[Bill Murray]

Morning Lads:

Now you know why I will never be a historian!!
I tend to get carried away and leave gaps in my tidbit offerings but will try to clean it up a bit here.

The subject photo on this thread seems to depict Interwar vehicles and probably MCP vehicles at that.

It was at this issue that I was aiming in that there were many possibilities regarding the origin of US or US style chassis which ended up in Europe and North Africa.

It was confusing enough pre 1939/1940 when the majority of the strictly civilian models were imported, manufactured or assembled in the various countries. There were also, of course, many examples of military or quasi military trucks that were being made in the UK, Holland, Belgium and several other countries in the mid to late 1930s that seem to have been based on US style chassis.

Then in 1939-1940, there was a flood of what I perceive to be US origin vehicles coming into Europe, especially the UK and France,but not limited to those countries. This further muddies the identification problem sometimes.

So, David, you are quite correct that there was some sort of assembly operation in almost any country you can name but I was thinking only of major operations where there was also a manufacturing operation in addition to ckd/pkd assembly.

Cliff: Sorry I more or less ignored Australia/New Zealand and the rest of the Asia/India area. To me that was a bit out of the scope of Kuno's original photo question. As the war progressed, one would certainly find Australian and New Zealand vehicles at least in North Africa in the eary stages and all over the Pacific right to the end. I also failed to acknowledge that Chrysler had a substantial manufacturing operation in Canada.

Tony, you too are of course correct. Being an American, though, I can tell you there is a world of difference in how we identify vehicles. Other than in the buff books, you will almost never see the designation 91T or 48A. We call 'em a 39 Ford Deluxe or a 39 Ford 1/2 ton or whatever. A certain laziness on our part perhaps.

The same is usually true of dedicated military vehicles. We rarely use the numeric designations with the exception of armoured vehicles. So, a Jeep is a Jeep no matter if it is a Willys, a Ford or a Bantam, a CCKW353 is a GMC 2 1/2 tonner etc.

I would exempt, of course, people who actually own and restore such vehicles. I am speaking here of people like myself that collect more in the line of photos, catalogues etc.

Enough of the mea culpa.

David, did I take your comments about RHD vehicles from GM to mean they were built with RHD in the US? I always assumed that all RHD US style vehicles, at least light/medium trucks and cars shipped from North America were built in Canada.

Got to go for now, still looking at Kuno's photo and trying to make a decision.

Bill