Everything came down to one man's decision. In the first days of June 1944, a storm lashed the Channel and threatened to wreck the greatest invasion in history, and it fell to Dwight Eisenhower alone to decide whether to go. Trusting a forecast of a brief break in the weather, he gave the order — "OK, we'll go" — that launched D-Day. He also quietly wrote a note taking full personal blame should it fail, and slipped it into his wallet. Eisenhower's true genius was not tactics but coalition: he held together the prickly egos of Montgomery, Patton, de Gaulle, and Churchill, welding a fractious alliance into a single force that won the war in the West.

The figure presents him in the short waist-length "Ike jacket" that took his name, and tan trousers — approachable, unpretentious, every inch the manager of a grand alliance rather than a battlefield showman. As the supreme anchor of an Allied high-command display he presides over his field commanders: the "GI General" Omar Bradley, the headstrong George Patton, and his British deputy Field Marshal Montgomery.

W. Britain model 10081. 1/30 scale (approximately 60mm), matte-painted metal. Single foot figure on a sculpted base. Boxed.