Bales of Hay??

Go buy a couple of feet of manilla, sisel, or "hemp" rope (i.e., natural materials). untwist the 3 strands, wrap a threa or wire around each strand at appropriate locations for bailing, and cut into lengths. Then easy to form square with your fingers.

JK

D>

i used that stuff they line christmas and easter baskets with. you can airbruse it very convincingly.

I was going to make the same suggestion. I've used it for hay, tall grass, etc and, for most applications, you don't even have to paint it.

"Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs even though checkered by failure than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat"

On another diorama note, how big are those big hay stacks you see in the fields in Europe? This topic got me thinking of a new diorama idea of having pow's escaping or a downed airman hiding in one of the stacks and being searched for by the DML figure set of German police with dogs or maybe a few soldiers and an angry farmer with a pitchfork.

this might even be a good way to use those sought after French Resistance figures made about 30 years ago.....

Craig

Hmmm... French and Resistance used in the same sentence. Now there's an interesting concept.

Andy

did you know the size of the groups increased hugely after the liberation of paris? and at least quadrupled at war's end?

Years later my father still had nightmares about collaborator lynchings. They apparently didn't remove the corpse after death.

Bill Banaszak, MFE

Hell, even I'd have joined up at war's end. Seems like a pretty safe way to add to one's resume.

Andy

too slimey for me.

And James wrote

Thank you, James, for making my point. It was real convenient for one to join "La Resistance" at that point in (after) the war. Made it great if you were running for office in post-war France.

Andy

Andy:

Ever read Pierre Clostermann's "The Big Show"? He comments about the cynical feeling that the French Pilots who had been in the thick of it had toward the "Members of the Resistance" that came out of the woodwork after the Liberation of Paris.

Bill Shuey

This is a photo from the late 19th Century in the U.S., but I can't imagine European haystacks were much different. Looks like about

12-15 feet.

Works out to the 12 to 15 feet I estimated.

I remember a quote from an account of the first American raid against Ploesti. Aircraft crews reported that some of the haystacks opened up to reveal light anti-aircraft guns.

If you can fit a gun emplacement in one, it must have been of the same dimensions as quoted earlier.

This might make an interesting vignette itself. Not sure what LAA guns were there and will have to wait until my references surface in my laborious process of unpacking.

Cheers,

Doc H

I don't think a 20mm or 37mm would be that big. Now a hay pile that would hide an 88' is another story.

Bill Shuey

"I don't think a 20mm or 37mm would be that big. Now a hay pile that would hide an 88' is another story."

In my books, LAA is 35-57 mm. (Missiles are something else and weren't around in mid-WW2!). 20 mm is only a big machine gun. Didn't even think of it as a factor. You would not need a "static" emplacement for these.

Crew served guns would need space for not just the gunner, but the rest of the crew and the ready ammo etc.

An 88 emplacement would not fit under a haystack of the dimensions we're talking about. The gun would, in a passive or direct fire mode.

I assume that the guns involved at Ploesti were Bofors 40mm or something similar.

What I find a bit strange about this account is that it seems that the B-24 crews actually saw the haystacks "open up" to reveal the guns, which means that the defence must have been taken by surprise.

Legend has it that surprise at Ploesti was blown by navigation errors, but it seems that word did not get down to the German/Rumanian troops defending the place.

Cheers,

Doc H