....and Hessians, Brunswickers, Schaumburger-Lippers* and Reichsarmee. And a few more Piedmontese and Hanoverians. As I've more or less completed the Saxons, Piedmontese and Spanish for the WAS and SYW, I started looking around for other gaps. And there were a lot. I hadn't got all of Britain's allies from His Britannic Majesty's Army/The Army of Observation, so that meant the Hessians etc.had to be ordered. And then there was the other big participant in the Pragmatic Army, the Dutch. And I only have one 1/2 unit for the Reichsarmee (made up of odd grenadiers left over from previous recruiting drives.
* Can anyone tell me what the correct demonym is for folk from Schaumburg-Lippe is? They only made up 1 battalion of line infantry, plus a small squadron of light cavalry and small company of jägers. A fraction of game unit at my normal scale.
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| "More blue-coated 18th century infantry?! Why not use those Prussians over there. He's used them before in the Fontenoy games. Who can tell at this scale that they're not Dutch?" "Well Sire, he mumbled something about the flags looking different." |
My first step was to trawl through, Kronoskaf for orders of battle for the various German contingents and work out how many I would need for the biggest battles. However, the Dutch only fought in the War of the Austrian Succession, which is not covered by Kronoskaf. So I looked through the 2 volume For Orange and the States. The numbers of Dutch engaged in open battle (even at the big set-pieces of Roccoux and Lauffeldt, seemed relatively small compared to their whole establishment**, so I double-checked with any orders of battle that I could find on line. These seemed to back up For Orange and the States, so I went with a relatively small contingent of 6 foot and 4 cavalry brigades. The orders of battle, and maps, can be found in this excellent resource owned by HM KCIII https://militarymaps.rct.uk/war-of-the-austrian-succession-1740-8/1747/first-section
** many troops were in the many fortresses of the Low Countries.
My astute reader would have noticed the omission of the Swedes from that list. The Swedish were part of the coalition against Old Fritz in the SYW, and also fought the Russians in the intriguingly named "Hats' War" in the 1740s. But when I looked into the battles they fought, they were mostly divisional or brigade sized actions, and therefore not the level I normally game at. So I decided not to order anything for them. Maybe another day.
After some humming and ahhing about an Ottomon army of the period, I placed an order for about 30 game units of westerners (call it an early birthday/Christmas present).
