COLD WAR TERRAIN: THE NORTH GERMAN PLAIN

Written By Steffan Carey

Welcome to the first in a series of blog posts focusing on Cold War gaming terrain.

As the Flank March Cold War range currently includes the British Army of the Rhine and is imminently going to be adding the Soviet Motostrelki (check out the Zapad 1 Kickstarter here if you’re reading this before 25/11/24) I thought it would be a good idea to focus first on the region where those two forces would have faced eachother in any Cold War confrontation: The North German Plain.

The North German Plain (green on the map above left) is a geographic feature characterised by relatively flat lowlands carved up by the great Rhine, Ems, Weser, Elbe and Oder rivers (as well as an extensive network of man-made canals) draining into the North Sea and the Baltic. These rivers would have formed the most significant barriers to any potential Soviet advance and so capturing key crossings would have been a top priority.

The defensive area of NATO’s Northern Army Group (NORTHAG) sat almost entirely within the North German Plain, with its southernmost units (the I Belgian Corps) beginning to creep into the much more mountainous German Central Uplands (tan on the map above) otherwise covered by the US dominated Central Army Group (CENTAG). The full length of NORTHAG’s section of the Inner German Border (the frontier between West Germany, the FRG, and East Germany, the GDR) lay within the state of Lower Saxony while some of the British and Belgian fall back positions would have brough them into North Rhine-Westphalia on Germany’s Belgian/Dutch border.

One version of the Warsaw Pact’s “Seven Days to the River Rhine” plan (red arrows on map above right) envisioned two major thrusts, both focused at NATO’s weakest points at the intersections between its Corps and Army Groups:

  • One in the North directed at Hamburg and the North Sea ports, driving along the Elbe river which formed the boundary between NORTHAG’s I Dutch Corps and the Danish/German dominated LANDJUT (Land Forces Schleswig-Holstein and Jutland).

  • The other directed at British, Belgian and German units defending Göttingen and the key river crossings over the Weser at the intersection of NORTHAG and CENTAG.

This second thrust location then, with the Soviets facing off against the British, is where we’re going to focus our attention. As this blog unfortunately does not have a budget that would stretch to some proper “walking the ground”, I decided that the next best thing would be to pick a road on the Soviet route of advance and take a trip along it through the magic of Google Streetview.

I find the best approach with a new hobby project is to start small. We want to reuse as much of our existing terrain as possible and find a few quick and easy additions we can make to give a 1980s West German feel. To that end I decided it was a good idea to begin in the countryside (we’ll rein in our ambition and save Berlin for a future blog).

Much of the former British zone from Braunschweig to Hannover is intensely farmed with huge areas of uninterupted rolling fields. But there are some significant areas of dense forest to be found breaking up the farmland, especially around Göttingen and right on the Inner German Border near Helmstedt where the first screenshot (above left) was taken. These trees are predominantly beeches and oaks, if you’re into arborically accurate terrain go for creamy white and grey-brown bark on your trees.

Moving into some small villages and hamlets as we drive Westwards in our imaginary BRDM-2 (screenshot above centre), the buildings (most looking identical to those present in the 1980s era photos I’ve seen) are a mix of two-storey brick houses with older ones being timber-clad and more modern examples (post-war 1950/60s reconstruction era homes) being clad in off-white or cream plaster. Many of the latter have a few courses of exposed brick at ground level. The gardens of these houses (just as in the 1980s) tend to have a low brick wall or fence at the front and at the rear it’s very common to have a chain-link fence. Tall wooden fences and hedges are relatively uncommon.

As we emerge into rolling farmland (keep your eyes peeled, there could be a MILAN team out there!) in the final screenshot (above right), the roads are periodically lined with windswept looking cherry trees. This isn’t the Bocage of Normandy, put away your hedgerows. The field boundaries here are far more likely to be indicated by ditches or raised paths and roads. The main roads are tarmacked and markings appear to be pretty similar to those used in the 1980s. Various crops are grown in the area - wheat, barley, rye, rapeseed, sugarbeets, potatoes, asparagus. For the 1980s, ignore any infrastructure that’s too modern such as windfarms but definitely feel free to include things like electricity pylons.

Here’s a few photos taken during NATO exercises in the 1980s (not necessarily in Lower Saxony) that fit pretty closely with some of the features we’ve identified:

Enough preamble! Let’s get on with making some terrain.

This first batch was made with a very clear intent - I’d signed up to put on my first participation game at RE-Play at the Royal Engineers Museum, I’d never made any terrain before, and I had only 4 weeks to put together enough to fill a table (while also getting the Zapad 1 Kickstarter ready for launch).

With the help of Brad from BobMack3D and BattlegroundHD, I put together a simple scenario (you can download it here for free) set on the Eastern edge of the (real) West German hamlet of Solschen where a Soviet vanguard platoon plows headlong into a British ambush.

To fill the table I needed…

A couple of houses.

