Impressed? Not very!

[jack neville]

Originally Posted by Mike Kelly

I don't think there was any easy way the average joe on the street could put up a case if the Govt. wanted to impress your truck. It was probably an act of parliament that was enforced , maybe one of the emergency wartime acts .

Years ago I was talking to a chap at the Chevy parts place in Cheltenham. Col , the owner, ran the business from is home. Anyway an elderly bloke , the neighbour, was saying to me " I had my new 39 Chev truck taken from me and I wasn't happy about it " . I asked him if he got the truck back and he said " no never saw it again". He said "two guys came to my door and said we are taking your truck and that is it" .

I wish now, that I had queried him more about the money side of things e.g. did he get a fair price for the truck.

I bought this old wartime Victorian rego certificate at a swap meet . The ownership changes are interesting ! The Dept. of Defence owned this truck for a while, and Vic Drew who we all know of. Would this truck have had a ARN number while in the DD ownership ?

I went to school in Maryborough in the 70's with a couple of Rinaldi boys Mike. I dare say there was a connection with the Rinaldi who owned that truck at one point.

[motto (RIP)]

My father was with a signals outfit at Albert Park Barracks (Melbourne) in the early part of the war. He was a Despatch Rider or Don R as they were known. Part of his job was preparing impressed motor cycles for military service, or at least they were riding and maintaining impressed bikes.
IIRC he said that the civilian owners were given the choice of having the motorcycle returned when war ended or taking a ten pound payment and relinquishing all claim. He also said that those who elected to have their cycle returned usually received a new replacement. I guess the army had plenty of them at wars end.
Dad bought a WLA Harley Davidson after the war from Miledge Brothers in Melbourne. The price was 182 pounds ten shillings. He had the choice of taking one in the crate or buying one they had assembled as a demonstrator. They had a large stack of crated ones out the back.
I bought a WLA direct from government disposals (Tottenham) in 1970 for $65 I rode it for years and still have it. I got sick of hearing how you could buy them in crates for ten dollars but had to buy ten. Everyone seemed to know about it but no one could tell me exactly where.

David

[lynx42]

I started off trying to find the International tipper detailed in post No.9 by Mike Kelly through the AWM, ARN books but sofar haven't had much luck. BUT I did find a few pages of impressed vehicles, which were impressed in both the Northern Territory and New Guinea. The quality of my phone photos is not too good but here they are. There are some interesting vehicles and it seems they would grab anything. In the New Guinea list there is mentioned a 1925 Chev Tourer, a 1926 Chev Ute, a 1927 Buick Roadster, a 1928 Ford Sedan, a 1927 Dodge Van, a 1928 Chev Van and many more. In the Northern territory list the vehicles are a bit more modern, the oldest (I think) is a 1935 Ford Sedan.

Regards Rick.

OOO 038.jpg1

OOO 039.jpg

OOO 040.jpg

[Mike K]

Appears that the Inter tipper was de-registered when the defence dept. took control of it . It also changed hands three times on the same day !

Makes you wonder what the Defence Dept. encompassed ? Army, Navy, Air force and what else ?

Years ago I visited a MV collector near Deloraine in Northern Tasmania, among his many bits n pieces was a nice FWD HAR truck, on the cab side was a AWC ( Allied Works Council ) number plate in perfect condition . He also had a Cletrac airfield tractor with the tubular cab frame on it , EH Mack, the ex Clemmons restored Thornycroft 6X4 workshop and a UK bren carrier in terrible shape.

It looks like the AWC had their own reg. scheme and this is where maybe some vehicles disappeared into oblivion

[Robert Bergeron]

Thanks Terry but I am no subject matter expert, just a student of these subjects .

My only recollection of a forfeiture of property without compensation in Canada during the war was Order in council no 1486 by Prime Minister King and his Cabinet.

The Order in council ( or Executive Order..) thereby ordered the forced deportation and forfeiture of property of 22,000 Canadians citizens of Japanese descent from the West Coast ( British Colombia ) on 22 Feb 1942. All without compensation . A tragedy and travesty of justice in today's mind set .

All other war confiscations or destructions in Canada , borne out of military necessity , were deemed expropriations and ( duly , not always same as today I guess ) compensated . They were and still are considered claims against the Crown.

That approach dates back to responsible government in the Commonwealth and the realisation that the maxim '' the King can do no wrong '' has it's limits in democracy.

As a contemporary example, that tradition carries over in international conflicts . When a Leopard tank had to... ( Terry's friends like to go cross country in 40 ton dune buggies .. ) go through a poppy field in Afghanistan out of military necessity to reach the objective , a claims analyst ( suited up in body armour ) dutifully followed the tracks to assess the damages and compensate the farmer either in cash or in goats.

