Santa sent to me 2021

 The perfect gift for Covid Lockdowns when you can't go anywhere:

This sums up my year.

SomethingAwful Secret Santa arrives

 Something got delivered, and it was for me and I wasn't expecting it.

It's a big box and it rattles.
 
There's a hand written card!

And a personal message from the commander of the KGL!

And an entire Perry Miniature BATTALION OF INFANTRY TO COMMAND!

I have the Waterloo Boxed set, but I didn't have a unit I could use as the KGL. Now I do! Not sure how I can equip them, with the Baker Rifles that the 2nd Light Battalion King’s German Legion had, but I will need to try.

And the ENTIRE buildings and courtyard to fight one of the most iconic battle locations of all time! Terrain that has it's own Wiki page.

La Haye Sainte (named either after Jesus Christ's crown of thorns or a bramble hedge round a field nearby[1]) is a walled farmhouse compound at the foot of an escarpment on the Charleroi-Brussels road in Belgium. It has changed very little since it played a crucial part in the Battle of Waterloo on 18 June 1815.

La Haye Sainte was defended by about 400 German troops during the Battle of Waterloo. They were hopelessly outnumbered by attacking French troops but held out until the late afternoon when they retired because their ammunition had run out. If Napoleon Bonaparte's army had captured La Haye Sainte earlier in the day, almost certainly he would have broken through the allied centre and defeated the Duke of Wellington's army.[2]

The capture of La Haye Sainte in the early evening then gave the French the advantage of a defensible position from which to launch a potentially decisive attack on the Allied centre. However Napoleon was too late - by this time Blücher and the Prussian army had arrived on the battlefield and the outnumbered French army was defeated.

La Haye Saint after the Battle by Talliou

I was just expecting a hill or a tree or something, but this is way above what I expected! Thank you NT RABBIT!  Nothing is broken 

This page goes into great detail of the battle and fighting that happened- if you've seen Sharp's Waterloo, when the Prince of Orange ordered a Battalion to reinforce and retake the building, and twice let them get cut to pieces by French Heavy Cavalry...this was that building complex.

Useful for any 28mm battle, historical, fantasy, The Silver Bayonet, World Wars or 40k. The roofs and stories come off so I can do interior battles. The buildings were 3D printed from https://www.printablescenery.com/product/the-farm/

Thank you, Goonsir!

Starting a new army - Bolt Action

 With the pre-ordering of my Epic scale Waterloo armies (and not going to arrive for 3+ months) and getting another full British and Spanish army of someone, I've got nearly the entire Peninsula army I want. I still need to base/wash and do a lot, but the figures are all there. 

So I got this this week. Started planning a AIF 6th division platoon for use in Libya/Greece/Crete.

I had a Great Uncle who fought the entire war

So I spent all of last night deep in a rabbit hole tracing a great uncle who joined the 6th Australian Division in 1939. He was a sapper who spent most of the war in the 2/2 Field Company Royal Australia Engineers - the guys who build up and blow up bridges, clear mines and build everything from latrines to POW cages. I found his war records under VX13952 and his unit records which go for 100's of pages.

He went to Palestine, Egypt, Libya (I think - the division was there to take Bardia/Tobruk vs the Italians), Greece (vs the Germans), Crete (German Paratroops), back again to the Middle East, Ceylon (I think, the unit was there and he got a medal for it), back to Australia in the NT and SA (where he trained as a radio operator) then to Wewak (whose airfield they built) to fight the Japanese. Came back via Brisbane and demobbed in 1945. 

In Greece they were blowing up bridges to slow down the Germans AFTER the rear guard had passed them. In the Pacific they were using Flame Throwers and throwing charges into Japanese bunkers (and getting bombed by the USAAF) at the front of the advance.

 I've found one mention of him in the unit records driving a truck onto a boat to go to Greece. 

The one war story I have is that he told my mother he got off a boat onto Crete and met a lot of very friendly(!) Germans who treated him very well(!!). He died in 1988 and I never met him.

He was awarded a medal for being "Mentioned in dispatches", though I couldn't read in his record for what. He also got dinged many times and got busted for being AWL and other issues about a dozen times. 

 Ch 1 Order of Battle - Army S 1 The 6th Australian Division

2/2nd Field Company

Embarked — 14 Apr 1940 — Melbourne

Disembarked — 18 May 1940 — Kantara

30 Jun 1940 — Palestine

14 Sep 1940 — Egypt

6 Dec 1940 — Libya

29 Mar 1941 — Maryut

10 Apr 1941 — Greece

27 Apr 1941 — Palestine

25 Sep 1941 — Syria

30 Jan 1942 — Palestine

Embarked — 19 Feb 1942 — Suez

Disembarked — 28 Mar 1942 — Australia

28 May 1942 — NT

15 Apr 1943 — Adelaide

Embarked — 19 Nov 1944

Disembarked — 26 Nov 1944 — New Guinea

Now I want to build a Bolt Action army based on the 6th Division in Greece and Crete and attach a squad of Engineers armed with shovels.