Russian Imperial riflemen in composition — probably Pfeiffer (Tipple-Topple)? 🇷🇺⚔️

I don't know for certain. this maker. My best guess is Pfeiffer (Tipple-Topple) of Vienna, and it's the build that points me there. Pfeiffer made large 10 cm military figures without a base — and that very wobbliness is why he later took to moulding little raised bases straight onto them. These have no base at all, just those thin metal bayonets holding them upright, which would fit the earlier baseless Pfeiffer sort from around 1890s–1918. Russians were part of his range too. I did wonder about Lineol for a moment, since they made baseless riflemen as well — so a missing base doesn't prove anything on its own. But I've stood these next to my own Lineol figures, and it's not Lineol: the Lineol 10 cm men are far more slender, where these two are chunkier and more heavily modelled.

Which leaves Pfeiffer out in front — with one nagging doubt I can't shake. I've never actually seen Pfeiffer soldiers in a fighting pose; the ones I know are all marching and standing about on parade, not kneeling to fire. So either there's a Pfeiffer combat series I've simply never crossed paths with, or it's another maker I've not pinned down yet. For now: probably Pfeiffer, not proven. If you recognise the hand, do get in touch.

🇧🇪 Triumf of Mechelen — Allied Soldiers in Postwar Belgian Composition, 1945–1950 🇺🇸 🇬🇧 🇧🇪

Ochre-yellow men with dot eyes, thick paint and green pancake bases. No Elastolin crispness, no Lineol elegance, not even Durso's plumpness. These are Triumf, from Mechelen — the roughest, least documented of the Belgian composition makers, and one of the most honest.

The whole range is Allied. Not a German figure among them: these are the soldiers Belgium had just watched march up the street. Triumf built the British and the Americans on the same body and told them apart with the helmet — flat brim = Tommy, round M1 = GI. Same battledress, same webbing, one sculptor, two armies. It was an economy, and it works. What's here: 

🇬🇧 Tommies in Mk II tin hats, full chest webbing, marching and standing 

🇺🇸 GIs in round helmets — marching column, charging with the rifle low, kneeling, and flat on their bellies firing 

🇺🇸 US paratroopers, marching with the reserve chute lashed across the chest — that lumpy, flower-like mass with the dark radiating flaps 

 That colour is the first thing anyone asks about. It isn't fading and it isn't a repaint — it's 1945–1950 Belgium. Proper khaki drab needs stable earth pigments, and those were exactly the ones you couldn't get. Ochre was cheap and it was there. So the factory painted its Allied armies in the colour available, one flat coat, by hand, fast. Same story in the composition itself: coarse filler, soft detail, a slightly biscuity surface. Faces are three brushstrokes — two dots and a red mouth. Some of them look genuinely startled. That roughness isn't a flaw. It's the document. Triumf will never be collected the way Elastolin is. The sculpting isn't good enough, the paint isn't good enough, and there aren't enough left. But there's something in this ochre platoon the beautiful German figures don't have. Made in a country that had just been liberated, in a factory that couldn't get proper paint, of the soldiers who had just walked past the door. Not a masterpiece. Just the truth.

🪖 A Column of Tired Men — Elastolin 7 cm Wehrmacht Marching Infantry (1935–1940)

Look closely and you can feel the weight of the day in them. Shoulders a little rounded, rifles slung and shouldered rather than at the ready, faces set somewhere between concentration and exhaustion. This is a column at the end of a long day, not the start of one — and that mood is half the charm.

