Tilting at Windmills

Minden Miniatures Frederick the Great (center) and Prinz Ferdinand (standing on the deck of the wind mill). The two round stands are RSM mounted generals. Windmill scratch-built by Herb Gundt. (click to enlarge)

I was scrolling through some of my photo albums in iPhotos this afternoon and I realized that I had assembled quite a collection of windmills over the years. As Phil Olley would say, "every wargame needs to have at least one windmill." Obviously, I agree with Phil when it comes to windmills. There is something about them that just makes the terrain look a little bit better. All of the windmills shown on this page were scratch-built by Herb Gundt.

Closer view of the figures.

German windmill for my Winter Terrain/Leuthen set up. Also by Herb Gundt.

The rounder winter windmill is more common in Saxony and Silesia and in fact, somewhere, I have a number of pictures of the real thing, in situ, that I photographed on one of the Christopher Duffy tours, in 1994 and 1998. Some people think that I only went on these tours to photograph potential terrain pieces for Herb Gundt to build. They would be partially correct on that score.

When we visited Hochirk in 1994, everyone was telling me that I needed to take lots of pictures of the church so that Herb could build a model. So I walked around the church, taking detailed pictures every 10 yards or so in order that I would capture it all on film, and then send it to Herb to model.

Below, you can see a more recent addition to my windmill collection: a Spanish windmill to use in our 1809 Peninsula Campaign that will start in 2013.

Spanish windmill, also by Herb Gundt