German tank crews wrote the opening chapters of the war. It was their Panzers, handled with speed and daring, that made "Blitzkrieg" a word the world learned to fear in 1939-41. But the crewman shown here belongs to the later, grimmer story. By the winters of 1943-45 the Panzer arm was fighting outnumbered on every front — swamped by Soviet tanks in the east and American production in the west, its irreplaceable veteran crews thinning with every battle. The black-uniformed Panzer soldier was still among the most skilled tankers of the war, but skill could not offset the arithmetic. Increasingly he fought a defensive war of ambush and retreat, in the cold, against odds that only grew.

The figure is caught off-duty, bundled in a reversible winter parka over his black Panzer uniform and carrying a ration container back to his crew, at home among the stone walls of a village billet. Set him with the reconnaissance Panzer Lehr Schwimmwagen, across the line from his opposite number the U.S. Tanker and the M4A3 Sherman his Panzers had to fight.

W. Britain model 25082. 1/30 scale (approximately 60mm), matte-painted metal. Single foot figure on a sculpted groundwork base. Boxed.