At Arnhem the radios failed, and men died for it. When the British 1st Airborne Division dropped into the Netherlands in September 1944 to seize the Rhine bridge — the last and most ambitious objective of Operation Market Garden — its whole plan depended on scattered units talking to one another by wireless. They couldn't. The sets were too short-ranged for the distances the division was spread across, some had been issued the wrong crystals, and the wooded, built-up ground swallowed their signals. Commanders lost touch with their own battalions, with the artillery, and with the men fighting at the bridge. Unable to coordinate, the division was cut apart piece by piece. "A bridge too far" was lost as much to silence as to German guns.

The three-piece set is a small tableau of that failure: one British paratrooper crouched in frustration over his dead wireless set, another frowning over a map, and between them a battered road sign pointing the way to Arnhem — the bridge they could not quite reach. Both wear the airborne's camouflaged Denison smock. It belongs with the rest of the Arnhem group, the Airborne Jeep and 6-Pounder Anti-Tank Gun and Bombs Away, and under the man whose plan it was, Monty. Built around the signpost, it makes a diorama that tells a whole battle's tragedy in three figures.

Model: MG084 / King & Country / 1/30 (60mm) scale / matte finish / 3 piece set (two figures and signpost)