Military Transport

gingerjim wrote:

do you lads remember the old diamond t. or the mack , scammel , austin tilly, bedford 15 cwt water bowser, now they were the days, , ginger

Austin Tilly ? That's even before my time if that's the WW2 4x2 !......... Our LAD found a Chevvy 1- tonner (I think) of the same vintage, one of those things with the windscreen which sloped backwards. They towed it back from a trg. area where it must have been since being abandoned in 1945. They were determined to get it going again,.and they did...... first time out it screeched along the road which ran round Quebec Bks., backfired with badly seated valves and laid a trail of blue smoke behind. Biggest problem was it was stuck in permanent 4-wheel drive and the wheels they'd found for the front axle were bigger than the originals at the back, that was the cause of the screeching.

cartav they had austin tillys in the 50s you must have seen them ,little austin motors with canvas sides , i was on a raoc field park before i went to baor, there were upwards of 38,000 vehicles of all sorts , mostly blr jobs,from motorbikes to the antar. , hundreds of diamond ts, macks , scammels , even a few old centurians, most of them had full fuel tanks ,so you can guess a few of the ncos made a few bob during the fuel rationing during the 50s, ginger

I didn't want to doubt you. Gingerjim! I remember the Austin Utility from wartime uk but never saw one in BAOR......... And that field park! just think what that collection would be worth now. Something similar....... a factory was being built locally in the 1960's, the site was close by a canal, the subsoil was such that concrete piles were driven down for foundations, two piles shattered when partly in, it was a puzzle. An old man (there's always one) standing on the bridge said "I know what tha's found". The site had been filled and levelled; earlier, it had been a railway repair works, they'd been dragged in to cut up or mend Sherman tanks. Instead of moving old hulks out, they were just covered over.

And petrol......... I know of, or have heard of, one incident. A mate was with an armd. regt.in BAOR. MT 70 for the on-camp fuel pump came by tanker, it was delivered and signed for by the pump attendant as a quantity of UK gallons. The SIB were called in when the pump man turned up in an up-market Merc., their suspicions were justified. The pump was calibrated in US gallons.......... i.e 5x UK gallons delivered equalled 6x US gallons to dispense. Even at 1960' rates a 20% profit was not to be sneezed at.

And another.............
The end room of the single storey Block 7, Quebec Bks., Osnabruck, was the storage place for 32 Bty's bikes. Very dodgy, a fire hazard in sleeping accommodation, but there was more. Target figures for both BSA & Matchless were 50mpg as far as I remember, there was little difficulty in getting 75 mpg out of the six 350cc's.... It was easy to drain a pint here and there from a tank, petrol accumulated and was stored in four jerricans secreted behind two steel lockers. There were three main uses for the surplus.......... firstly, for distributing to favoured gunners for cleaning that new wax blanco, secondly to help drivers out when their target figures were down, or when the use of their airpump was needed to top up bike tyres, and thirdly to keep in the good books of the Battery Sergeant Major. An occasional litre which found its way into the tank of his second-hand DKW convertible was a certain way to avoid being selected too often for guard duty. So it wasn't really mis-appropriating MT70,
it was re-cycling & making intelligent use of one's resources.

deleting error

cartav, in the 50s petrol shortage, we had ncos driving around in big yankie cars, the yanks being the main customers for dodgy petrol , an awful lot of our ncos had fair sized bank accounts, that is until sib started looking around , a few courts martial followed, but the biggest fiddlers i ever knew were some of the civilian staff at the old viersen factory depot, it was a hugh place and a lot of stuff went missing , including machinery , eg lathes etc , hugh stocks of stores went missing and nobody knew how, every truck . car motor bike was searched. then one day i was patrolling the factory perimeter when i noticed a train pulling out of the marshalling yard and out through the gate , the penny dropped , no bugger ever searched the trains, we soon put a stop to the missing stores, ginger