By the winter of 1944 Germany was running out of everything, and the men of this set show it. Their kit is a patchwork — field-grey tunics and camouflage trousers thrown together, wool gloves and headscarves against the cold, whatever could be scraped up for a last offensive. That offensive was Hitler's final gamble in the West: in December 1944 he flung his re-formed panzer armies through the snow-covered Ardennes, hoping to split the Allied line and reach the port of Antwerp. It was a desperate throw. The Reich was so short of fuel that the plan actually depended on capturing Allied petrol dumps along the way — and when the weather cleared and the fuel ran dry, the great attack stalled, and the last German reserves were spent for nothing.

The three figures are a Waffen-SS machine-gun team in the snow: a junior NCO with his MP40, a gunner shouldering the belt-fed MG34 and lugging an ammunition box, and a panzergrenadier with the semi-automatic Gewehr 43. They belong with the other Ardennes German set, the Winter Battlefield Conference, and the notorious SS spearhead of the offensive, Joachim Peiper — and, across the snowbound battlefield, the Americans they were thrown against, the whitewashed Sherman "Kraut Killer." In a winter diorama, an SS gun team trudging through the Ardennes is the German half of the Battle of the Bulge.

Model: BBG125 / King & Country / 1/30 (60mm) scale / matte finish / 3 piece set