Partisans!

Stealing through the seemingly endless forests and swamps of the Eastern lands, they come...infiltrating and fighting their way ever westward, in ever greater numbers...Partisans!  But who are they?  Heroic defenders of Stalin's Mother Russia, taken to the woods and fens to carry on the Communist dream and to fight the Fascistcapitalistimperialistreactionaryplutocrat invaders to their dying breaths?  Certainly that's the official Soviet version.  (See video below.)

Other people, many of them German, seem to have felt that the term Partisan was open to a degree of interpretation. Sometimes it meant civilians turned soldiers and actual Red Army troops trapped behind the lines and still fighting more or less in concert with the rest of the Soviet Army.  Sometimes it meant bunches of damned thieves and bandits who spent more time robbing and murdering their own people than they did fighting the Germans, the term Partisan existing solely to give their criminal depredations a veneer of respectability.  And there was a huge grey area between these two extremes into which most partisans seemed to fit best.

And to make it all even more annoying and confusing, lots of them weren't even Russian.  Many were Ukrainian, Lithuanian and Polish patriots to whom the Russians and Germans were all bastard foreigners and invaders who just needed to go away.  No matter.  The Germans shot at all of them, and all of them shot back at the Germans and, sometimes they shot at each other.  Chaos, randomness and woe.

 Peering at these Partisans as they stand at my desk top, I can't decide which side they belong to, but I suppose it doesn't really matter.  Whoever they are, I'm pretty sure they will be harassing the hell out of my Bolt Action Wehrmacht guys here in the near future.

Over the last few weeks, I've had quite a few painting disasters, including some AD&D Wereboars, some 15mm Wehrmacht Stug Gs and infantry, and some Warhammer Orc boys, all of whom have had to go in the strip jar as my stupid wrist has been so stiff, trembly and clumsy that I keep making mistakes and dropping things, but I think I've finally turned the corner on this broken arm thing, and I don't think these West Wind guys, painted mostly with Flames of War paints, came out too bad.  Eyes are still tough, though...just can't keep my hand still enough to get in there without leaving a huge blob of paint in the figure's eye socket.  (You might have noticed that most of these guys don't have eyes.) Oh, well.  At least I'm getting stuff done again.