Bataan cab 11 water truck

[Hanno Spoelstra]

Originally Posted by David Dunlop

The troops sailed from Vancouver aboard the SS Awatea. She sailed with 12,000 cubic feet of empty cargo space because of cockups that prevented priority MT being loaded that was sitting in a Military Siding in Vancouver at the time.

Brand New MT had been ordered from both Ford and GM to be crated and delivered to Vancouver for loading, which had been done by both companies.

When the Winnipeg Grenadiers and Royal Rifles sailed on the Awatea, Brig. Lawson, their CO had been advised an American Freighter, the Don Jose, had been chartered to ship the MT to Hong Kong, and would be following them in a few days.

It was the Don Jose that redirected to Manila for some reason and the MT seized. Since it was all in crated mode,I doubt the Americans had the manpower or time to assemble much, if any of it, before being over run by the Japanese.

I wondered how this very early/ first production variant (ca. April 1940) of a C15 w/Cab 11 and wooden 2A1 GS body ended up in Indonesia after WW2. The Dutch shipped a lot of ex-Canadian Army equipment to Indonesia after WW2, but I have not seen (much) evidence of such an early CMP surviving in NW Europe Canadian Army stocks in usable form by 1945 (ref. Early CMPs in NW Europe)

Another option is this truck was part of an in-theatre equipment transfer from the British-Indian Army.

Could this C15 have been part of the diverted cargo aboard SS Don Jose? Then used by the Japanese Army, and later recaptured by British-Indian troops?


PS: the driver standing next to the C15 is Jan Harm Reints, a Dutch soldier who was a driver on a forage truck.
Jan Harm died on 25 July 1947 during an ambush at Batavia, Indonesia, while driving a train.

PXL_20231027_175932155-1536x1119.jpg
Source: http://michelsgenealogiesite.nl/jan-harm-reints/