Channel Dash - Final Work and Walkthrough

With all the Germans finished up, I took some time to finish painting the British Motor Torpedo Boats (MTBs) and Motor Gun Boats (MGBs) for the MTB/MGB attack scenario and I put together a pair of Swordfish torpedo bombers to help out with the air attack scenario.

The venerable (but hard to assemble) Swordfish

The Swordfish are from MSD Miniatures Luftwaffe 46 range. Historically, six Swordfish made a sort of “Forlorn Hope” attack on the German ships during the Channel Dash. So they are fairly important for the air attack scenario, but there was some doubt as to whether they would make an appearance. Kevin had ordered and was working on some ROS-Heroics Swordfish, without much success. I saw the MSD also made a Swordfish, so I ordered a couple to see what they were like. I didn’t think they would be too hard to work with, so Kevin decided to order some MSD Swordfish too. It seemed like we were back on track with the planes, but It really took a lot of effort to get the planes together. Kevin put up a couple posts on his blog about this too (post 1 and post 2). In the end the Swordfish turned out okay, but they were really hard to work.

PT Dockyard 72' MTBs (left) and 70' MGBs (right)

The British MTBs and MGBs are all from The PT Dockyard and required minimal assembly (there was a little trimming of excess resin to clean up the models and the MGBs needed the 20mm gun glued aft). The paint schemes are straight out of Mal Wright’s British and Commonwealth Warship Camouflage of WWII.

MTBs with a central blue panel

MGBs using light blue - dark blue patterns

I used a light blue and dark blue on a very light (almost white) gray. Having used various shades of gray for previous British coastal forces, this scheme looks a little odd. I think the colors turned out good, but I still need to base the boats.

With all the ships and planes done, Kevin and I schedule a walkthrough of the game. We set up the German capital ships close to one map edge and talked through the escort ship and fighter options. The choices for the German players shouldn’t be too tough, but they will have to figure out how to best use the flak from the escorts in conjunction with the fighters.

German capital ships all set up

The British will have a lot of aircraft (we are going with 6 Swordfish, 6 Beauforts, 4 Whirlwinds, and 6 Spitfires), but they won’t all be entering at the same time or location. So it might be hard to coordinate and organize the attacks.

A pair of Beauforts move in for a high-level bomb attack

We ran through several options for the attacking planes. The British will have a hard time with getting through and attacking the German ships, but it won’t be easy for the Germans either.

Swordfish dropping their torpedoes

Beauforts pursued by an FW-190 with Spitfire escorts

I think the game will look pretty good and we are hoping that it plays well too.