New Project: Far East

For a couple of weeks I have been pondering with the idea of starting with the Far East for Chain of Command. A couple of tweets from Richard Clarke about the eventual release of the Fat East supplement and the fact that I have been reading The Tactical Painter's Malaya 1942 Campaign AARs was all that I needed to dive in and start gathering a new platoon

The force I choose to focus on is the Royal Netherlands East Indies Army (KNIL - Koninklijk Nederlands Indisch Leger). I have always been interested in the small nations of WWII, and this is a great opportunity to, not only start a theater I have never played, but a pretty little known force too.

Because I play in 15mm, options might be a bit limited. Initially I thought there weren't any companies doing KNIL in 15mm, and was planing on modifying Peter Pig's Dutch. But they are using the Lewis LMG while the KNIL used the Madsen. As I was going to have to modify pretty much the whole platoon to make them fit for the tropical climate, maybe I could modify some Brens to look like Madsens...

In the end I did find two companies that carry 15mm KNIL troops. I was quite surprised about that. One of them is QRF, they have packs of Rifles, LMGs, Command and AT Rifles. The other company is Old Glory, they have a Rifle Pack and an artillery crew pack.

I decided to buy everything from QRF except for the AT Rifles, and I also got a pack of Rifles from Old Glory, I hope they mix well. All in all it's about 70 miniatures. I won't be using all but I will need around 50 because, for what I could gather, KNIL platoons where about 50 men strong.

These are the two lists I was able to create with the data I gathered.

You can find the original "research" HERE.