COBI German Fighting Position Set 3043

COBI's German Fighting Position is a 1:35 model built from 642 blocks, 19.5 cm long and 13 cm high, produced under licence from Relic Entertainment for Company of Heroes 3. The roof lifts off to show the interior, the hatch opens, the entrance tilts, and ladders and handles are built into the structure. A figure of an MG 34 gunner is included, along with sandbags, a box, tools and spare weapons.

What is inside is the point

Open the roof and look at what COBI put in there: a stretcher, a stove with a chimney, a radio set and a rack for rifles.

Not a gun position — a place where men lived. A field fortification was occupied continuously for weeks or months, and everything about the interior follows from that. The stove is there because an unheated concrete box in winter is uninhabitable and men in it stop functioning. The chimney is there because the stove needs one, and it is a problem: smoke gives the position away, so fires were lit at night or not at all.

The stretcher is there because a casualty inside cannot be carried out through a crawl entrance by hand. The radio is the position's only value to anyone outside it — a strongpoint that cannot report what it sees is just a place where some men are.

Most models of military structures give you the concrete and the weapon. This one gives you the domestic arrangements, and they are what a soldier who was there would have recognised first.

Company of Heroes

The game models cover, suppression and line of sight rather than hit points, which is why a fortified position behaves in it much as it did in reality: very hard to approach frontally, and finished the moment someone gets to the flank.

In the COBI range

Part of the Company of Heroes 3 series with the US Air Support Center (3042), the Sherman M4A1 (3044), the Churchill Mk. III (3046) and the Marder III (3050). Set 3136 is the Regelbau 667 bunker of the Atlantic Wall.

Specifications

Pieces: 642 · Figures: 1 with accessories · Scale: 1:35 · Removable roof, modelled interior · Licensed by Company of Heroes 3
Model dimensions: 19.5 × 13 cm (7.7 × 5.1 in)