Toy Soldiers 4: WWII Germans

For whatever reason, while Airfix is a British company, their German soldiers were the class of their WWII soldiers that I saw.  These are extremely well-designed and detailed.    

These WWII German Mountain Troops were one of the first two boxes I got.  The other was a box of WWII British commandos.  I had a lot of fun with just these two sets of troops.  The picture on the box (which I unfortunately no longer have) showed these Germans with “Frozen Meat” medals on their hats, indicating they were Russian front survivors . . . err . . . veterans.  (Don’t invade Russia in the winter.)  Some of these figures appear to be on holiday as they were skiing and biking. 

  

These WWII German Infantry are magnificent in sculpting and details.  For some reason, they’re also just a little bigger than most of the other armies.  Perhaps over the years, Airfix went up and down in scale for figures.  They’re close enough to the others.  The officer figure is really dynamic and with this set and you get guys with flamethrowers.

 

A friend of mine had some WWI German Infantry.  Yep, they had spikes on their helmets.  They seemed to have some good detailing and had good poses (and a flamethrower trooper), but were technically terrible.  They had excess plastic coming off of most them from on their castings.  I don’t know if it was a manufacturing issue or the poses were too ambitious and created the problem. 

 

What’s surprising is that the WWII British Infantry were one of the worst of the Airfix sets, especially for a British company.  They were a smaller scale, had terrible poses, were badly detailed, and weren’t even well-trimmed either with bad excess plastic.  I think they rebranded this set as WWI British Infantry, so they were even lazy with them.  Needless to say, I didn’t keep any of these guys.  I also had WWII Russian Infantry.  They were molded in grey and were so uninteresting, I can only remember one of them.  The set came with a large mortar.  There was some dude with his arm out and hand empty having just fed a shell into it.    

 

 

These WWII German Afrika Korps troops are my easy favorites amongst the modern armies.  The details are great and the poses are inspired.  You’ve even got variations in their uniforms and how they’re wearing them.  There’s something like a Rommel figure with them.  If you were putting up in a static battle diorama, these guys would be the stars.  I did have set of WWII British Eighth Army that would be their appropriate opponents.  They weren’t bad in details, but were boring by comparison.       

  

I also had a set of WWII German Paratroopers.  I did not keep one of them.  They seemed a little smaller in scale.  They were badly detailed and strictly functional in posing, no creativity at all.