The mortar was the infantryman's own artillery — and for airborne troops it was very nearly all the artillery they had. Landed behind enemy lines with no room for heavy field guns, paratroopers relied on the mortar to reach what their rifles couldn't: a machine-gun nest behind a wall, a strongpoint in a wood, an enemy forming up out of sight. A simple tube, a bipod and a baseplate, it lobbed its bombs in a high arc to drop almost vertically onto targets no flat-shooting weapon could touch, and a trained crew could rain rounds down astonishingly fast. In the shrinking perimeter at Arnhem, where the British 1st Airborne fought surrounded, their mortars were among the few heavy weapons keeping the enemy at arm's length. The two-man set catches the instant of firing: one paratrooper drops the bomb down the muzzle and turns away, while his kneeling number two claps his hands over his ears against the blast. Both wear the British airborne's camouflaged Denison smock, a Lee-Enfield rifle slung close by. It completes the Arnhem group with Bloody Radio is Useless and the Airborne Jeep and 6-Pounder, all under the architect of Market Garden, Monty. Dug into a garden or a shattered street on the Oosterbeek perimeter, a mortar crew in action gives an Arnhem diorama its beating heart of fire. Model: MG087 / King & Country / 1/30 (60mm) scale / matte finish / 2 piece set with mortar
