The Royal Army Medical Corps put its men ashore on D-Day in the same assault waves as the infantry they would treat — battalion regimental aid posts established within hours of the first landings, field ambulance units following close behind, the whole chain of casualty evacuation working under the same German fire that everyone else was under. Medics and stretcher bearers were classified under the Geneva Convention as Non-Combatants and wore the Red Cross brassard as protection. In practice the protection worked unevenly: a sniper might respect the Cross, an artillery shell did not, and the British medical service suffered its own significant losses at Gold Beach that morning. The medic carried no rifle — at most a revolver for the strictly limited purpose of defending wounded men from direct attack — but he did the army's other essential job, going forward into the same fire to bring the wounded back. The British medical chain that day stretched from the waterline to the surgical wards at Portsmouth: aid station to field ambulance to casualty clearing station to the hospital ships, the wounded man passed from hand to hand by men in armbands.

This King & Country figure shows an RAMC medic on the move with a folded stretcher across his shoulder, the canvas-and-wood litter ready to unfold over a casualty at the next stop. He wears the standard infantry battledress and the MkII helmet with the foliage-strung scrim of the Gold Beach figures, but the diagnostic markers are the Red Cross brassard at his upper left sleeve and the smaller Red Cross emblem on the canvas medical haversack at his side. The corporal's two chevrons mark him as a full-rank NCO of the RAMC — typically the assistant section leader of a battalion stretcher party. He carries no rifle. He works the same battlefield as the Gold Beach Grenadier putting Mills bombs over the wall and the Gold Beach Running, Firing Rifleman crossing the open ground, picking up the casualties their work creates, and answers directly to the CSM Stan Hollis VC citation: "By his own bravery he saved the lives of many of his men."

Model: DD416 / King & Country / 1/30 (60mm) scale / matte finish / 1 piece set