COBI Churchill Mk. III Set 3046

COBI's Churchill Mk. III is a 1:35 model built from 654 blocks, 21 cm long, produced under licence from Relic Entertainment for Company of Heroes 3. The tracks work, the turret rotates, the gun moves and the hatch opens. A British tank commander figure with beret, Sten submachine gun and binoculars is included. All markings are printed.

It could climb things no other tank could

The Churchill was designed in 1939 to assumptions that turned out to be wrong: that the next war would look like the last one, with trenches, shell craters and mud. So it was given very long tracks running the full length of the hull, eleven small road wheels a side, and gearing for crawling rather than speed.

The war that arrived was mobile, and by every normal measure the Churchill was obsolete on delivery — slow, awkward and undergunned.

Then it went to Tunisia, and the British discovered they had accidentally built the best hill-climbing tank of the war. Churchills went up slopes that engineers had certified as impassable to armour, arriving above German positions from directions nobody was watching. At Steamroller Farm in February 1943 two of them climbed ground so steep that the German report assumed they must have been airlifted in.

The same qualities made it the chassis for the specialist vehicles of 1944 — the flamethrowing Crocodile, the bridgelayer, the AVRE with its demolition mortar. A tank built for the wrong war turned out to be the right one to convert.

In the COBI range

Part of the Company of Heroes 3 series with the US Air Support Center (3042), the German Fighting Position (3043) and the Sherman M4A1 (3044), all at 1:35. In the game the Churchill is matched against the Panzer IV.

Specifications

Pieces: 654 · Figures: 1 with accessories · Scale: 1:35 · Licensed by Company of Heroes 3
Model dimensions: 21 × 10 × 11.5 cm (8.3 × 3.9 × 4.5 in)