Following on the heels of the Eighth Army comes the newest of Victrix’s 1:144/12mm Second World War offerings – the hardy, versatile and bloody beautiful Universal Carriers.
Before diving into the review, thanks to Victrix for sending these out! This article contains an affiliate linkÂ
The Universal Carrier was a staple of British and Commonwealth forces in the Second World war, finding it’s way into US, Soviet, Axis and European armies. It was a reliable, easy to produce and versatile transport, armoured personnel carrier, support weapon platform and command vehicle. Ubiquitous in the Second World War, the Universal Carrier had a long and storied post-war history, cropping up in every brushfire conflict of the 50s-60s. With such a common (and bloody useful) vehicle arriving for Victrix 12mm range, it’s likely that if you’re building a force – for virtually any combatant – picking up this set will be very useful. With all that said, it’s going to have to be a very nice kit to portray the tiny carrier well at 12mm. Let’s have a look.
Ok, right, I get that this is probably not a surprise – it’s a very nice kit. You get six carriers in the bag, a ton of spares and the opportunity for a huge number of variants. Everything is very nicely done, they scale perfectly (as you’d imagine) with the rest of the range and will fit in well with the relevant national infantry. You get both Eighth Army (in Tropical kit) and Late War British crew variants. The late war crew will also work well for Para forces.
Here’s the cool bit. The various armies of WW2 did some crazy things with the Universal Carrier, though these were often limited to “giving a different weapon to a passenger”. That’s been carried through to this bag, with nine variants of the Carrier buildable from the kit (and you can build six of most of the variants – only the flamethrower comes one a frame). You can build:
- Standard/Transport variant with or without Bren
- Officer/Command/Forward Observer
- HMG carriers – 50cal/Vickers
- Antitank carriers – Antitank rifle/PIAT
- 2 inch Mortar Carrier
- Flamethrower – Canadian and British Variants
That’s pretty comprehensive – the only common variants you can’t build out of this are the lengthened ones like the preposterous Australian 2lb Anti-tank gun carrier. With some chopping and converting you could probably manage it, but everything else is just right there in the bag.
This means you can buy a bag and put together a Carrier Section (two, and three in the late war, bags would get you an entire Carrier Platoon) accurately according to any TOE you can find online. You can fit the full complement of crew/passengers in each Carrier, and if you wanted to be incredibly clever you could leave crew unglued, letting you switch from early war 3 man to late war, 4 man, teams. Of course, in researching this, I found about fifty variants of the Carrier Platoon/Section, but most of them stabilise around three carriers – one transport, one 2 inch Mortar and one anti-tank. I built mine to this, added a command tank and couldn’t resist adding a flamethrower carrier.
Combining this set with others in the Victrix range will very easily let you do lend lease Carriers in Soviet service using the spare crew from the SU-76 and tank riders from the T-34, or American/Free French using Sherman and M3 Half-Track components.
Build Quality
As with Victrix other 12mm kits, these are a frankly preposterous amount of detail crammed into a tiny model. Tracks, bogies, steering wheels, ladders, weaponry – it’s all here in fantastic detail, millimeter-long weapons are distinct, webbing and pouches are (somehow!) all present and correct. The accuracy of the sculpts is fantastic, with everything you’d want on a Carrier at any scale all present at 12mm.
You need to be very careful in the build, as you’re essentially making a square box (the bane of all modellers) with fine corners. The plastic is scale-model thin, so if you’re used to chunkier, larger scale models you’ll want your finest and lightest file. As always I built my first using my standard tools which, at this scale and with fine, thin, plastic, meant I was basically taking a rasp to it.
They are undoubtedly a complex build and tweezers will be handy though not necessary. The basic build is 16 pieces for something about twice the size of a fingernail, which is a lot. The accompanying instruction leaflet is clear and obvious, so it’s not a mystery to build these, just a surprising amount of steps. What you get out of that though is something pretty magical, and once the main body of the Carrier is together it’s really worth the hassle.
Pieces and Spares
Given that you get 6 Carriers, with enough options to make 9 variants in both Desert and Late War uniforms, you get a ton of spares on each sprue. Spares at 12mm are perhaps not incredibly useful – you’ll be hard pressed to kitbash some of the pieces onto anything else – but they work well as stowage if you want to add more detail to your carriers or other 12mm kits.
The huge number of spare drivers, gunners and infantry does present some interesting possibilities. If you’ve picked up the British Late war or Desert sets, you’ll find extra Bren, PIAT and Vickers teams that, with a little bit of filing and gluing, work perfectly well as standalone weapons teams:
The driver and passenger spares aren’t standing, but it’s nice to have additional sitting models for dioramas or adding a few riders to tanks. The sitting co-drivers work really well as loaders and observers, so you can squeeze out a few more bases of infantry and support teams without any effort on your part.
Painting
I’m not the greatest small-scale painter in the world (that’s our own Rockfish or Porble in my opinion), but these were a blast to paint. There’s enough raised detail on the armour plating that a simple base colour and wash followed by drybrushing and highlighting works very well. They’ve come out quite dark brown in the pictures, but are a nice sandy bright colour in real life, honest! I added a little bit of grease and oil with a black wash and smothered the tracks in dust.
All told, painting each one was significantly quicker than the build process and I averaged about five minutes a Carrier. Nice and easy, and they’ll hit the table the same day you get them!
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With the core of the British War effort sorted in Infantry and Carriers, I am eagerly awaiting early/mid war British Tanks to finish off the 12mm Eighth Army project – Matildas, Grants, and Crusaders please Victrix!
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