I is for I believe There's Some Interest in These!

I'm vindictive, but there yer go, 'e wanted it, 'e started it, but 'e doesn't like it up 'im Captain Mainwaring! Jim? Oh yeah, I posted one about a week ago . . . as a comparison! It really is pretty low-brow, puerile stuff isn't it? The emperor's got no clothes but he can rustle-up two Jim!

We see here some Lone Star, vintage, soft-polyethylene plastic, 54mm WWII German Infantry and/or Afrika Korps' toy soldiers. The theatre in which they are supposed to be serving being dependent on the colour of plastic with which they were manufactured. Some sources call the dark grey ones 'stormtroopers', but I don't know if that was how Lone Star advertised then at the time?

I don't have perfect samples of either colour, and while we have seen these in small scale, here I think (if not they are definitely on the Airfix German Infantry HO pages, both types - and DAK?), there are more poses in the larger scale, although as most of them are surrendering, they aren't that much use!

The six nearer-/either side of- the centre-line are duplicated in 1:76th (dark grey only), the four to the outsides were only available in 54mm. Colour-wise; the pale grey (and greenish-grey) being the 'Afrika Korps' iteration, and the darker greys; the standard Wehrmacht.

I had to repair two for these shots, the pale flamethrower was in three parts when I dug him out, and one of the surrender-flags had . . . err . . . been dropped! There seems to be a DAK = black boots & base, Wehrmacht = brown boots & base rule thing going-on here, almost the complete opposite of what actually happened in real-life?

The dark grey flamethrower looks a lot dirtier under the camera flash than he did in daylight, however to remove the dirt would take more paint-off so he will stay as he is, and it really doesn't look that bad in normal light - I guess a lot of silicate or quartz in the dirt have reflected the flash!

These have also been washed-out by the flash, the two nearest the centre-divider are actually the greenish grey, see surrendering guy above! Of course - with their 'Lone Star' caps, they make excellent Spectrum troops to back-up the Timpo captain's Scarlet & Green and Colonel White!

Comparison with the Charbens officer and a couple of similar poses from the ANZAC set.

Ah! Friedrich Paulus's 6th Army! The guy at the back is going to take his chances in the snow . . . he became the signal-box operator at Brookwood junction, you know; he wrote-up his memoirs as 'Through Hell for Hitler'!

Sort of 'stop the press' image, but more 'additional' as I hadn't done the blurb for this post when I shot these, it still goes at the end though, as I had done the other shots. A re-issue Charbens and second Lone Star DAK officers from that charity-shop lot the other week (month?), along with a less-dirty flamethrower who's come-in at some point; last PW-show, I think?