Keeps the countrymen happy and helps to conquer the hearts and minds of the people you are trying to help overseas.

Be nice to hear about the treatment of Australia's enemy nationals during the same period as a scholarly comparison .

The times were different then .

My two cents.

[Lang]

Robert,

Two points about Australia that make our experience different to Canada.

Firstly we had very few resident Japanese (mainly in the pearl diving industry in northern Queensland and Western Australia) so had little of the massive disruption caused in Canada and USA.

There were internment camps for enemy nationals but nowhere near the North American scale.

The most important difference is our Constitution has specifically written into it that the Government may take property if in the national interest (in war time or to build major roads etc) but the owners must receive "fair and reasonable" compensation.

This has always been interpreted to mean full retail value and further payment for costs suffered by the owner. Of course in this day and age Government resumptions not only pay for costs such as moving household goods etc but for various things like pain and suffering and psychiatric treatment for their traumatized dog.

As mentioned above, Australians were paid very fairly for any vehicles or property taken during WW2.

Even in wartime parliament can not alter or suspend the constitution without a full national referendum which historically has almost never approved proposed changes.

It would be interesting to know if a blind eye was turned to property belonging to enemy nationals - I suspect it was and they got little or nothing - but they all returned to their farms etc after the war so were not robbed of their possessions permanently.

The story goes on 75 years later.
http://www.canberratimes.com.au/act-...20-gxexwf.html

This is a dramatised report but gives some more of the picture.
http://theconversation.com/why-austr...ld-war-ii-4582

Lang

[rob love]

Here in Canada, we do not have property rights enshrined in our constitution: the government may take with no compensation. Ask any gun owner whose guns were declared prohibited overnight, and had to forfeit them.

[Robert Bergeron]

Thanks Lang . Very interesting indeed . We had to wait until the 80's in Canada to have a Bill of Rights and a proper Constitution repatriated from Britain and as Rob said still no property rights . I had not realised how evolved your country was on these aspects. Roos rule ! Wish i could offer you a cold pint for that . Cheers mate .

[Tony Smith]

Originally Posted by Lang

The most important difference is our Constitution has specifically written into it that the Government may take property if in the national interest (in war time or to build major roads etc) but the owners must receive "fair and reasonable" compensation.

As mentioned above, Australians were paid very fairly for any vehicles or property taken during WW2.

It would be interesting to know if a blind eye was turned to property belonging to enemy nationals - I suspect it was and they got little or nothing - but they all returned to their farms etc after the war so were not robbed of their possessions permanently.

Lang

Very different story for those Japanese interned in Aust. See https://digital.library.adelaide.edu.../2/02whole.pdf

Australian born and/or naturalised people of Japanese descent were arrested and interned and lost their property and assets, businesses and jobs and often their families were split up never to be reunited, and then deported at war's end. Many Korean and Formosan (aka Taiwanese) prisoners, who were regarded as "Japanese" nationality when interned, were also deported at war's end although notionally they had been granted newly independant nationalities that were our allies.

This wasn't due however to a blanket policy regarding all POWs and Internees, it was related to another policy in force at the time, the White Australia Policy. This has popped up in another thread, http://www.mapleleafup.net/forums/sh...ad.php?t=27908 . See the story BELOW the highlighted article in this link: http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/ar...eTo=1946-12-31

The White Australia Policy effectively excluded "undesirable types" from entering the country by legitimately setting impossible hurdles to gain entry to the country. One such method was setting an entry questionnaire "in a European language". If you were a "desirable type", your questionnaire might be in English. If you looked a little bit swarthy, or brown, or yellow, or otherwise foreign, your questionnaire might be written in Greek, or Estonian, or Basque. All fair and legal. Of course, you were asked first if you were proficient in any other languages. "Why, yes, I am a professor of languages at Calcutta University, and fluent in English, French, Spanish, Arabic, Aramaic, Pashtun, Urdu and Hindi. I also know a little Mandarin and Japanese!" "Well, you're outta luck, Sport! Ya shoulda studied Gaelic Dialects of the 17th Century!" Entry denied.

Persons born in Australia to Japanese parents, or long term residents who had naturalised to British (Australian) citizenship, wwere stripped of their naturalisation, and on release from interment were declared Illegal Aliens under the WAP and deported to countries they had never known or knew the language. People who had in some cases lived in Australia for 40, 45 or 50 years before the war (remember, Japan was our ally in WW1), grown large families and sucessful businesses were sent overseas and never able to return, and their families never saw them again.

Perhaps most oddly to us today, the Japanese internees, either POWs, locals or civilians transferred here from the Dutch or French colonies of the South West Pacific generally thought they had been treated well and humanely by Australian Authorities.

It was a whole different mindset back then!