The hedgerows almost stopped the invasion. Inland from the Normandy beaches lay the bocage — a centuries-old patchwork of small fields walled by dense hedges grown atop earthen banks, some thick enough to halt a tank. A vehicle that tried to climb over reared up and bared its thin belly armour to German guns; one that stayed on the road drove into a killing zone. The answer was improvised in the field: Sergeant Curtis Culin welded steel prongs — cut from German beach obstacles — to the front of a tank so it could punch straight through a hedge bank at ground level. Tanks fitted with them were nicknamed "Rhinos," and they broke the deadlock.

This King & Country model — the fourth and finest of their Stuarts — is the M5A1 light tank "Sloppy Joe," a quartet of those hedgerow-cutting forks welded to its lower bow and a tank commander up in the open turret glassing the ground ahead. Armed with a 37mm gun and .30 calibre machine guns, the M5A1 was a scout and infantry-support tank used by both the U.S. and British armies — the British called theirs the "Honey" — and armour like it nosed ahead of the foot soldiers through the lanes beyond the beaches. Set it with the infantry it shepherded, the Gold Beach Advancing Rifleman and Bren Gunner, under the campaign's commander Field Marshal Montgomery in Normandy. A Stuart bursting through a hedgerow bank with infantry in its lee is one of the definitive Normandy diorama scenes.

Model: DD395 / King & Country / 1/30 (60mm) scale / matte finish / tank with commander figure