Based on German historical characters.
In January 1944, American infantry tried to cross a river below Cassino. In February, bombers destroyed the monastery above it. In March, the town itself was devastated. Only in May did the defensive system finally give way. Those were not four repetitions of one battle: each attempt changed the ground, the armies and the choices available to the next.
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.
Geoffrey Wellum remembered the telephone. Before the engine noise and the climb, before the enemy aircraft and the decision to fire, there was the waiting for it to ring. The young Spitfire pilot’s recollection shifts the Battle of Britain away from its familiar silhouette in the sky and back towards an airfield where men did not yet know what the next few minutes would require.
At a crossroads in Belgium, the convoy disappeared. Harry Leigh-Dugmore had been told to follow the vehicle ahead; when the military police waved him on, there was nothing to follow. He was twenty, a lance-corporal, and suddenly responsible for eight other men, a truck and a Bren carrier. The road to Dunkirk began, for his small party, with the discovery that nobody knew where to go.
King & Country AK060 Water Supplies Set depicts two Afrika Korps soldiers sharing a drink. One supports a jerrycan while the other bends forward with a cup. Both wear shorts and retain their field equipment; the green tunic of one soldier contrasts with his companion’s pale tropical clothing. Released in September 2010 and retired in December 2012, it is a two-figure set built around a single shared action.
The frame antenna is the first thing to notice on AK029. It rises above the open halftrack and makes this command vehicle recognizable even before the “Greif” lettering is read. The standing Rommel figure provides the familiar personal association, but the vehicle’s communications equipment is what gives the set its distinctive outline.
AK027 is a complete activity rather than a gun with a token attendant. Five crew figures surround the 10.5cm artillery piece, with different gestures and positions turning the space around the weapon into part of the model. The release also offers two useful configurations: traveling behind a tractor or opened out for firing.
AK026 makes the connection between a gun position and the journey that brought it there. K&C’s Desert Transport is an Sd.Kfz. 11 halftrack, supplied with a driver and vehicle commander. Its open body, tracked rear section and light desert finish give an artillery collection a practical counterpart to the gun and crew.