These are 7 cm composition figures by O&M Hausser, under the famous Elastolin trademark — the benchmark name in German composition toy soldiers, made at Neustadt bei Coburg. They belong to the 1935–1940 Wehrmacht range, the period after rearmament when Hausser's field-grey infantry showed the firm at its best, before wartime shortages set in. What keeps a column like this interesting is the variation Hausser built in: some carry the rifle shouldered high (Gewehr über), others march with it slung; stride lengths, head angles and the set of the shoulders shift figure to figure. It's how a handful of moulds became a living column rather than a row of identical tin soldiers. For me this is the heart of the set. Because the faces were hand-painted, every man has his own character — ruddy wind-burned cheeks on one, a paler drawn look on his neighbour, a mouth painted a touch too red on a third. That period style, rosy cheeks and dark-lined eyes, is very much of its time, and it's why these figures still pull you in. Under a lamp they stop being toys and become a group of very tired, very individual young men.

🌊 Das Boot in the Sandbox: Lineol Sailors, an Ekalin Kaleun, and a Plywood U-Boot⚓

A U-boat lies alongside, her ensign snapping in the breeze. A line of sailors files ashore in their dark blues. And off to one side, the skipper watches his men come home, binoculars in hand. It's a scene straight out of Das Boot — except the whole thing is about the size of a bread bin.

The sailors are Lineol composition figuresare from the 1950s — and they're East German. After the war the Brandenburg factory was seized, nationalised, and eventually shifted to Dresden (VEB Lineol-Plastik), where it kept casting figures until 1960 - 1963. Standing apart, as commanders do, is the officer in the leather coat with the field glasses. He's an Ekalin figure — a German maker who works in the same classic style and scale, so his pieces slot right in beside Lineol and Elastolin. And what an officer. The coat, the binoculars, the slightly weary stance — this is "the Old Man." Impossible not to think of Jürgen Prochnow on the bridge in Das Boot, or that battered white-topped cap that became the most famous prop in the film. The submarine is a modern laser-cut plywood model by Human Articel (China) — as far from a vintage figure as you can get. And yet she works. With a "2" on her tower and the ensign flying, she gives the crew somewhere to belong. It's worth remembering the gap between the toy and the truth. These cheerful little sailors stand for one of the deadliest jobs of the war: of the roughly 40,000 men who served in the U-boats, around 30,000 never came back — close to three in four. What made Das Boot unforgettable wasn't the action, it was the waiting — endless grey days broken by moments of terror, young men crammed into a sweating tube, singing along to "It's a Long Way to Tipperary" on a wheezing gramophone because gallows humour was all they had. Set your crew down on the sand, though, and you're staging the good part: the boat's back, the men are ashore, and nobody has to dive. The Old Man can lower his binoculars. Everyone made it home.

A Young Prince and His Toy Fortress 👑🏰⚔️

This fascinating German postcard depicts Prince Wilhelm of Prussia (1906–1940), the eldest grandson of Kaiser Wilhelm II, surrounded by an impressive collection of military toys. The caption reads "Die eroberte Festung" ("The Captured Fortress"), showing the young prince with a toy fortress, cannon, wooden horse, drummer's drum and miniature soldiers. Published by Gustav Liersch & Co. of Berlin, a well-known German publisher of illustrated postcards, this card captures more than just a royal portrait. It offers a wonderful glimpse into the kinds of military-themed toys that fascinated children in Imperial Germany during the years before the First World War.

There is also a touch of historical irony. The smiling boy playing with his toy soldiers would later serve as an officer in the German Army during the Second World War. In 1940, at just 33 years of age, Prince Wilhelm was killed in action in France. His death attracted such public sympathy that Adolf Hitler subsequently restricted members of Germany's former royal families from serving on the front lines. For collectors of antique toy soldiers, postcards like this are valuable historical sources. They preserve details of period toys that are often difficult to identify today and remind us how closely childhood, popular culture and history were intertwined over a century ago.

📡 Ground Control: NewRay Spotters and a Plastic Predator 🛩️🛩️🛩️

Something a bit more modern this time. Here's a small NewRay infantry group keeping company with a plastic RQ-1 Predator — the soldiers cast in NewRay's pale ivory plastic, the drone a separate Chinese-made model from DIY.

