The blue service dress the fleet called "Crackerjacks" — after the snack's sailor-suited mascot — clothed one of the largest mobilizations in American history. The peacetime Navy of the 1930s numbered a few hundred thousand men; by 1945 it had swelled past three million, most of them wartime volunteers and draftees who had never seen salt water before boot camp. They manned the greatest fleet the world had ever known, and they all wore this: the blue wool jumper, the flat "Dixie Cup," the black silk neckerchief. The uniform's odd details were inherited from the age of sail — the square "tar flap" collar once guarded the jumper from a sailor's tarred pigtail.

The figure walks out in full service dress blues, neckerchief squared and Dixie Cup low on the brow. He belongs in a liberty-port diorama: set him with the Sailor in Whites with Seabag reporting aboard and the Sailor on Liberty with Date ashore, under the flag of Admiral Chester W. Nimitz.

W. Britain model 13089. 1/30 scale (approximately 60mm), matte-painted metal. Single foot figure on a sculpted base. Boxed.