Cohorts of the Damned

After a long absence from this project, I finally made a big push to get the last combat troops for it done and dusted last week. When I started out, the plan was to do something along the lines of the British expeditionary force in China in 1860, with one British and two Indian regiments. As I went about planning, though, I decided that I wouldn't be able to choose between a Lancer or a Hussar regiment for the British, so I may as well go with both. Later on, as I was doing some reading on the 1860 campaign, it stuck out to me that the merits of heavy cavalry in particular – in this case the 1st Dragoon Guards – were heavily emphasised in the British reports, and that therefore, I probably ought to have a heavy dragoon regiment to hand, too. The end result was that I went from just three cavalry regiments to five. None of the regiments depicted here had any particular history with Japan; I simply pulled out three British regiments that were stationed in India in late 1867, plus tw...

After a determined effort, save for a brief sidetrack to round out the artillery , the infantry are at last done. The first of the infantry were done over a year ago, back in August 2022, so the completion of the full set has been a long time coming. My decisions for the infantry weren't too complicated. In short, I wanted to get a reasonable variety of appearances while sticking with regiments that were more or less on hand. That meant the Yokohama garrison, the Hong Kong garrison, and some regiments from India. As it turns out that was actually not too tricky to do: the late George Nafziger's compilation of orders of battle includes almost yearly accountings of the locations of the regiments of the British Army, so it was easy to check who was where. It also helped that there is some information on the Yokohama garrison I could draw on, which led to me finding out that there was a changing of the guard in early 1868 as the 1/10th took over from the 2/9th. That, conveniently, ...

Finally following on from  the last part , I stalled a bit on the artillery because there was just going to be a lot of technical complexity involved, in two main ways: firstly, I hate  painting wheels and have no idea how anyone gets paint between the spokes and along the inside; secondly, I like my wheels to turn, which means a lot of drilling and messing around with brass and pewter to get the axles fixed. Technically  I wouldn't consider the artillery fully done per se, but given that I've got all the guns and crew finished, I will call them just about complete even though I still have a couple of limbers and horse teams still to do. I have to admit it is quite funny that the first image you get when you google 'Armstrong Gun' is this one, showing of one of the half-dozen guns that were built in Nagasaki, rather than at Elswick or Woolwich. I did up the artillery basically on a whim based on what I thought would look fun, in no small part because my attempts to a...

Following my  last post , which covered the Indian infantry on this project, I've now rounded out the naval forces. These make up one of the smaller portions of the overall force, consisting of one unit of Royal Marines, a unit of Naval Brigade, and a gun crew. The plan originally was to do only a small handful of sailors, but earlier this year I decided to do a participation game at the Overlord show in Abingdon based on the 1864 Shimonoseki Expedition. A photograph by Felice Beato showing one of the British naval brigades – and a few stray Marines in the foreground? – in possession of a Japanese coastal battery at Shimonoseki in 1864. To do that, I decided I would need two units of Marines, two of British sailors, and one of French. When I started the process, however, I somehow completely failed to do any research into the kit worn at the time, which is why my Naval Brigade are all wearing sennet hats rather than white caps. Similarly, for the Marines I went with troops with sha...

For reasons I can no longer really work out, I decided, just as I was starting to build up some decently sized Japanese forces for the 1868-9 Boshin War, that a fun additional project would be doing some British and French expeditionary forces. Should I ever finish the British one, it alone will probably number almost as much as both my Imperial and Shogunate armies put together. Logically of course, that means the latter two ought to be enlarged... Questionable decisions aside, it's something that I've made fits and starts on in the last year, and that I now feel I ought to make a more determined push on. So, this first post will document the one complete element of these forces so far, that being the Indian infantry, and hopefully that spurs me on to get the rest of these finished in the coming months. The decision to field Indian troops in this force was made for three reasons. Firstly, why not? Secondly, the hypothetical structure of my expeditionary force was based on a sl...