Rapid Fire! 20mm Carentan in pictures

 

Well, this was Christmas in August. Last week Mário Laranja came up to Coimbra with 4 big boxes crammed with this beautiful Carentan City in 20mm. In fact when visiting him in Algarve a few years ago I saw most of these houses already built and it was the Uauu! effect. Recently Mário quit the smaller scales and concentrated his modelling and wargaming in the 28mm size. And that was a clever move as his Carentan ended up, to my surprise,  with me. My luck with friends that quit 20mm and give me all their 20mm collections apparently continues and I can only hope for more to come!

Carentan was the place of some vicious fighting between the German 6.FJ Reg. and the 101st US Airborne division on the second week of June, 1944. Of course while looking or thinking about Carentan one can´t forget the incredible work the series Band of Brothers made on the issue even with some imprecision here and there namely about the movements of Easy company, 506 PIR, while approaching and inside the city. Even so a big piece of action capturing very well the feeling of war. 

I got all 18 buildings and other structures like this, primed grey and with lift top roofs. So my only work was painting them. The level of detail on the structures was so good that some simple dry brush techniques made most of the work. 

All buildings and structures are made in card and then (clever trick), Mário let cyanoacrylate run all over ALL surfaces spreading the super glue with the tip of the jar or with the brush when included. This gave the structures the consistency and strength of hard plastic or resin. 

The interior of some of the building had no other floors but others did. I glued the upper floors when they existed as there are enough space to place hundreds of figures in all these houses. 

Here you can see the way Mário made the roof's interiors namely the always intricate dormers.

As said before my work was simply painting the lot. As you can see in this roof some dry brushing was applied in two tones in each surface. 

This is a bombed house. All masonry and rubble is again card, 'washed' in cyanoacrylate glue. 

Carentan was not destroyed in the fighting of the 2nd week of June but received plenty of damage. 

This arch gives a beautiful detail to this street. 

The House of the Arches is famous in the Band of Brothers episode on Carentan and it was originally a commercial area. 

The colours of the wood work, gutters and other details was just based on my perceptions of the Normandy buildings and the work of others from the Web. 

This is Carentan´s milk factory (the only factory of Carentan) with a nice place for the Germans to place a 20mm AA gun. 

The streets are made of small sections. Mário made a few shapes in card and they served as the matrix for duplicates in resin. 

This big house on the back of the famous Cafe de Normandie has a very large yard were even some vehicles can be parked. 

The telephone poles were made out of barbecue sticks and some street sections have bomb craters.

Here you can see two of the most famous buildings of Carentan, the Cafe de Normandie (left) and the Desire Ingouf restaurant (bottom right). Nowadays the Cafe de Normandie is the Bar du Stade, unfortunatly also closed maybe due to this damn pandemics. Desire Ingouf became famous with a picture of some of the paratroopers of the 101st Airborne division resting by it and some others passing by in a captured Kubelwagen. 

Mário Laranja used for this setting the Call of Duty map and game on Carentan. As its a video game its not accurate, missing all action and buildings around the train station and the Place de la République. Even so I think its an impressive lay out and a pleasure to paint. 

For more Carentan there is the Matakishi's Tea House lovely site you can visit here:

https://www.matakishi.net/carentan.html

Next: Im thinking about dedicating a bit of time to restore my very old Napoleonic paper models.