Historical background

In my gaming experience many people try to build the most powerful army possible so they can always have a good chance of winning the game. I try to build different armies that I don’t see on the gaming table. I try to choose historical forces that would be seen on the battlefield and try to win with the forces that would have been available at the time. This provides a challenge as miniatures makers make the miniatures that other people will want to buy so in many cases I have to custom make my miniatures myself for my forces. Another issue is scale. I am currently playing a game called Flames of War (FOW). It is a Company level WW-II game that uses 1 man to represent 1 man and 1 vehicle to represent 1 vehicle. Men are mounted as teams but the miniatures represent a one to one ratio. The miniatures scale that are sold for FOW are marketed as 15mm and the men and smaller vehicles are 15mm but when you get into the larger vehicles they switch to 1/100 scale which is a little smaller. For gaming it works but I don’t think it looks right. 15mm is actually 1/87 scale the same as an HO scale train layout so I use those vehicles for my armies.
My current project is building an army for the invasion of Russia by Germany on June 22nd, 1941 – Operation Barbarossa.
Since the Russian Army used massive numbers and a higher level of control they use a Battalion size unit in the game while everyone else uses a Company size force. I built an Infantry Battalion for them already so now I am building a tank army.
The German army started the operation with 3300 fighting vehicles and faced 23,000 fighting vehicles (The Eastern Front, Duncan Anderson, Loyd Clark and Stephen Walsh, MBI Publishing, page 22). The Russian Army lost ¾ of their tanks in the first few months of the war (Ivan’s War, Catherine Merridale, page 183). Many of these were older models of tanks from the 1930’s (and earlier) some of which were used in Spain and the earlier war with Finland.
These are the tanks I am going to build for my new tank army.