Polish tanks for 1939

A few days ago I was replying to a comment on my Polish infantry, when it dawned on me, that I never posted pictures of their armour, even though I finished those nearly two years ago. So here we go.

Years and years ago I was planning to do a 1940 French army (no longer necessary, since my mate Martin owns a very substantial one now) and I bought six Renault FT (also called FT-17) tanks from Trenchworks. Now the Trenchworks models are on the expensive side, but to be fair, these are some of the nicest resin models I have worked with. Extremely detailed and extra clean, bubble free castings. All the turrets sport holes for magnets and change of main weapon (both magnets and weapon options are provided). So it would have been a shame if I had to sell them on at a loss. Fortunately the FT seems to have been the tank virtually everyone bought from the French in the interwar period and the Poles were no different. So this gave me a chance to use them with my Polish army. The Poles actually did some modernisation on the FT before the German invasion so the tracks are not 100% correct and they used a different turret, but I guess without me mentioning it, hardly anyone would have noticed.

Polish Renault FT tanks with machine gun turrets

While I wanted my Polish tanks to feature the soft edged rectangles camouflage pattern, I quickly realised that this would be a nightmare to airbrush with the very angled frontal armour and the forward return roller assembly protruding out front. So I went with the wavy line pattern for the FT tanks.

Polish Renault FT tanks with 37mm cannons

Everything from here on (both tanks and crews) are by Warlord Games. The vehicles are all very nice, but one can really notice the difference compared to the Trenchworks. The Warlord models all have very, very tiny air bubbles which do at times really show after the weathering was applied.

Up first are the TKS tankettes. I have two with machine guns and one with the 20mm cannon. I always liked their looks, so these were a must. But I have to admit… I would not want to imagine going to war in one of these. Granted, their profile was extremely small, but their armour was so weak that I guess you could just as well have gone into combat as part of a machine gun team, with an even smaller profile.

Polish TKS tankettes

Now on to something heavier, the 7TP tanks. The name is somewhat ironic, since it refers to them being “7 ton Polish” versions of the Vickers 6 ton Mark E produced under license, but by the time the went into production, they actually weighted in at 9 tons. I have two 37mm anti tank gun versions and one twin turret machine gun version. Since the Battlegroup Blitzkrieg rules call for different numbers, I am sure that I will add another AT version sometime in the future.

Polish 7TP with 37mm gun

Polish twin turret TP7

And last the Samochód pancerny wz. 29 “Ursus” armoured car. Which is actually quite big, heavy and well armed for an armoured car. I went with the wavy type camouflage on this on. All eight vehicles that saw combat were part of 11th Cavalry Brigade and all photos that I could find showed them with this type of camouflage.

Ursus armoured car

Ursus armoured car