Thursday 30 April 2020

Some French Allies for Lutzen 1813 - Baden, Hesse Darmstadt and Croatians

My task of getting my troops ready for the Spring 1813 campaign continues. With these latest French Allies I've just finished the French force for Lutzen. They complete the III and IV Corps as defined by the Old Meldrum scenario

Here's the huge III Corps under Ney completed.



Here is the somewhat smaller IV Corps under Bertrand.



Researching all of the new allied units proved difficult.

The first of the new troops is the 2nd Provisional Croatian Regiment. Croatia was a new part of the French Empire having been gifted to them from Austria. They had sent units to Russia in 1812 and those had had their brown Austrian uniforms replaced with new green ones in the French style, even in one case being given a French Eagle. However the 2nd Provisional was not one of these and continued into the 1813 campaign in their old brown Austrian uniforms, but with French style pom-poms and cockades on their shakos.

I decided to continue to use the French Line infantry miniatures, but painted brown and since the cockade was actually mentioned I decided rather madly to completely paint those. You can just seen in the photos that they do have all three colours, red, white and blue.



The second unit is the 3rd Baden Line Regiment. Finding information on their uniforms in 1813 was even harder, though I did find that they had replaced their helmets with French-style shakos. Their flags were easily found though.



Finally there is one of the Leib Regiments from Hesse-Darmstadt. These Hessian troops again were a bit complex to research, everywhere I found seemed to have different uniform details for 1813. Then I found a site saying that in fact their uniforms were all over the place after the defeat of 1812 and that even within units they varied massively. So I decided it was almost impossible to be wrong and stopped worrying.



So that's the French force for Lutzen complete. I checked for the Allies and it looks like there were a heck of a lot of Russian Guard and Grenadier regiments at the battle, a lot more than I have anyway! Looks like I'll have to put an order in...

Edit: Since posting the above someone mentioned to me that the Hesse Darmstadt unit in the 1813 German campaign did not re-organise in the French manner, only the one sent to Spain did that. So I've done a quick remodelling job to remove the colours and plumes from the grenadiers and voltigeurs...


4 comments:

  1. Great work,inspiring as always.l fear you may have gone too far down the rabbit hole for me with 3 colours on a cockade in 6mm ! I blame the isolation :)

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    1. I must admin it was complete madness. Though oddly not that difficult.

      Really it was just a case of wondering if I could, and if you could actually see it in the photos, which you just about can.

      I won't be doing it on all my minis!

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