The country behind Gold Beach was the bocage — a landscape of small fields one to five acres in size, each surrounded by ancient earth banks topped with dense, often four-meter-tall hedgerows that Norman farmers had been planting and re-laying for a thousand years. The Allies had studied the maps and the aerial photos but had not really grasped what the bocage would do to an infantry advance. Tanks could not push through the hedge-rooted banks. Visibility from one field to the next was sometimes zero. Every field had to be cleared on foot, then the next, then the next, with German positions concealed behind hedges only yards away — and the British infantryman's day in Normandy became a long series of pauses in cover, sweeps of the next hedge, and short bounds forward across the open between. The kneeling-ready posture this figure holds was the daily geometry of bocage fighting: the man in cover at the edge of the field, rifle balanced across his thigh, watching the next hedgerow while his section listened for the order to move.

This King & Country figure shows a Green Howards rifleman kneeling at the alert: right knee on the ground, left forearm braced across the raised left knee, the No. 4 Mk. 1 Lee-Enfield held diagonally across the body with the bayonet fixed. His MkII steel helmet wears the foliage-strung scrim net that distinguishes the Gold Beach figures, the 1937-pattern webbing carries the day's load — small pack across the back with the entrenching tool helve protruding, ammunition pouches at the chest, gas-mask haversack at the front. The Green Howards' regimental flash is visible at the upper sleeve. He waits in cover for the next bound forward made by the Gold Beach Running, Firing Rifleman, the Gold Beach Grenadier at his side ready to throw a Mills bomb over the next hedge, and CSM Stan Hollis VC somewhere ahead clearing pillboxes the way the VC citation describes.

Model: DD413 / King & Country / 1/30 (60mm) scale / matte finish / 1 piece set