Scenery for Tarawa

While we were enjoying a Spearhead battle at Ian's house (battle report to follow) Ian raised the issue of creating sea walls and barbed wire lines for Tarawa.  The former provided the Americans with pretty much their only cover from incoming Japanese fire.  The following pictures show the construction of these (logs laid on top of each other and supported by vertical poles).

So here is my version.  These are made for 6mm figures but the same technique can (I'm sure) be replicated for larger scales.

Note that I have not built up a level of earth to the level of the top of the sea wall (as in the pictures above).  These pieces are used to simply denote where the sea walls are (to determine which units are under cover from gunfire) but as it is not possible to integrate them fully into the scenery we're going to use, building the earth up around them will make them look 'wrong'. 

I also produced some barbed wire scenery (apparently this was placed under the water leading up to the beach so the Americans would get entangled while still a long way from shore).

I don't know if Ian will think they're OK - or how many are required!  Given the fact that we're gaming over the whole of the island, we may need an absolute bundle of both lots.  No doubt we'll discuss on Saturday.


How to make a sea wall

Start off with a lolly stick (these are 4.5" long) and mark a line down the centre.  Mark equal spaces along the line - these are for the vertical posts.

Lolly stick base.

Use a pin vice to drill holes through the lolly stick and feed through pieces of cocktail stick into the holes, pressing the lolly stick down onto a table top pokes them through.  These are your vertical posts.   The paint the base a mid-brown.

Verical posts added.

Base painted.

Now for the wall logs (the horizontal ones).   I decided to use three cocktail sticks stuck together (two don't look right and four are too high).

These are cut to 2.25" (so when placed together they exactly match the length of the base).  I placed these on small pieces of coffee stirrer (from Starbucks) with a blob of PVA on each.  These are not used in the construction, they just allow the three cocktail sticks to be stuck together.  As the PVA dries, I 'paint' more PVA down the length of the 'logs' and let that dry. 

Cocktail stick logs - pre-painting.

While the PVA is drying, I put some ballast on the base and cut the vertical logs to size (just a bit higher than the three cocktails sticks width).  The ballast is then painted and drybrushed.

Ballast added and vertical logs cut to size.

The coffee stirrer bits are then prised off and the horizontal logs are then painted and given a brown wash (to enhance the shadowing of the logs). 

The horizontal logs - painted and washed

Then these are simply glued (using UHU or a similar stronger adhesive) to the vertical posts and that's it!  Your very own Tarawa (or any other Pacific island) sea wall. 

These can be adapted of course, to include a jetty or a breach (caused by an artillery strike for example). 

The barbed wire is relatively simple to do.  Follow the same process as for the sea wall, but wrap thin wire around one end post and around each other vertical post.  Paint this a natural steel colour (with maybe a touch of orange for rust) and job done!