Box 003 – Hungary, a Work in Progress

Enough of true scale modelling. I have managed to slap some more paint on my Hungarian troops, not because they have a battle coming up, but because they have been shamefully neglected since their last appearance in 2019 in the southern DNEPR. The following pictures show them before final inking and glossing (I refuse to call the process ‘contrast painting’).

Figures are Peter Pig WW1 and WW2 Germans, some with Zeltbahn.

Officers are a mix of Italian, Spanish civil war and Austrian. The armour is a QRF Nimrod, Toldi, and Butler’s Printed Models Csaba.

The  truck is a Syborg 3d Print and the gun a 1/76 Airfix 6pdr heavily camouflaged, pretending to be a beute 10.5cm gun of indeterminate description.

My sole foray to Hungary was a trip to Budapest with the lovely Mrs K. The Schizophrenic  Museum of Military History reflected Hungary’s troubled past in the  path of successive bigger neighbours’ military steamrollers. It was all there in the museum: The cannon balls half embedded in the walls marking the high tide of Ottoman expansion and recapture of Buda in 1686, The Danube Flotilla, the failed Hungarian war of Independence in 1848-49, The Soviet years and afterwards. But what mostly caught my eye was a series of exuberant oil paintings of the Hungarian Air Force fighting the Soviets during World War Two. No graphic details of Soviet pilots baling out with burning parachutes or exploding ammunition convoys were spared. Alas no pictures emerge online. The English translation read, “Fliers from the ultra far right period of Hungary’s history”, whereas the German translation was simply “Unsere heldenisch Flieger” (our heroic pilots).

To my knowledge Nierhorster’s PhD Thesis is still the gold standard for information on the Hungarian armed forces. See the reference sidebar for the link.

I was expecting to be called out for not mentioning Hadrian’s wall or the Berlin Wall in my last post, but seem to have got away with it. 🙂