Greene's Division At Brandywine - 1777

10th Virginia Regt - George Weedon's Brigade


5th Virginia Regt - Peter Muhlenberg's Brigade


General Washington & Staff Confer at Chester Court House


9th Virginia Regt. - Muhlenburg's Brigade

Please click on the pictures to enlarge the photographs

In the previous post, Der Alte Fritz outlined how he organized his British and American forces around the battle of Brandywine on September 11, 1777 . I have posted several pictures of some of the units that comprise the 1st Virginia Brigade, under the command of Brigadier General Peter Muhlenberg, and the 2nd Virginia Brigade, commanded by Brigadier General George Weedon. The figures shown in the pictures are primarily from the Old Glory American Revolution range. The figure scale used is 1:10, i.e. one casting represents ten real soldiers.

The order of battle for these two brigades consist entirely of regiments from the Old Dominion State of Virginia. The first number, shown in parentheses, is the estimated number of men in the regiment and the second number represents the number of wargame figures used to create the brigade on the tabletop.

1st Virginia Brigade - Muhlenberg (850) - 90 figures
1st Va. Regt (120) - 20 figures - blue coat w/red facings
5th Va. Regt. (127) - 20 figures - blue coat w/red facings
9th Va. Regt. (391) - 30 figures - hunting shirts
13th Va. Regt. (200) - 20 figures - blue coat w/ yellow facings

2nd Virginia Brigade - Weedon (900) - 90 figures
2nd Va. Regt. (182) - 20 figures - blue coat w/red facings
6th Va. Regt. (223) - 30 figures - grey coat w/green facings, bowler hat
10th Va. Regt. (295) - 30 figures - hunting shirts
14th Va. Regt. (100) - nil
Stewart's Pa. (100) - 10 figures - brown coat w/green facings

My methodology in deciding the number of figures per regiment starts by taking 10% of the reported number of real men and seeing if that results in a viable wargame unit of close to 20 or 30 figures. In Muhlenberg's brigade, I basically rounded the 9th Virginia Regt. down to 300 men and allocated the remainder to the 1st and the 5th Virginia regiments. Then, I rounded those smaller regiments up to 20 figures. I could have also merged two smaller units together and maybe called on of the units the 1st/5th Virginia Regiment. No doubt some reorganization such as this might have occurred in real life once a couple of regiments were depleted by casualties , sickness, expiring commitments, etc.

In the second Virginia Brigade, I completely eliminated the 14th Virginia and allocated its men to other regiments. As a result, I was able to increase the 6th, which look rather natty in their grey coats and bowler round hats, while simply rounding up the 2nd Virginia to 200 men and the 10th Virginia to 300 men. I decided to keep Stewart's small Pennsylvania regiment on the books so that I could have a couple of dinky regiments on the table. I would imagine that the Continental Army had a lot of undersized regiments such as Stewart's, so it adds to the verisimilitude (how do you like that word?) of my army.

I should also mention that each Continental brigade also gets a skirmish stand of 3 figures. Skirmishers simply roll a D10 die and score a "hit" on a roll of "2" or less. So they can be quite pesky if you have luck with your game dice. Each brigade has a command stand with 2 figures on a 2-inch square stand. Usually both figures are mounted, although sometimes I had the second figure standing on the ground to create a mini-diorama. Division commanders such as General Greene are also mounted two per stand. The army command stand, shown third from the top, has three figures. This depicts general Washington (from the Old Glory Continental personalties pack) with one mounted aide and a second aide standing on the ground with his foot on a barrel as he peers through a telescope. This figure was included with the artillery command bag for the American side. It makes for a nice diorama for the army command stand, don't you think?

This all adds up to 180 figures plus 6 skirmishers, 4 mounted brigade command figures and 2 mounted division command figures in Nathanael Greene's division, or 192 figures in total. That is a relatively easy amount of figures to paint over several months and it is why the American Revolution is a good candidate for the 1:10 ratio of castings. It doesn't involve huge wargame units as the regiments average only 20 to 30 figures.

I hope that you enjoyed this little peek at Greene's division and that you will come away with an understanding of how Der Alte Fritz organizes an army. I will try to post some more pictures, perhaps of the Loyalist Forces, in my next blog entry within the next couple of days. Oh, one more thing, the buildings were designed and created by Herb Gundt of H.G. Walls and the terrain boards were made by Tony Adams.