Thursday, September 22, 2016

Austrian army 1980's

Slow continued painting and basing of my Austrians has lead to sorting out some sort of army list for them.
Que 'opening can of worms' sound.

Now I had been using the good old Ultramodern army lists from 1986 to base my army on, and for the most part I've found them to be reasonably accurate. This doesn't extend to the Warsaw Pact with some of the equipment being rather inaccurate. Anyhoo, back to the topic at hand.

As part of its re-establishment as a nation in 1955, Austria was limited in what its armed forces could use. No missiles or submarines, or long range artillery. Surrounded by Warsaw pact countries, Austria's army was set up to delay invaders moving through to other countries (though I can't see Austria , especially the western end, being a convenient highway to anywhere). As such it was largely based round local troops and blocking units backed by more mobile regular infantry units and 3 Panzergrenadier brigades. The regular units throw up a few problems of their own equipment wise, but I'll get to that in a later post.

The local troops are quite interesting from an 'odd equipment' point of view. The blocking companys manned fixed fortifications which had Europes largest collection of fixed tank turrets. These were mostly 105mm Centurion turrets, but also included M47, M36, M24 and even someold T34/85's. To cap it all there were also Charioteer turrets. River blocking units were armed with 40mm AA cannons to shoot up likely crossing points
I've been pondering how to model these on the table. Obviously the attack factors take care of themselves but the defensive factors are far more difficult. Some options I have pondered would be
-counting as infantry so a 7 to destroy with AI factors.
-spotted as infantry (except when firing).
The points cost would also have to be sorted out.
I don't think that they should be allowed to ambush as I suspect that Warsaw Pact operatives would have plotted out the general locations of all the emplacements.
deploying on the table I would suggest that one tank turret stand and 1 infantry stand be deployed touching each other and also touching a terrain feature thats not a hill.
Anyone else have any thoughts ?

Bibliography.
http://www.fireandfury.com/orbats/modcwaustria.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure_of_the_Austrian_Armed_Forces_in_1989
Bruce Rea-taylors Ultramodern army lists 1986