COBI 1942 Ambulance WC-54 Set 2257

COBI's 1942 Ambulance WC-54 is a 1:35 model built from 293 blocks, with multi-piece wings, a brick radiator and a windscreen with printed wipers. A figure of a paramedic with a newly printed helmet is included, along with a redesigned stretcher and a brick with the vehicle name. All markings are printed.

This ambulance saw the end of its own era

The WC-54 was the standard US Army ambulance of the Second World War and it carried four stretchers or seven seated wounded. It did the job that had defined battlefield medicine since the Napoleonic wars: drive as close to the fighting as the roads allow, load, drive back.

Then it went to Korea, and something happened that made it obsolete in a way no better ambulance could have.

In 1950 the US Army began using helicopters to lift wounded men directly from the front line. A Bell H-13 with two external litters could take a casualty from a hillside to a surgical hospital in twenty minutes, over terrain where a WC-54 would have needed four hours and a road that did not exist.

The results were immediate: mortality among wounded reaching a hospital in Korea fell to around half the Second World War figure. Every modern medevac system descends from it, and the WC-54 went from being the answer to being the vehicle that met the helicopter at the pad.

Ambulances like this one were still in service in some European countries into the 1960s.

In the COBI range

Set 2268 is the Limited Edition of the same vehicle with a field hospital tent, a surgeon figure and a numbered certificate. Set 2295 is the medical Willys MB — the small vehicle that did the first, worst stage of the journey.

Specifications

Pieces: 293 · Figures: 1 paramedic with stretcher · Scale: 1:35