COBI BM-13 Katyusha (ZIS-6) Set 2280

COBI's BM-13 Katyusha is a 1:35 model built from 440 blocks on a ZIS-6 truck chassis, with rubber-tired wheels, an adjustable launcher angle, an opening cab and detachable rockets. Two figures are included, an officer and a private, both printed front and back.

Named after a love song

The weapon had no official name that anyone used. Its factory marking was a K, for the Voronezh works that built it, and Red Army crews turned that letter into Katyusha — the affectionate form of Yekaterina, and the title of a song written in 1938 about a girl standing on a riverbank waiting for a soldier to come home. The song was everywhere in 1941. The name stuck to the rocket launcher and never came off.

German troops chose a different one. The rockets left their rails with a rising shriek that nothing else made, and the men on the receiving end called them Stalin's organs.

Accuracy was poor and it did not matter. A single launcher put sixteen rockets into the air in a few seconds, and a battery saturated a grid square faster than tube artillery could be laid. Then the trucks drove away before counter-battery fire arrived — which was the real point of mounting the rails on a lorry.

In the COBI range

Part of the 1:35 historical vehicle series. The truck chassis is a useful base for building other wartime lorries in the same scale.

Specifications

Pieces: 440 · Figures: 2 · Scale: 1:35
Model dimensions: 20.5 × 7 × 12–17 cm (8.1 × 2.8 × 4.7–6.7 in, depending on launcher angle)