COBI D-Day 06.06.1944 Set 2054

COBI's D-Day 06.06.1944 set is built from 34 blocks and contains three figures, carrying the official logo of the 80th anniversary of the Normandy landings: a heavy machine gunner from a landing craft, a soldier of the 1st Infantry Division — the Big Red One — with an M1 Garand and a bazooka, and a paratrooper of the 101st Airborne with a parachute pack, a grenade and an M1 rifle.

The bazooka is named after a musical instrument

The M1 anti-tank rocket launcher had an official designation nobody used. What stuck was a joke.

Bob Burns was an American radio comedian of the 1930s who performed with a homemade wind instrument — two lengths of gas pipe and a whisky funnel — which he called a bazooka, after the word bazoo, slang for a loud mouth. It was a well-known novelty act; his show ran for years.

When the rocket launcher appeared in 1942, soldiers testing it looked at a long metal tube you held over your shoulder and blew things out of, and the name arrived by itself. The Army never officially adopted it and the men used nothing else.

The weapon mattered out of proportion to its size. For the first time an infantryman on his own could destroy a tank, and the Germans were impressed enough that captured examples were copied directly — scaled up into the Panzerschreck, which fired a considerably larger rocket.

In the COBI range

Sets 2048, 2055, 2058 and 2058A are the other D-Day figure sets, all at the same scale and designed to combine. Set 4849 is the Higgins boat and 4825 the PT-109.

Specifications

Pieces: 34 · Figures: 3 with accessories · D-Day 80th anniversary logo