6DW: UAR Towed Anti-Tank Guns 1
/Now that the infantry and armour are all sorted, it was time to add the other support weapons to my UAR/Egyptian force for the Six Day War. Top of the list had to be anti-tank guns.
Looking at my orders of battle (available here) I could see that the vast majority of Egyptian AT guns were ex-Soviet 57mm Zis-2 pieces (around 300 of them), followed by ex-British 6-pounders (about 100 of them), followed by a smattering of ex-Soviet 100mm BS-3 guns (maybe 70 of them). Off to the Battlefront website to do some buying.
Interesting...the only pack of anti-tank guns that Battlefront has for the Six Day War is a mixed pack of two 82mm recoil-less rifles (which you get as part of the company HQ anyway), one Zis-2, and two BS-3s. Yes, it's technically a three gun platoon, but why use the least common anti-tank gun as the mainstay? Another Battlefront mystery!
So I decided, by buying the two-pack of Zis-3/Zis-2 WW2 Soviet guns, to get two platoons of towed anti-tank guns: one of three Zis-2s, one of two BS-3s. Here is the first off the production line: the Zis-2s.
The crews are a mix of the crews included in the pack with the addition of spares from the helmet-heads within the Peter Pig Modern Africa range (a very useful range indeed for filling in the gaps in any Soviet-equipment-using force).
I decided to give my guns five crew members each, rather than the usual four, as I have a feeling that I might need every man I can get to turn back the eventual Israeli tide!
