WWII Folgore Italian Paratrooper, North Africa

Thanks for the input Mike. I will bear that in mind for any future projects. The one that I am busy doing is a 120mm resin figure of a paratrooper in full jump gear with knee guards and the lot in camo jump smock. I will post pics as soon as I have some progress on it.

Best Regards

Arthur

Arthur;

 When the uniforms in North Africa deteriorated troops either did without or used what they could get. There are pictures of Italian gun crews down to shorts and boots. A supply of British uniforms were recovered at Trobuk and the Axis troops used them, putting on the appropriate markings and insignia for their own units. You could get away with taking a British North Africa figure and adding an Italian helmet and applying Italian insignia. Ultracast makes the helmets:

 http://www.ultracast.ca/products/AC35/008/default.htm

Mike T.

Hi Jack

thanks a stack for all the info! What a help it all is. I will definately check out the osprey book. However odd the picture looks, it still gives a great indication of what the stuff looks like. Perhaps if the guy got rid of that stupid expression it might change things!

I'll keep you guys posted on the progress

Cheers, Arthur

The paratrooper helmet does look odd.  What the Italians did was take their regular army helmet and trimmed off the brim - same thing as what Germany did with their para helmets.

 As for the George Bush look-a-like, it appears the owner of the website used the same headshot and pose to display a variety of uniforms from many diffferent nationalities.  Looks like he imported the pic into some paint program and altered colours and such.

I didn't think George W was old enough to be in the Italian Army during World War II.... 

Something looks odd about this pic.  Does the face look out of scale to anyone else? 

Hi Arthur,

To my knowledge I have never seen a book that deals only with Italian paras. You might have to do a more generalized search such as the North African campaign.  The Osprey book The Italian Army 1940-45 (2) Africa 1940-43 does have one colour plate and about two pages on your particular request.  There is also a recently published book by Concord entitled Axis Forces in North Africa 1940-43 - this one has three colour plates.  A couple Italian model companies, Model Victoria and Royal Model, produce 1/35 figures - you can google these for painting ideas.  I tried an image search using folgore+division and found this:

The web page http://www.diggerhistory.info/pages-uniforms/italy2.htm#folgore for this photo has web links to badges and weapon.

.... and this from the pages of the Axis History Forum: 

Jack 

Thanks Steve! Some really useful stuff! This has been a great help as it's given me a bit more insight into this division than what I had. The pics were also good.

Thanks once again!

Cheers, Arthur

Have you read through this?

http://www.ww2f.com/north-africa-mediterranean/18297-folgore.html 

some pics 

Hope that helps,

Steve