Both were printed on an FDM filament printer (links to the designer and printer at the end of this blog post). It was my first time working with FDM prints, I knew they were preferable in many ways to resin for terrain (they’re less prone to warping and a bit more resilient to getting knocked about) but I was interested to see how noticable the layer lines were. The answer in this case - not all that noticable. If you get in really close the layers are clearly there but from any more than a couple of feet away they pretty much disappear. They do limit your ability to use things like washes and drybrushing, which can risk highlighting the layers, but in many ways that was quite useful as it forced me to try sponging on a lot of the colours and some basic weathering for the first time and that proved to be a really quick and effective technique.

  • For the plaster walls, I applied grey and black primer through an airbrush (a rattle can would work just as well) in a fairly random mottled pattern then applied a thin off-white layer on top. This meant the primer showed through just a little and gave a bit of subtle variation that made them seem a bit weathered and stained.

  • For the brickwork, I used Scale 75’s Brick & Roofs paint set and applied a beige basecoat (representing the mortar) then sponged on the red brick colour leaving beige in the recesses.

  • For the windows, I spray painted clear plastic folders black and cut them up before supergluing them in place. I’m not sure if I’d actually prefer the windows to look like they’re reflecting the colours of the sky and surrounding landscape and there’s also a bit of frosting from the superglue going on in some of them - I may redo these at some point.

  • For the gardens I used some second hand placemats I picked up in a charity shop. For the slightly more neglected one, I made a chain link fence with wire mesh and mixed some white and yellow flock into the green to represent daisies and other weeds. For the better kept one, I designed and 3D-printed the scalable fence/brick wall sections (I’ll make the files for this available at some point in the future) and glued down small mdf bricks and square figure bases to represent pavement and edging. For the driveway I painted on Asphalt from AK, the effect was good but you could probably achieve a similar one by sponging and stippling greys over a black base.

Some trees.

I got a bit ambitious here. My big worry was that I wanted something fairly realistic looking but I didn’t want it to get destroyed after a single day of transport, packing/unpacking and gaming. I decided to try out Geek Gaming Scenics’ “indestructible” tree method (you may have seen the end result on the Band of Brothers tables he produced that were touring the UK show scene for quite a while). I’ll be honest I had almost no faith that this method would work after the first few steps of using impact glue to attach spindly delicate sea-foam branches to a plastic tree armatures. But the key ingredient was liquid latex. It absolutely stinks so take it outside before you dunk your trees in it, but the end result once they’re dry is really really impressive and I only used about 100ml of the stuff (roughly £1’s worth) on six large trees. You can knock them over, drop them, throw them in a really useful box and they’re hardly even shedding flock.

A road.

I considered a DIY approach but, for the sake of speed, ordered one made from mousepad type material from Deep-Cut Studios. I masked off the road markings and sponged them on with white paint. The mousepad material immediately sucked this up which was very frustrating at first but, in the end, actually makes the lines look really dirty and worn. A happy accident. I then ruined the entire table by failing to check my own reference images - painting the black and white sections the wrong way round on my roadside marker posts - an obvious contravention of West German codes of compliance for which I can only apologise!

Finally, I cut up some welcome mats to make fields (I’ll probably make some that look more like they’ve been recently ploughed in the future) and painted up a resin fighting position from Full Metal Miniatures to give the Brits a bit of cover.

Here’s how it all turned out on the day:

Overall, a really satisfying start to this terrain project and a solid foundation with loads of scope for some future expansion and additions.

I’ll sign off with some links below to all the creators who produce and sell the stuff I’ve used for the terrain in this blog:

  • 3D Print Terrain’s Cold War in Germany - I can’t yet review the full STL pack but I have printed most of the houses and the garage and they’ve all come out very well and are the perfect fit for a West German themed table. I’m currently working with ROK Minis to find a way to have these printed and sold under license in the UK. Rich at ROK has some fantastic ready-printed armies and terrain on his store so check that out.

  • Deep-Cut Studios - produce the tarmac roads I’ve used for my table. They’re on a heavy mousepad material so they sit nice and flat.

  • Kore Aeronautics ‘70s Cars Kickstarter - Kore Aeronautics have now completed an ‘80s Cars Kickstarter campaign for even more choice. I’ve also seen them around at a few shows in the UK if you prefer them pre-printed.

  • BobMack3D - Cold War wargaming legends and producers of the STLs for the BMP-1 transports used in my RE-Play game.

  • (Cuddly) BuddlyCrafts - purveyors of the finest grass coloured felt at very reasonable prices. A good, reasonably priced gaming mat option.

  • Scale 75 - I used their Colors for Buildings - Bricks & Roofs paint set for most of the tiles and brickwork.

And some of the brilliant hobbyists who’ve provided inspiration along the way:

The next blog in this series will take us into the towns and villages of Lower Saxony.

So, until next time, happy hobbying,

Steffan Carey
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