Finns in Plastic?! Jim Butler’s New Project

Not content with being in charge of direct sales and marketing, Jim Butler has been on a crusade to amass as many Bolt Action armies as he can before someone notices and forces him to sit in meetings and answer emails instead. His latest project is a Finnish force – in plastic! Don’t panic; this isn’t a stealth release announcement. It is a really cool bit of kitbashing though, using our new plastic Soviet kit!

After watching (the completely accurate WWII documentary -ed.) Sisu I was reminded that no serious Bolt Action player can consider their collection complete without a force of doughty Finns. While browsing our small but perfectly formed selection of metal Finnish troops I overheard a conversation about how the delightful new Soviet plastics could just about stand in for the Finnish M36 tunics, and how the Finnish standard rifle, the M/39 “Ukko-Pekka”, was essentially an improved Mosin-Nagant. Replacing the heads with Stahlhelms and forage caps, the new Soviets could easily pass for Finns, and using a mix of German and Soviet support weapons wouldn’t be entirely ahistorical. Since my bits box was literally overflowing with spare heads and weapons from the German Veteran and Afrika Korps sets, as well as equipment from the Winter Fallschirmjäger and Grenadier kits, this seemed like a project too good to pass up.

At this point a colleague kindly informed me that I’d need to model the correct webbing to make them ‘properly’ historically accurate, but since learning that the global supply of Green Stuff is about to run short I decided to do the responsible thing and skip this step. Not because my commitment to authenticity is less than 100%, you understand!

The army list PDF is available on the Community site, and using it I put together a 1,000 point army made up of two Rifle Platoons – all made from the Soviet sprues and the contents of my bits box.

The core of the army is five 6-man Regular infantry squads – the Finnish special rule means that when these are reduced to three men they get bumped up to Veteran status – and two 6-man squads of Kaukopartio. These absolute monsters are tooled up to the nines and can fight anything, including armoured vehicles. Of course where possible I’ll make use of the Finn’s ability to outflank (and the Kaukopartios’ ability to enter from any table edge), so that I can advance on objectives without facing the enemy battle line. The special rule means I can rush onto objectives and if they take casualties I can be reasonably confident they will be resilient enough to hold on. 

Two sniper teams are really my counter for support weapons – a scalpel rather than a hammer, and very thematic. I don’t have much to take on heavy armour – just three ‘fausts – but if I can at least keep enemy armour at arm’s length that might be enough to hold onto objectives, and the two AT rifles will be able to deter light vehicles and also double as snipers versus heavy weapons and artillery.

Doing a bit of research on uniform colours I realised there was a lot of variation, but for the most part they seemed to wear a light greenish grey tunic and dark grey trousers. I tried a few test models using Runic Grey Speedpaint (over a white undercoat) for the tunics but this was a little too blue so I added a wash of Military Shade (or Magic Juice, as I call it) and this seemed about right. I first tried a neutral dark grey for the trousers, but on the tabletop it got a bit lost so I experimented with Tyrian Navy. Strictly speaking it is too blue, but sometimes to get armies to look right on the tabletop you have to dial up the contrast or add a little colour. On the whole, I’m happy with the look, I wanted it to be obvious they aren’t German despite the Stahlhelms.

The sniper teams have cloaks painted in Holy White Speedpaint, so that meant virtually all the details could be painted in a single coat – Satchel Brown for the rifles, Crusader Skin for the flesh. As armies go this was very quick to get tabletop ready; six or seven evenings at most.

Below is the army list – normally I’d have some bigger infantry squads but that army special rule helps these smaller units be more resilient (and the Kaukopartio are Fanatics). At some point I’ll go back and add a couple of captured Soviet BT-series tanks to make it more rounded and get it up to 1,250 points, but this force will be great for small games or to lend to people to try a game.