The casualties are still turning up today.
When my mate's Gran digs up her flower beds she upturns little soldiers even now, brown with soil, and they line the windowsill like a miniature terracotta army.
Nothing thrilled me more in my childhood than receiving a new box of 1:72 scale soldiers and snapping them off their plastic holder by the helmet to enlist in my imaginary wars.
There were some standard poses for little soldiers. One would be throwing a hand grenade. A couple standing and shooting from the shoulder, others on their knees firing rifles and some lying on their bellies. These were generally the Allied troops.
The Germans held machine guns at the hip. Some were already shot, left perpetually throwing their arms back in the air as they fell. An officer in his cap pointing a Luger. Another looking through a pair of binoculars. An American GI with a bazooka. Commandos in woolly hats, Paras with helmets stuffed with tiny foliage. A signalman with a radio. The shocking old bottle blue of a French Foreign Legionnaire in his Kepi Blanc.
The Germans generally held the large camouflage-painted wooden castle that I owned while the Allied Forces had to storm it in original green metal Dinky toy troop carriers with proper rubber wheels.
PlayStations may be more realistic as kids now tap away at keypads with fantastic graphics on the screen and sensory explosions all around, but I feel they have lost that element of imagination.
The magical ability to get lost in playing for hours at a time. To plan a campaign around the settee and over the coffee table to a main objective under heavy fire from a cowboy on a horse, two Roman Centurions and the funny plodding walk of a pet budgie.
They could breach the castle gates and find a huge green plastic Hulk awaiting them in the courtyard.
While Action Man was a game to be played with the lads, pushing the scar-faced, buzz hair-cut hero down a hill in a plastic APC carrier as a hail of stones rained down, little soldiers was a more solitary pursuit. A game of tactics rather than thrills.
I can almost hear the sad strains, the lonely trumpet call of the Last Post to my lost legions. And childhood.