Siegfried Line, Germany 1944

1/35 Warriors US Tanker leaning on the wall of a bunker, Siegfried Line, Germany 1944

This is a small vignette that I started a few weeks ago. It depicts a World War II US Army tank crewman leaning against the wall of a recently captured German bunker in the Siegfried Line (also referred to as the Westwall) in Germany, 1944. The Germans began construction on it in 1936, and the Line stretched nearly 400 miles from the border of Holland to the border with Switzerland. It included thousands of bunkers and tank traps along with land mines and barbed wire. Some of the worst fighting for the Siegfried Line took place from September to December of 1944 in the meat grinder known as the Hurtgen Forest. The figure is a 1/35 tank crewman in the ETO 1944/45 from Warriors, with a replacement head from the DML US Tank Crew, NW Europe 1944.

The figure’s jacket was open at the neck and had something resembling a shirt underneath. When I attached the new head, a bit of surgery was required to have everything look right. To cover my somewhat slipshod surgery, I added a scarf from two-part epoxy putty.  The upper sleeve of his left arm had a triangle representing a US Army armored division patch. It was way too thick, so I carved it away and bulked the resulting crater with two-part putty. After that, I primed it with Mr. Surfacer 1000 White Primer. I need to go back and refine the putty on the upper left arm. After that little fix, I can start painting

I like to put my figures on a base with some type of wall, fence, building section, or abandoned vehicle. I’ve wanted to build a World War II German bunker, and this seemed like a good time to do it. Over the last few years, I’ve gathered quite a few bunker pictures from the internet, especially of the Siegfried Line. The bunker is made from Legos with sheet styrene glued on it to provide a smooth, even surface for the two-part epoxy putty. Legos are the perfect foundation for walls and buildings. They come in a variety of sizes and are made of styrene. I always use glue on every joint to keep the Legos together. The hardest part of using them is cutting the studs off the top of the brick. I use a sprue cutter and then glue a section of sheet styrene over it to cover the hole left from the studs.    

 When I first put the section together, I was just going to add it to the rear of the base perfectly square. But then I remembered the Shep Paine adage, “don’t have anything square on your base, angle it.” That meant bulking up the wall with Styrofoam so the bunker would be at an angle. I used the regular crappy white packing foam you get with furniture and small appliances. This is in the form of a sheet, maybe ½ inch thick. When it comes to foam and modeling, I’m no snob; I use everything. Pink insulation foam from Home Depot/Lowe’s, foam core sheets from the dollar store, foam from meat packs (wash them well, you don’t want to get some funky stomach affliction from handling it), and the white crumbly stuff. The right side and rear of the bunker required me to glue two pieces of foam together to get the proper thickness.

After I bulked up the bunker, I left it oversized and glued it to the base. It’s easier to cut down after it’s glued in place than to measure and cut it. When the glue was dry, I used a large box cutter blade, which I had removed from the handle, to cut the bunker down to size. I kept the blade flush with the base and slowly cut through the foam with a gentle sawing motion. Even though I paid attention to what I was doing, I still managed to do a rather half-assed job. The sides weren’t too bad, but the back was way off. To fix the sides, I covered them with chipboard (fancy cardboard from a frozen pizza box) to square everything up. The back was covered with a thin (but not too thin) piece of shellacked balsa. If the balsa isn’t sealed, the moisture of the glue will warp it. Since the foam was off-kilter from my subpar trim job, I glued the balsa to the wood base and added shims of chipboard between the balsa and foam to fill the gaps. This would help square everything up. I applied a generous amount of glue to the top edge to secure the shims in place. When the glue had dried, I cut the protruding shims and coated the front and top of the bunker with Titebond II. This seals the foam and provides the two-part epoxy with a textured surface to adhere to.

Once the Titebond II had dried, I covered the top and front with two-part epoxy to simulate the cast concrete texture of the bunker. While the putty was still soft, I used sections of textured sheet styrene (scraped/hacked with a knife and saw blade to create a wood effect) to imprint the look of the wood frames used to form the wet concrete while the bunker was being built. When it dried, I didn’t like the texture that I applied; it looked like bad cave art. I debated tossing it in the trash can, but I just added another layer of putty (it was much easier than building an entirely new section of the bunker wall). This time, I was more careful/diligent about adding texture. After it had dried the second time, I was happy with the results. Now I could apply the veneer. I used walnut veneer to finish the base, which I glued to all four sides. On the front and sides that surround the ground in front of the bunker, I left the veneer a bit higher, so when I apply the groundwork, it will be level and not look like it’s oozing off the sides. The veneer was stained dark walnut and sealed with a gloss coat.  

 After the gloss coat dried, I realized that there were noticeable gaps on both sides where the veneer and the bunker met. I fixed this by filling the gaps with epoxy putty and then texturing it with a toothpick to match the rest of the bunker.

More on the figure and bunker soon.

RH