Sunday, 4 March 2018

Bolt Action Force Historic ties (loosely)

After listening to several bolt action podcasts (Down Order, Call to Battle, Cast Dice and the War room. Check out your podcast app for them! ) I found a lot of them mentioning that they had picked a division, operation or particular unit to base their force on (Royal Marines, American Rangers at Point de Hoche etc). I have regular troops, airbourne and sas.  I aimed to pair up my regulars with the SAS.  After a quick Google search I located am operation into Germany called Operation Clipper.  Here is a  link  to the Wikipedia page.  The operation was ained at reducing the Geilenkirchen salient on the Siegfried line.  Part of this operation was the battle for Tripsrath. My Google had led me to a picture of an SAS jeep captioned SAS  assisting the 1st Battalion Worcestershire regiment in anti sniper duties.


The picture of the SAS jeep where the caption mentions the Worcester regiment.

I also purchased a book about the operation.


A nice little read covering the whole operation (involved American units also). This book does not mention the SAS involvement and after speaking to more knowledgeable people than me, it seems potentially the caption might be incorrect.
Fear not I said loosely based and that photo puts SAS in that area so that will do for me. Regular forces attacking the front SAS outflanking at the sides!!!
Now in my mind I want another bolt action army at some point. At the moment I'm  researching my grandfather's service in WW2. One was captured in Singapore and was a Japanese POW for the war. My other grandfather fought with the BEF in France in the KSLI (Kings Shropshire Light Infantry) accepted to be the last unit to leave Dunkirk (I believe, I'm in no way am expert). After this he ended up in Durham Light Infantry and in Africa and Italy (what he got upto there though we have no idea)
So this makes me want a small BEF force to represent my grandads unit. 


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