COBI DUKW Amphibia Set 3110

COBI's DUKW Amphibia is a 1:35 model built from 508 blocks, 27.5 cm long, carrying the official logo of the 80th anniversary of the Normandy landings. The wheels roll, and an American driver figure comes with a considerable load of accessories — a bazooka, a Browning, Garand, Thompson and M1 weapons, binoculars, crates, barrels, cans, a spare wheel and two lengths of barbed wire.

The name is a parts code

DUKW is not an acronym for anything. It is GMC's internal designation, read letter by letter: D for the 1942 model year, U for utility, K for all-wheel drive, W for two driven rear axles. Somebody in the factory filled in a form and accidentally named an icon.

Soldiers pronounced it Duck, which suited a vehicle that swam.

What it solved

An amphibious landing has a bottleneck nobody sees in the newsreels: supplies. Landing craft can put cargo on a beach, but somebody then has to move it inland, and a beach under fire is the worst possible place to be unloading lorries.

The DUKW skipped the step. It was loaded from a ship at sea, drove itself ashore through the surf, and kept going up the road to a supply dump without stopping. Two and a quarter tonnes, or 25 men, from ship to inland in one movement. Around 21,000 were built, and they mattered more at Normandy than most of the vehicles that get remembered.

They still work: the tourist duck boats in several cities are the original vehicles or copies of them.

Specifications

Pieces: 508 · Figures: 1 with accessories · Scale: 1:35
Model dimensions: 27.5 × 8.5 cm (10.8 × 3.3 in)