Military Vehicles During World War II
When Britain declared war on Germany in September 1939, British forces were ill-prepared and ill-equipped. The invasion of France which followed the six-month "phoney war" was ill-advised and was unlikely to succeed. Germany had been mobilizing for war since the mid-1930s, while Britain had spent little on rearmament during that period, hoping that a major conflict could be avoided. The events of May 1940 were a serious setback and, at the time, it appeared that there was little prospect of help from the USA who believed that this time Europe should sort out its own problems.
Few wold have dared to predict the long struggle that lay ahead. World War II became a truly global conflict and there is little doubt that the pressures and exigencies of the moment created an incredible technological hothouse effect which, among other things, had an enormous influence on the design of military vehicles. Certainly for Britain and the USA there was little comparison between the vehicles that were in service at the beginning of the conflict and those being produced in 1945.
It was not a contest of equals and each of the participating nations brought its own particular strengths and weaknesses to the battlefront. The British Army had been forced to abandon thousands of military vehicles in France in 1940. Faced, then, with terrible shortage of all kinds of equipment Britain took whatever was available from the domestic motor industry, with little standardization between the products of different manufacturers. The result was that many vehicles were far from satisfactory and the Army faced an ongoing logistical nightmare in producing and distributing parts to keep this fleet of vehicles running.
The situation in the USA was an altogether different matter. When the USA finally realized that the war in Europe really was a global affair, that nation's massive industrial production capacity rightly earned it the title of the "Arsenal of Democracy". The USA was more successful in standardizing on a small number of specialized military vehicles, concentrating on turning these out in large numbers for all of the Allies. The standardized Jeep, GMC, Chevrolet, and Dodge vehicles played a valuable part in the conflict, but there were also trucks from many lesser known companies, including Available, Hug, Biederman, Thew, Hendrickson, Walter, Sterling and Corbitt.
Canada understood the significance of standardization, but perhaps with just three domestic manufacturers this should be no surprise. The standardized Canadian Military Pattern(CMP) vehicles combined technical competence with ease of production and might be considered to have established a pattern for the design of military vehicles in the post-war years.
Curiously, Germany was behind in innovation, producing military vehicles which were technically superior, but were complex and difficult to produce in sufficient numbers. It is a paradox that the nation that invented the concept of Blitzkrieg entered the war at least partially dependent on horse-drawn transport, mounted troops and a multiplicity of civilian vehicles. Rearmament had started in earnest with Hitler's rise to power in 1933, and military spending rose accordingly. Truck manufacturers were encouraged to produce any vehicle thought to be worthy. By the middle of the decade, there was such a multiplicity of vehicle types in service that several attempts were made to reduce the number of designs, to little avail.
Germany entered the war with far too many different types of vehicle and with an obsession with technical quality that slowed production. There was also a heavy reliance on civilian and captured vehicles that exacerbated the problem. As the war progressed, Allied bombing began seriously to affect the ability of the German motor industry to produce sufficient transport vehicles. Many vehicle types were simplified, while others were abandoned in an attempt to maintain production-but it was probably too late to affect the outcome of the war.
In the end it was down to volume-standardization did not win the war, but standardization and simplification allowed production to be maintained at the highest levels.
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