You can’t really do a Normandy amphibious landing wargame without barbed wire and beach obstacles, the Germans laid thousands of obstacles and many miles of barbed wire.
Barbed wire was typically laid around any prepared defensive position. I’ve realised I didn’t have anywhere near enough so I set about making some.
WHAT YOU WILL NEED
Here’s a list of what I’ve used to build these:
- 2mm mdf boards, pre cut to 120mm x 80mm
- Match sticks
- Wood glue
- Play sand (pre-cleaned, I’ve a large tub of the stuff that I baked in the oven when I built my beach boards. Don’t tell the Mrs!!)
- Your choice of flock/scatter
- PVA white glue
- Rule
- Snippers
- Agrax Earthshade
- Vallejo Light Sand
- Javis Barbed Wire, or Security Wire
Step 1: Apply PVA to one side of the mdf bases – this will be the bottom and will help to counter any warping during later steps.
Step 2: Measure one of your match sticks and snip it in half. Each match stick giving you two posts.
Step 3: Mark out on the mdf bases where you’re going to attach your posts. Glue posts in place using some good quality wood glue. Leave to dry, I left mine overnight.
Step 4: Apply Agrax Earthshade wash to the posts.
Step 5: Using an old brush apply PVA across your base, and apply sand. Don’t worry about being too accurate here, as later steps will cover any gaps.
Step 6: Once dry, I tapped off loose sand back into the large tub. Next, add your choice of flock, grass, debris etc. I’ve added a light-mid green flock mix with sand, to match my dunes.
Step 7: Using an old brush do a very light dry brush of Light Mud – or similar – to bring out the wood detail.
For my first attempt I glued on the wire before finishing the posts. For the rest I’ve completed everything before adding the wire, much easier!
Step 8: Super glue the wire in place. It helps to pre-bend the wire the shape of your posts, and to snip into manageable sections, rather than trying to bend the wire around the whole obstacle in one go!
So there we have it, some barbed wire for your Normandy beach. You could also add a rust wash or similar to the wire to age and weather it, I might well do this later. Likewise if you want to mix it up, use wooden skewers instead of matches to give you round posts.
I’ve aimed to build some relatively complex triple-depth entanglements, but you can use the same approach for barbed wire fences. Likewise if you want to build some of these to use in other environments, just alter how you finish off the basing.
These obstacles take a lot of wire with each one taking almost a metre. This would work out as quite expensive using the Javis wire, so I did some digging around.
Security Wire seems to be a great alternative, but it usually comes in coils of around 50 metres. I’ll never need that much, but found Last Man Last Bullet sell security wire in useful lengths – more cost effective than the Javis wire, and it’s essentially the same. Plus you can buy as much (or little) as you want rather than a 50 metre coil of security wire you might never use.
Now onto the remaining 14 sections of barbed wire…
WARGAME DESPATCHES 