B is for Beachead - Hong Kong Style, Part 1 - Beach Head Assault

As promised yesterday evening - a closer look at the Beach Head Assault sets from Hong Kong makers and some linked bits and pieces (second post - below)

This is the set I looked at the other night, figures are close to H0/00 and quite well detailed, bunker is basically the Giant copy of the Marx pillbox.

The same set, this time however it has had Byra Products overprinted and one lot of troops (the 'Enemy') have been replaced by the Airfix copies usually found in lucky-bags and cheap Christmas Crackers.

We then have 'Set Number 273' again in two slightly different versions, and this shows well how the HK manufacturers would plagiarise each other as happily as they would copy western producers. Although these look the same, they are in fact smaller, have new artwork (with one differing greatly from the other; planes...) and have slightly different contents, both from each other and the preceding sets.

These are later sets with poorer quality figures, to the Britains copies have now been added copies of the Crescent Desert Infantry. The left hand set is probably the earlier (closer to the original artwork, better detail to the armoured cars and planes), while the one on the right is the copy of a copy of copies!

The Haglon/Hagemeyer set is closer to the first two in style, contents and card size, but has the poor quality figures of the two above sets so I've placed it here in the 'hierarchy' of card types. Note also it's numbered 272 a digit below the above two sets, so there will be a connection lost in the mists of time, and it may be this set slightly predates them?

As so much HK stuff has 3 or 4-digit numbers, I suspect the numbers pertain to contracts rather than stock numbers, or; some do at least!!?!

Thanks must go to James Opie for this and all Hong Kong articles as his generousity in the past pretty-much doubled my HK collection at a stroke.