Vehicle ID Request

[PaKlo]

Photos from service of these Bomb Service Trucks are in LIFE archive - photo from December 1942.

[Bill Murray]

Hi PaKlo:

I cannot thank you enough for the new photos and I think we are very close to a solution. Rob Beale had the right idea, they are based in the Continental United States.

I found a reference to one of your photos on Google and it stated one of the photos was taken in California. It mentioned Chula Vista, a town outside San Diego, where the Rohr Corporation built engines and such and did some assembling of Navy bomber aircraft for Douglas amongst others. There was also a Naval Station Air Base on North Island in San Diego.

I am posting another photo I found a while ago and it too has the camouflage netting over the parking area and this was a feature found around the many aircraft factories in California in WWII. I should mention that I lived in San Diego 1940-1944 and saw them almost every day.

Finally, your photo of the front end of one of these trucks shows very clearly a California registration/license plate so we can be sure I think that all of them were taken in California.

I am just starting to research the photo archives of the Rohr Corporation, Chula Vista, San Diego and the Naval Station Air Base on North Island for that time period to see if I can find any more photos.

To close this post, I think the reason I and others could not find any photos of this "civilian" Bomb Service truck in our military research materials is that while they may have belonged to "the government", they were assigned to the manufacturers of aircraft and components for development and training and were not assigned to the Navy, Marine Corps or Army Air Corps.

As Rob pointed out, they did not need all terrain capabilities on the hard surfaced areas that they were used in.

Thanks again.

Bill

[Bill Murray]

The photo below has nothing to do with the subject of MLU vehicles but I found it while researching some of the archives I mentioned earlier and thought it might be of general interest.

Bill