DUKW...Duck .... Duh...

[Scrivo18]

Off the top of my head

year of manufacture, 6 x 6 configuration, Amphidian vehicle and vehicle carrying capacity come up with the term DUKW, which the troops then called them 'Ducks'

I have it written at work on the display board for my Dukw...

Which if all goes to plan will be swimming next weekend for Australia day and DUKW will be explained as above..

Tim

[Scrivo18]

If I remember correctly the majority of them were built by the Yellow Bus company ....... Nothing to do with Kaiser at all....


Bahhh


Tim

[Mike Cecil]

You are pretty close, Scrivo....

Yellow Truck and Coach Company, a Division of GMC.


D = design year 1942
U = amphibian
K = front wheel drive
W= rear wheel drive

So, too ....
CCKW is 1941, C=standard cab; K & W as above
AFKWX is 1939, F = Forward cab, K & W as above .... X special long wheel base chassis.

(Thank you Boniface & Juedy!)

Mike C

[maple_leaf_eh]

I have a Wikipedia account. Does this mean my 5-watt opinion might some day be immortalized by a significant national institution too?

[gordon]

Originally Posted by Mike Cecil

You are pretty close, Scrivo....

D = design year 1942
U = amphibian ( Utility - 'A' was already used for a low profile truck )
K = front wheel drive ( driven front axle)
W= rear wheel drive ( twin rear axles on an inverted leaf spring )

Mike C

added a couple of notes to Mike's explanation

[Tony Wheeler]

Mike, have you written to AWM and chastised them suitably? I note also their Glossary does not contain CCKW at all, despite their collections search returning 56 results.

[Mike Cecil]

No Tony: they can wait till the end of this month and buy a copy of my book, 'Australian Military Abbreviations, Acronyms and Codes' when it is released by Virtualbookworm.(Hardback, 10,500 entries including a more accurate interpretation of the meaning of 'DUKW'!).

Besides: I never mentioned the name of the institution concerned.....

Mike C

[Richard Farrant]

Originally Posted by Mike Cecil

Besides: I never mentioned the name of the institution concerned.....

Nor did I ! There must be more than one institution in ACT

[Tony Wheeler]

Originally Posted by Mike Cecil

I never mentioned the name of the institution concerned.....

Duly noted Mike! Nor did I expressly state or otherwise imply infer or suggest that you did! Inasmuch as numerous websites having been reported to publish said DUKW translation, it must concluded in respect of the particular website mentioned independently by me, to wit: AWM website, that such mention is owed solely to its particular interest in this forum, and that any resemblance to the "major institution's website" mentioned initially is purely coincidental!

Seriously though I have no hesitation whatsoever in naming and shaming any institution, let alone a publicly funded one, which through laziness alone publishes utterly incorrect information within its professed field of expertise, and which through both illiteracy and stupidity abuses language and logic to the extent of introducing and describing alphabetic numbers! Perhaps that's because I'm of a generation when the three R's mattered and we were taught to recognize which squiggly symbols were letters and which ones were numerals, and how they worked to construct words and numbers respectively. 3ND o5 R@N7!