COBI D-Day Allied Forces Set 2055

COBI's D-Day Allied Forces set is built from 35 blocks and contains three figures: a Canadian soldier with a Lee-Enfield rifle, a British paratrooper with a Sten gun, and a member of the French Resistance with a pistol and a hand grenade. Each comes with a stand. All uniforms are printed.

The man in civilian clothes did more than the other two

The third figure has no uniform, and on 6 June 1944 people like him achieved something no bombing campaign managed.

For weeks the BBC had been broadcasting meaningless phrases in its French service — lines of poetry, odd sentences, personal messages. Each one was a coded order to a specific Resistance network, and on the evening of 5 June the messages activating the sabotage plans went out.

Plan Vert cut the railways. Over the following days more than a thousand cuts were made to the French rail network — rails blown, points destroyed, locomotives sabotaged in sheds. Plan Violet cut the buried long-distance telephone and telegraph cables, forcing German commanders onto radio, which the British were reading.

The effect was measurable. The 2nd SS Panzer Division took seventeen days to move from Toulouse to Normandy, a journey that should have taken three. Reinforcements arrived late, piecemeal and exhausted, having been attacked on the way by people who then went back to their jobs.

None of them wore a uniform, which meant capture was not imprisonment.

The other two

Canada landed at Juno and got further inland on the first day than any other Allied force. British paratroopers took the Orne bridges before dawn in a glider assault of extraordinary precision.

In the COBI range

Sets 2048, 2058 and 2058A are the other D-Day figure sets, all at the same scale and designed to combine.

Specifications

Pieces: 35 · Figures: 3 with accessories and stands