COBI Churchill Mk. IV Set 2717

COBI's Churchill Mk. IV is a 1:48 model built from 315 blocks, 16 cm long, in a dark green rarely used in the range. The turret rotates, the gun moves and the tracks work. All markings are printed.

Dieppe

On 19 August 1942 a mainly Canadian force raided the French port of Dieppe, and 58 Churchills went in with them. It was the first time British tanks had been landed from the sea against a defended coast.

It went very badly. The landing craft put the tanks onto a beach of loose shingle, which the tracks churned into and could not grip. Those that got off the shingle found the seawall and the anti-tank obstacles beyond it intact, because the engineers meant to clear them had been shot down on the beach. Not one tank got into the town. Every Churchill landed was lost, and of roughly 6,000 men who set out, over 3,600 were killed, wounded or captured.

The raid is often called a disaster, and it was. It also produced the lessons that made 1944 possible: that a landing needs its own specialist armour, that obstacles must be cleared by machines rather than men on foot, that beach gradients and surfaces must be surveyed beforehand, and that a defended port cannot be taken from the sea.

Every one of those conclusions is visible on D-Day. The flail tanks, the bridgelayers, the fascine carriers and the flamethrowers of 1944 — most of them built on this same Churchill chassis — exist because of what happened on that shingle.

The tank

Produced from 1941 to 1945 and modified constantly. Strong armour, a low silhouette and unmatched ability on broken ground; slow, and with a six-pounder gun that was adequate rather than good. It fought in North Africa, Italy and Western Europe.

In the COBI range

Set 3046 is the Churchill Mk. III at 1:35 from the Company of Heroes 3 range, and 2269 the Cromwell of General Maczek.

Specifications

Pieces: 315 · Scale: 1:48
Model dimensions: 16 × 7 × 7.5 cm (6.3 × 2.8 × 3.0 in)