VN081 pairs two SAS patrolmen in different camouflage clothing. The pointing leader wears an ERDL-style pattern; his companion wears tiger stripe. Both carry modified SLRs with extended magazines, and the leader’s rifle has a shortened barrel and forward grip. Their faces, equipment and clothing are prepared for concealment.
VN065 depicts an Australian Centurion with a long main gun, turret machine gun, antennas and extensive stowage. The commander is visible at the turret opening. Its broad tracks and heavy turret contrast sharply with the light patrol vehicles elsewhere in the Vietnam range.
VN031’s Australian patrol commander stands with binoculars in one hand and an L1A1 self-loading rifle in the other. He wears a bush hat and green field clothing. The figure was originally offered during King & Country’s Australian visit before becoming more widely available.
Before Eighth Army tried to break the Axis line, it tried to make the enemy look in the wrong direction. Dummy vehicles, disguised tanks and a false pipeline helped create a battlefield that could be misread from the air. El Alamein began not only with guns in the night, but with weeks of work on what an observer would think he was seeing.
“I was scared stiff,” Sapper John Haines remembered in an account preserved by NZ History. Private Ivan Divehall remembered excitement. The same parachutes could produce both reactions. On the morning of 20 May 1941, German troops descended over Crete, and the men watching them had only moments to turn astonishment into action. The invasion would be decided by airfields and command decisions, but it began as a profoundly personal encounter with an unfamiliar way of war.
A trench in the Tobruk perimeter did not look much like the sweeping desert war of popular memory. Its occupants were below the horizon, watching ground they might have to patrol after dark. Behind them lay a harbour. Beyond the perimeter lay an enemy whose advance had carried him past the town, but who still could not use its docks. Holding this unglamorous place imposed a cost on every mile of that advance.
VN030 shows four Australians moving on foot, with bush hats, varied weapons and equipment carried across their backs. The spacing between the separate figures is part of its appeal: the group can stretch along a path instead of being fixed into one compact fighting cluster. After the helmeted Marines of the early VN releases, the changed silhouette is immediately noticeable.
The slouch hat gives this Australian sergeant an immediate national identity, but the date and theatre take the story beyond Gallipoli. This is a figure for the Australian Imperial Force’s fighting in Europe during the final year of the war.
Explore King & Country AL108 Trooper Mounting Up with Brown Horse, its historical setting, distinctive details and place in the Australian Light Horse collection.
Explore King & Country AL107 Officer Turning in the Saddle, its historical setting, distinctive details and place in the Australian Light Horse collection.
