America declared war in April 1917 with almost no machine guns and not one of its own Vickers delivered — not a single gun. A US division needed 192 of them. So the army bought British and French, and set Colt building the Vickers under licence in .30-06; ten divisions sailed in May and June 1918 carrying American-made Vickers guns. The gun the army actually wanted, John Browning's M1917, was better than any of them and came too late to matter: about 1,200 saw combat, all of it in the last ten weeks. The 6th Machine Gun Battalion finally traded its French Hotchkiss guns for Brownings on 14 November — three days after the Armistice.

Three men and the gun across two bases: the officer standing off with his binoculars, the gunner down behind the grips, the loader feeding the belt in by hand. Steel helmets, which puts them no earlier than 1917. The water jacket wrapped round the barrel is what separated this from everything else on the field — it let the gun keep firing long after an air-cooled weapon would have cooked itself. For a diorama in matching scale, set them with the Montana Hats artillery, the other American crew in the range. Across the wire, the German MG08 team is its opposite number and near enough its cousin, and the Marine rifleman is the sort of man it was there to cover.

Regal Enterprises WW100/A. 54mm, white metal, hand-painted in gloss enamel. Vickers machine gun with an officer and two-man crew, on two bases. Boxed.