Although I primarily wargame 18th- and 19th-century battles, I've always wanted to do a D-Day game (ever since Airfix first produced those wonderful little gray-blue WWII Germans). I was aiming to be ready for the 80th anniversary of D-Day, but I failed pretty miserably. Maybe I'll make it in time for the 81st! I've built some suitable terrain and accumulated a reasonable collection of beach obstacles, landing craft, vehicles, and troops. Now I'm working on the Germans' Atlantic Wall defenses. Many of these were simply too large or too hard to reproduce in scale on my table, so I'm settling for some more "impressionistic" German fortifications. I'm by no means an expert on any of this WWII stuff, so please forgive any naive errors. I'm mostly just aiming for things that will look the part.
I started with the available hard plastic kits and tried to turn them into something more interesting (and possibly more realistic). Italeri makes two bunkers, one of which is actually a pretty accurate model of the H677 bunker. Both have no interiors, of course, and skinny little plastic walls. So I had to add thicker walls to make the interiors look less odd. I also added some infantry positions to the H677:
The other Italeri bunker is a strange, figure-8-shaped thing, which resembles no actual bunker that I know of. Here's what I did with it:
Most will remember that Airfix also made a couple of "big gun" emplacements, one called just "Gun Emplacement" and the other "Coastal Defense Fort". I've modified both of them pretty extensively. Here's the first:
Here's the other one:
The only other plastic kit suitable for the Atlantic Wall -- that I know of, at least -- was the thing by Arii called "German Secret Strong Point". I just used the main piece of the set:
Last, another "big gun", this one a pretty accurate representation of one of the gun positions in the Longues-sur-Mer battery. The front portion of the bunker was a plaster kit (whose maker I've forgotten). The rear and the interior I added:
When I have some more time, I'll post some photos of the smaller defenses I'm working on: pillboxes, AT positions, shelters, pits, and the like.