What makes the pairing work is the poses. NewRay didn't sculpt these as a firing line — there isn't a levelled rifle among them. Instead you get a spotter leaning hard into his binoculars, two kneeling observers glassing the horizon, and a standing radioman with a slim whip antenna rising from his handset. It's an observation-and-communications crew, which is exactly the company a reconnaissance drone ought to keep.

The General Atomics RQ-1 Predator earned that role honestly. First flown in 1994 and in American service from the following year, it was built as an ISR platform — intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance — long before it became famous for anything else. The "R" in RQ-1 literally stands for reconnaissance; the "Q" marks it as an unmanned system. The shape is unmistakable even at this scale: the long slender fuselage, the bulbous nose housing the satellite dome, the downward-canted tail, and that rear pusher propeller turning behind everything. The DIY model gets all of it — propeller, inverted tail, sensor nose and all. The underwing munitions are period-correct too, which is the part people often get wrong. 

The Predator carried AGM-114 Hellfire missiles while still wearing the RQ-1 designation — first in a February 2001 test, then operationally over Afghanistan later that year, where the armed RQ-1 went to work in the opening phase of Operation Enduring Freedom. The "multi-role" MQ-1 redesignation only came afterwards. So a missile-toting RQ-1 isn't a contradiction at all; it's exactly what was flying.

The livery is pure toy-shop invention rather than any real unit: "CA-172" along the fuselage and wing, a plain "CA" on the red-and-white chequered tail, and a couple of red diamond emblems for good measure. No squadron ever wore it, but it reads convincingly enough at arm's length.

🎖️ A Little Prince at the War Table — Wilhelm Karl von Preußen, Potsdam 1930

A sepia Ansichtskarte of a young boy in a sailor suit, seated in a wicker chair with one hand reached out to a tableful of little figures, captioned simply Prinz Wilhelm Karl von Preußen(1922–2007), grandson of Kaiser Wilhelm II.Bottom right, the photographer's blind-stamp: Atelier Ursula Blau, Potsdam. And pencilled in the corner, the year — 1930.

The card carries the mark of Ursula Blau, a Potsdam photographer active through the 1920s and '30s who made something of a speciality of the local aristocracy. The actual postcard publishing was done by Verlag Piek, Potsdam (printed up the spine on the reverse) — a smaller local Ansichtskarten-Verlag. Wilhelm Karl Adalbert Erich Detloff Prinz von Preußen was the youngest son of Prince Oskar of Prussia, who was himself the fifth son of Kaiser Wilhelm II, the last German Emperor. That makes our little chap in the striped Matrosenanzug a grandson of the Kaiser — and, as it turned out, the last surviving grandson of Wilhelm II, outliving all the others until his death in 2007. He was born in Potsdam in January 1922, so in 1930 he'd have been right around eight years old — which fits the boy in the chair to a tee. In later life he became the long-serving Herrenmeister (Master) of the Protestant Order of St John (the Johanniterorden), a post he held for over four decades. There's a lovely irony in a small Hohenzollern seated at a table of miniature soldiers, and it's worth a paragraph because it's actually true rather than just poetic. The Kriegsspiel — the formal tabletop wargame the Prussian army adopted to train its officers — was born in this very family's orbit. When Georg von Reisswitz was developing his model-battlefield game in the early 1810s, it was the Prussian princes who saw it, loved it, and recommended it up the chain to their father, King Friedrich Wilhelm III. A decade later, in 1824, Prince Wilhelm (the future Wilhelm I) gave the refined version his hearty endorsement, and the army ordered a set for every regiment. Many historians credit that wargaming culture as a real ingredient in Prussia's later battlefield success. The boy in this picture isn't playing Kriegsspiel, of course — that was maps and tokens, not painted infantry on a parlour table. But there's a straight line from those princes hunched over Reisswitz's sand model to this great-great-grandson of the dynasty doing the eight-year-old's version of the same thing in 1930. The toy soldiers were never far from the House of Hohenzollern.