Let´s start with a real highlight: Our naval specialist Cabrio was very busy again and has created a British Tribal class destroyer. The model is very detailed and will replace the Fletcher class destroyer or Flower class corvette on some maps with British troops, like Narvik and Corkscrew. Besides its main armament of four dual mount 4,7inch guns it comes with a quad torpedo launcher, two dual Oerlikon 20mm guns and one quad Bofors. The following pictures show you some of the details of this ship which was coded by Sarge31FR.
The British Tribal class was a class of quite large, fast and well armed destroyers which were being build from 1936 on. They participated in many operations, especially in the North Atlantic and the Mediterranean Sea where they were mainly used as convoy escorts.This made them targets for enemy submarines and bombers, too. 12 out of 16 Tribal destroyers of the Royal Navy were lost. The Canadians lost one out of eight, while all three Australian Tribals survived the war. One of the most spectacular operations was the boarding of the German tanker "Altmark" in Norwegian waters on 16 February 1940, were sailors from the HMS Cossack killed seven of the German crew and freed the 303 British merchant seamen prisoners onboard the Altmark.
Let´s switch from big to small, which doesn´t mean that there is any less to look at. Since we are currently in the process of providing our Dutch troops with as much original equipment as possible, our small arms expert RuppDee took up the task of creating a Schwarzlose M08/15 machine gun. This weapon replaces the Vickers mg for the Dutch troops and will also be used by the Hungarian forces. There´ll be a stationary and a tripod version. As usual, RuppDees´s model is of excellent quality as the following picture shows.
The Schwarzlose M08/15 machinegun with 7,92mm calibre was the Dutch version of the Schwarzlose 07/12 from Word War I. In 1940, large quantities of this weapon were available to the Dutch forces. Since they hadn´t been used much between the wars they were in almost perfect shape at the time of the German attack, forming one of the core weapons of the Dutch resistance. It was also used in the anti aircraft role.
Our next and last news for today is an addition for the Dutch forces, too. Nimrod6 modelled and skinned a Landsverk armoured car, and again this vehicles comes with incredible detail and high quality. The Landsverk comes in two versions which have different armaments: The Landsverk M.36 is armed with a Madsen 20mm autocannon and three Vickers machine guns, while the Landsverk M.38 has a 37mm Bofors cannon instead of the 20mm. Both versions are replacing the Renault FT-17 for the Dutch troops which has acted as a placeholder.
The Swedish Landsverk armoured car of the series 180 was one of the most advanced models in its class and superior to the German armoured cars of that time. The Dutch army bought several of those cars in the late 1930s, namely the types Landsverk 181 and 182. They were designated M.36 and M.38 and served in different independent platoons.They played a major role in the defence of the airfields against German paratroopers and destroyed many Ju-52s. Even some German armoured vehicles were destroyed by the Landsverks, with not even one casualty from enemy ground-fire. So it´s no surprise that the Wehrmacht added the surviving Landsverks into their own vehicle pool.
This concludes our small preview of version 1.6 for today. Soon we will be presenting you another news with more highlights, so stay tuned und check back on our website www.battlegroup42.de regularly, or even better, join the team !
Some nice additions to the mod...
Need to find Nimrod6, please contact me.