A little summary of what I’m trying to do and why.
Why?
I’ve been fascinated with military history since I was a kid. It started with the battle scenes from the movies like John Wayne’s “The Alamo” and Yule Brynner’s “The Buccaneer”, which inspired countless hours digging through the family encyclopedia for knowledge of more and more historic wars and battles. Then came a Sunday afternoon local TV broadcast of the movie “Waterloo” that I recorded on VHS and watched over and over, which cemented my fascination with the Napoleonic period.
As a kid I had a fairly large collection of 1/32 plastic soldiers in eras from knights to the American revolution, Alamo, civil war and WWII, as well as a giant sandbox and some friends with their own collections to allow for even bigger battles. But unfortunately I never had, or knew there were, Napoleonic 1/32 plastic figures when I was a kid. As with most kids, playing with toy soldiers gave way to sports and other interests by high school. It was not until I was in my thirties and I saw an ad for The Toy Soldier Company in a history magazine, and received their paper catalog, that i restarted my affair with these figures. I bought some and painted them, something I wasn’t very good at, nor enjoyed. But I LOVED a the way the finished figures looked when massed together in formation. I painted about 350 of them, but my interest waned again over the expense and limited availability at that time.
About 2 years ago I started collecting again, this time with more income and a focus on the 1809 France vs Austrian campaign, and the availability of a much wider selection of figure sets relevant for that period, a goal started to form in my head; why not try to build the forces to do a game of one of my favorite battles; the battle of Wagram. Specifically, the French left, focused around the Saxon IX Corps and surrounding forces, including the Army of Italy, IV Corps, Guard, and Cav reserve. Opposed by on the Austrian side; I Korps, The Reserve, III Korps & IV Korps.
Daunting task to to be sure under the best of circumstances, but one all but impossible given the lack of any current manufacture of 1/32 Austrian fusiliers or Grenadiers. This kept my dream on the back burner, and limited the pace of my purchases, until discussions on Hat Industries (www.hat.com) forum showed that the company was looking to restart development of their long dormant 1/32 Austrians again. While these figures are still in development, the promise of their availability in the not too distant future inspired my efforts to build out the rest of the units in the mean time. And thus, my collecting shifted into overdrive, driven even further so by the COVID shutdown of pretty much everything else.
More to come, thanks for listening.
