Having spent the last few months in Spain with the gallant Spanish attempting to hold off the voracious French, I found it was time (again) for a change. Being retired has many advantages, like time. But as precious as that is, it is also a drawback of giving you too much time to think. The Bard put it best in Julius Caesar when Brutus (I think) describing Decius (I think) said: "He thinks too much. Such men are dangerous."
I suspect my level of dangerous, never particularly high, is quite a bit less as I am now in my seventies. But I still probably think too much, and that leads me back to today's topic: North America and more particularly, the Anglo-American War of 1812.
Many years ago the great American war game pioneer, Jack Scruby, offered inexpensive, tin-lead castings in several scales, most notably (and still one of my favorites) 30mm. Today we call it 28mm, but the two are virtually indistinguishable. In any event, my first purchases in those halcyon days of discovery (war games, girls, cars, girls, more war games, real part-time jobs, and girls), were from his War of 1812 series. By today's standards, they are simple, almost crude, but since they were all we knew about (the British wave hadn't broken yet), they were the only game in town so to speak! I probably still have a couple of dozen somewhere in my collection.
The real challenge, however, was finding information on those fellows. Uniform information on pretty much most of the 19th century American army, save for the Union and Confederacy, was hard to find. The centennial of the American Civil War was only a couple of years past and quite frankly, I had had quite enough of it. There was stuff out there, but you had to look for it.
Flash forward nearly sixty years, and I probably have three to four dozen histories, references, tactics, and military minutiae books and pamphlets sitting on my library shelf. I still find that war fascinating, and, having thought too much, decided it was time to go back.
The spur, if you will, were some Expeditionary Force (EF) Militia Infantry II (Yeoman Crown Shako) 54 AMR 04-S. While no doubt these could be painted up as organized militia, the uniform is pretty much the same, including shako, of the 1812/1813 for US Regulars (which is what I did). I'll post some pictures next time. The quality and casting of these figures are superb. They come with interchangeable arms and poses for almost infinite (well...a lot of) variety. Given that the well done figures by Ken Cliffe with his All The King's Men line are no longer manufactured, this line by EF is well timed and based on their website, soon to expand!
I have played enough of the About Bonaparte (AB) rules to know that for enjoyment, and the relatively small battles of this war, the Expeditionary Force lines could be a renaissance in 54mm gaming. The pictures show some Americans and British organized for AB. Dirk Donvil has done a remarkable job of making multi-battalion Napoleonic battles practical with these rules.