Aaron's Armageddon Team Yankee M1 Abrams Armored Combat Team

Aaron Mathie’s M1 Abrams Armored Combat team

Part 2: 31 March 2016

Like Casey, Aaron has been very busy painting a Team Yankee army for the boss, which has limited the amount of free time he has had to work on his own army. Nevertheless, he has made good progress. After painting enough US vehicles in the Winter Verdant variant of the MERDC camouflage pattern to last a lifetime, Aaron has chosen to paint his force in the Summer Verdant scheme, for a bit of variety.

Aaron has made some minor modifications to his M901 ITVs, to match add-ons that appear in many photos of the vehicles. He decided it would be a good project to add a small personal touch to his models. He constructed these items out of plasticard, and measured them by eye so that they look about right. The tall item just next to where the cupola sits is a periscope. The two long slabs are armoured shields that aid in protecting the crew during reloading operations. And finally the two tall pieces at the back are the supports for the Hammerhead when it is lowered in the travel position.

Aaron's M109s are very shiny at the moment. He has given them a coat of gloss varnish in preparation for a shading oil wash.

Part 1: Armageddon Weekend – 12 December 2015 Or how I learned to stop worrying and love World War III Sometimes you happen to be in the right place at the right time, and so it is with Battefront's Team Yankee and I. When I first came to work at Battlefront I mostly knew the company for its WWII product Flames of War, not being much of a tabletop gamer and the second world war having been used as THE example for how things are done in modern conventional warfare a lot during my time studying meant that the game looked interesting but not my bag era-wise, due to subject matter saturation; so I was mostly getting into a job that would allow me to do something I had enjoyed since childhood ... namely painting models. I was intrigued by the Fate of a Nation and Tour of Duty products, but again neither really matched up to a period that I was enthusiastic enough about to pick up a brush and create a force for, in my own time.

However, after a few weeks of working at the company I overheard Team Yankee mentioned in a discussion taking place behind me. This made my ears perk up, as I was pretty familiar with the novel having read it a few times over the years, most recently a few months before starting at BF. It was an especially tantalising prospect for me as it was exactly the period I had always been very keen on. I had played a little bit of hypothetical WWIII in 6mm at high school, been involved in countless campaigns of Twilight 2000, and grew up in the 1980s. I had access to heaps of reference books and journals kept by a brother-in-law of mine,  I read articles, memorised technical information and checked out pictures of NATO and Warsaw Pact forces in Europe, and was totally transfixed by the cold war period as only a kid can be. Team Yankee sounded like a project that might just grab me and get me to attempt some gaming. Within a couple of weeks of overhearing those two words, it was officially announced (internally) that BF was going to design a WWIII miniatures game. So here I was experiencing one of those rare moments in life where I was indeed in the right place at the right time.

Enough of your incoherent ramblings.  Get on with the army you have chosen and why already!  I hear you cry. Fair enough. I have chosen a US Army force for my first dip into Team Yankee the game. This choice was made for a few reasons, the first (and as a painter the most important to me) was that I really like the look of MERDC as a camouflage scheme, therefore Americans ticked the box straight away. However, I was also much more familiar with NATO (especially US) equipment, tactics and operational theory, than their Warsaw Pact adversaries ... A US force it would be then. But what type of Force, Mechanised Infantry or Armour? Being an aspiring (but never serving) infantryman in my late teens, my initial reaction was to roll a Mech Combat Team to show the colours as it were. However, as I started to jot down what that would require, the blindly obvious fact of painting quite a bit of infantry came to me. Being as I paint a lot of infantry for work it started to look a bit less appealing in my case (they are great, and over time my intention is to collect a Mech force) at least in the short term. In that case an Armored Combat Team was a bit of a fait accompli.  Therefore my initial 50 point list will consist of an HQ with one M1 Abrams MBT, two platoons each with two M1s, which rounds out my required picks at 40 points, which leaves 10 points to play with. After a bit of thought, the next pick had to go to a Mech Platoon with a fourth M47 Dragon ATGM team for seven points (the queen of the battlefield holds too much personal appeal to not make a showing in my force). Now the agonising choice of where the final three points were to be spent reared its head.

After even more thought, knowledge of the period told me to expect masses of Soviet armoured vehicles rolling through the fields and valleys of Fulda with malicious intent for my poor defenders, so a counter to that threat needed to be added in the form of a platoon of two M901 Hammerhead Improved TOW Vehicles to throw seriously scary ATGMs in the direction of the red hoard in order to make them reconsider their choice of launching an unprovoked attack on the Federal Republic. So there it is. I'm looking forward to getting a start on that lot over the Armageddon launch weekend, and I hope you all enjoy coming along for the ride.

M1 Abrams Armored Combat Team HQ 1x M1 Abrams 8 points  M1 Abrams Tank Platoon 2x M1 Abrams 16 points M1 Abrams Tank Platoon 2x M1 Abrams 16 points M113 Mech Platoon 4x M249 SAW team with M72 LAW anti-tank, 4x M47 Dragon missile team, 4x M113 7 points M901 ITV Anti-tank Platoon 2x M901 ITV 3 points Total 50 points