially in folds and bottom of the shields.  I hit them with a spray of Dullcote but the shininess is still strong; a sort of semi-gloss but not a bad look; and I decided to leave it as is.

This whole exercise has been  interesting for me.  Is the cost of the armies important?  No, not really but it is fun to think of them as really cheap. Is the painting and its accuracy important?  Yes, I still found myself going "oh man THAT splotch is really bad...." but oh well, carry on.  Do I like the painting?  Well, yeah I think so.  But, let's revisit that one after I get it back out of the box in a year or so!

So with that long introduction here are some of the pictures of the armies
Starting with the Romans. 

Yes, yes there are no shield patterns. My rational is two fold. 1) all of the designs during this period are pure speculation.   2) Historically the Romans had to muster recruit armies quickly. Would they waste time on such details. 3) Do I want to? PS: I don't do decals.

Roman command.  As with this collection I really don't know or remember the manufacturers of the miniatures.  28mm however.

Some of the shields had imperfections, I just exaggerated them to give a 'battle damage' effect

 The wash technique seems to cover-up many of the wanderings of my paint brush. Not all, but many on first glance. So don't stare too closely.

My philosophy for painting horses? If it's brown, it's a horse!

This shot is interesting for the effect the wash on the boots.  My painting was a very quick splash of light brown to the foot area.  The wash then allows all the details to pop-out.  Let's see: number of colors used? Dark Red tunic[1], flesh[2],dark brown back of shield[3], brown pila& boots[4], gunmental shield rim and pila point [5], light brown hilt[6] bronze helmet, belt and scabbard [7].  Seven total colors and not worrying about edging or even coverage. Yup, 5 minutes is not unreasonable I guess.

And the Slave army. Do note that this version must be mid to late revolt as many of the ex-slaves have full Roman armor taken from the many dead legionaries by their previous victories over other Roman armies. Even the shields. Thus red for both sides.  To make a quick distinction, Romans in red tunics, slaves in pale.

in DBA 5 elements are warband, 5 blade (4 in captured Roman armor and for me Spartacus' blade General in, probably, unhistorical Gladiator armor.

the small group of gladiator miniatures which seem to start this whole collection!

showing the wide variety of miniatures I used to create the slave warbands

This is a good picture of the wash effect.  The middle warrior is a rather simple (but well sculpted) figure which I gave minimal colors.  The wash, albeit way too heavy, nicely enhances the sculpting. The shield to the left shows the wash pooling on the bottom. I must pay attention to that next time I use this technique. The shield in the middle shows a rather nice mud-spattered effect. Didn't do that on purpose; probably when painting the bases.  Oh well.

my DBAing at Enfilade

It is only at the Enfilade convention that I game DBA. I have quite a few armies based for these rules and so I bring some down for the 3 hour drive down the freeway. Yes Europe, we need to drive some 300 km or so to get our gaming in!

If I have wondered around the convention looking at games and chatting with once a year gaming friends, I sometimes get 'hit on the head' and get volunteered to play in the DBA Open tourney.  They were again one short and needed another to have an even number. Oh what the heck.

Of course, in a "Open" tourney players bring what ever armies please them.  Some bring an army they have not yet played, others a 'kick butt' version.  I had played my Spartans earlier so continued with them.  Only playing once a year does not help in remembering match-ups so I like the 'mono' type armies. While my first game was against Samurai which I managed to win, unfortunately, many of the players this year used medieval armies full of knights.  My spears do not match up well with knights.  I faced these in the next two rounds losing both and dropping out of contention.  As I said to myself, "Boy, don't bring a spear to a knight fight!"

my Spartans in the usual situation for my troops - bad!

the two figure Psiloi stand in the rear of the hoplite line helps....a little... against knights. 

This shot shows the end of my game against the Teutonics. While the formation is the best I could do against knights the dice again destroy any hope of victory.