The marines of San Marco

By Chris King

This blog is on converting Wargames Atlantic Italian infantry to San Marco Marines - because every fool always needs a new modelling project, I have been busy over the early part of summer putting together some of the excellent and characterful World War II Italians from Wargames Atlantic.

Because every fool also needs to make his hobby more difficult, I've decided to try to create the slightly unusual Early War platoon structure that I found in digging around online: an officer in command of 36 men, broken down into two squads of eighteen men each; one armed with rifles and the other sporting two light machine guns. This approach does, of course, require more men than the 32 in the box, which left me with leftovers from my second.

Twelve of those men have become dedicated to operating the tripod-mounted support machineguns (there are two in each box set; the fourth machinegun has now been mounted on my Sahariana); a couple are officers, and one is now modelled as a medic, but I had ten spare Italians, and I fancied a project:

The San Marco Marines have a tradition running back to the 1550s, when they were known as the La Marina Regiment. They fought with distinction in several wars, including the Battle of the Piave River (1918) and during World War 2.

I decided that one of the simplest conversions I could effect would be to turn my spare Italian infantry into San Marco Marines. On the one hand, this meant that they could retain their helmets, but on the other hand, I would need to sculpt the distinctive tan sailor's collar and black kerchief. Cue the Milliput!

Ok. The Milliput did not work. So it's almost twenty years old, but I thought it might be worth a shot. It wasn't. I simply could not get the putty to work despite doing lots of research, and having used it before… albeit also about two decades ago.

So instead, I opted for using paper; as the collar sits fairly stiff and square on the upper back this ought to work.

Well, it worked well enough for me: after some trial-and-error with some scraps of normal 80gsm paper, I had developed the following pattern:

The bottom of the paper, which I didn't get quite right, is a bit of a cheat - the bottom of the broad collar’s deep ‘vee’ becomes the trailing ends of the black kerchief.

Once cut out, the paper patterns were soaked in undiluted PVA, then prodded and pressed into place using my sculpting tool; once dry, the bottom of the ‘vee’ was pinned in place when needed by a dot of superglue, and then the marines were spray-primed white.

Here's the final outcome (please note that I am not a stickler for minutiae at this scale, so forgive inaccuracies in equipment etc. I did try to model the dark-handled knives which seems were worn sticking out of the marines’ belts, but it was rather a lot of work for a detail barely noticeable).

The painting was straightforward - I am at best… a ‘jobbing’ painter - and I hand painted (well, butchered) the anchors on the front of the helmets. From my own limited research, they seemed to be fairly irregularly applied to the actual helmets!

It was really good to work with these great kits, and I'm looking forward to exploring my Italians more!