COBI Battleship Tirpitz - Executive Edition Set 4838

COBI's Battleship Tirpitz Executive Edition is a 1:300 model built from 2,960 blocks, 84.5 cm long, in the ship's distinctive Norwegian camouflage. The propellers and rudders turn, the turrets rotate and the barrels elevate. The Executive Edition adds an exclusive figure of a German radio operator with a brick-built Enigma machine, and two black plates with the ship's name and data mounted on the display stand.

Why the figure in this box is a radio operator

A battleship in a fjord does not fight. It communicates — and that is exactly how the Royal Navy knew what the Tirpitz was doing.

The Enigma machine in this set encrypted German military traffic by passing each letter through a set of rotating wheels, so that the same key pressed twice gave two different letters. The number of possible settings ran into the quintillions, and Germany considered it unbreakable for the entire war.

It was not. Polish mathematicians — Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Różycki and Henryk Zygalski — reconstructed the machine's wiring in the early 1930s and were reading German traffic years before the war began. In July 1939, weeks before the invasion, they handed everything they had to British and French intelligence. Bletchley Park built on that foundation.

Naval Enigma was the hardest to break and mattered the most, and when it was read the Admiralty knew where German capital ships were and when they moved. The hunt for the Bismarck and the long watch on the Tirpitz both depended on it.

So the little figure with the machine is not a random extra. He is the reason the ship in this box spent three years being found.

In the COBI range

Set 4839 is the standard Tirpitz with 2,810 pieces and no figure, and 4853 the same ship at 1:700. Set 4860 is her sister Bismarck.

Specifications

Pieces: 2,960 · Figures: 1 radio operator with Enigma · Scale: 1:300 · Display stand and two data plates
Model length: 84.5 cm (33.3 in)