French Navy in 1/2400 for Nimitz, General Quarters III, Naval War, etc.

In 2024 the guys in the gaming group will be getting into playing NIMITZ (by Sam Mustafa). Additionally, another group of gamers here play a lot of General Quarters III and I should get into that too. If others are willing to give it a go too, I'd be interested in learning the Naval War set of rules, which looks really good so far - it's free, nicely packaged, and can be found here: (https://www.naval-war.com/).

Due to various circumstances, NIMITZ and WW2 naval wargaming generally will have to be a secondary project for me, so I decided to get just a squadron to participate in multiplayer games. For maximum flexibility, I picked up a balanced group of the available CinC 1/2400 ships for the French Marine Nationale - a navy that nobody else in the gaming group was doing, and a force which could plausibly participate on either the Allied or Axis side, and (with some stretch of the imagination) the Pacific Theatre as well as the Atlantic and Mediterranean.

Marine Nationale expeditionary squadron on fleet exercises (CinC Miniatures).

The miniatures

As is usual for CinC the miniatures are well-made and finely detailed, though of course the gun barrels are a little flexible and potentially fragile. This is less of a concern for ships than for tanks where the barrels overhang the main body, so not too much of a problem. I painted the ships very simply with black undercoat and layered drybrushes of various greys tending up to Silver Grey (illustrations of French navy ships seem almost white). The turret stripe markings are apparently more a thing during the Vichy years, but they look good and will help distinguish my ships on the tabletop.

For the bases, I went with my favoured, cheap method of plastic cut from even and clear sections of takeaway food containers with the ships placed on top of a line of Selleys and then slid forward to give the impression of a bow wave. I was a bit impatient in doing this, so the wave effects are not ideal, but hopefully look fine at tabletop distances.

The squadron flagship is an advanced (though flawed) battleship of the Dunkerque Class,

backed by a La Galissionniere Class light cruiser,

and protected by no less than five state-of-the-art Le Hardi Class Destroyers.