My favourite wargames subjects are the ones I can remember from my youth. Among them are those I could see on the TV news while sitting at the table with my family and listening to my father explaning his version of events.
The Iran-Iraq war acompanied me through my teens and while it fascinated me at the beggining to the
end it clearly became on of those merciless games were gas was cowardly thrown, bad tactics used, no prisoners were taken and the death toll kept on increasing due to 'human wave tactics'.
Recently while reading the new books from the series Middle East@War (Helion publishing) many of these common places were put aside in my head. The Iranian used Infantry attacks due to the lack of armour, but they were many times sucessful even if the Pasdaran and Basiji suffered tremendously. The river and sea assaults by the Iranians are acts of tremendous bravery and their use of the American armour and aircraft from the seventies (up to today) is a proof of skillful engineering even without any support from the producers and without any software related to repair and logistics taken home by the US personnel when the Shah was overthrown (not counting the US satellites which poured information constantly to the Iraqi side in the case of any Iranian movement...).
Another interesting aspect of the Iranian army is the mix of the hundreds of British Chieftain and Scorpions, US M-47, M-48 and M-60, Soviet material still bought under the Shah and many other captured from the Iraqi army or bought during the war. Even WWII tanks were still active like Chafee's and M-36 TD's. In the air the famous F-14 - not even sold to Israel - was flying and shooting down dozens of opponents alongside F-5's and Phantoms.
Finally another good reason to make an Iranian army of the 80's is to have another army to fight with my two Iraqi tank and mechanized divisions in 20mm and its air support.
A few M-60A1 from Esci painted with the closest light green I found to the Iranian AFV colour, Citadel Straken Green. As usual plenty of details were added namely a crewman with the typical M1 helmet and scarf made of GreenStuff.
The small Iranian roundel was constant and these M-60's also carry the symbol of the 12th Imam.
Up to now only one Chieftain, a repaint from Altaya.
Also repaints from Altaya are these two F-5 Tigers the equivalent of the Iraqi Mig-21.
The famous F-4 Phantom (also Altaya repaint). A few were recently seen targetting ISIS in Syria...
Closing this batch a AH-1J Cobra from Italeri. These excellent helicopters were credited with the destruction of hundreds of Iraqi targets with TOW ATGM.
Next: probably more of the same or close. Or maybe the last Churchill tanks for my 6th Tank Brigade.
A superb collection. I've got those books you refer to. Oddly I can't remember much of the TV coverage from the 80s but I remember the coverage of the Falklands war which was around the same time.
ReplyDeleteCheers,
Pete.
I think the coverage of Iran Iraq war must have been pretty scarce by British and US media as their involvement in the issue was pretty ugly specially by siding with Iraq that later becomes the devil. But here in Portugal we saw plenty of it.
ReplyDeleteDe caminho cobres os conflitos todos ...-:)
ReplyDeleteSou danado por cobrir
ReplyDelete