I discovered a similar thing with my soft plastic toy soldiers back in the sixties. I had lots of those soldiers made by Marx in 1/32 scale (Americans, Japanese, Germans, Mexicans, Indians, Texans, etc...). They were made of a strong but flexible, shiny plastic, and I used to set them up outdoors in trenches, bunkers, weeds, and so on, and fight battles between them with a BB gun. This was no problem during warm weather. The BB's would sometimes leave a noticeable dent in the soldier, but that was all.

In the winter, however, hits would often cause them to fracture into pieces, as the plastic had grown brittle in the cold.

Due to this, I gave up shooting at my toy soldiers on cold days.

I also discovered that one had to be quite careful with plastic ships in cold water for the same reasom. If you happened to run into a rock, the bow was likely to shatter.

Apparently the survival rate of torpedoed tankers was MUCH higher in the warm waters of the South Pacific than it was in the colder waters of the North Atlantic.

- LH