[David_Hayward (RIP)]

These trucks would appear to be earlyish 1941 Models. However as such this discounts them from being to British order and thus must have been either Canadian domestic or overseas orders. I favour the latter though because of general evidence. Of course totalling these units identifies these as the "47 units" that Dr Gregg referred to.

This now means I have a whole load of rewriting to do! I have to alter my thesis to suit plus some other works because it is evident that despite Dr Gregg's suggestion by implication that these 47 trucks were early 1940 MODELS, they were not and could not have been assembled in the UK in the earliest days of DND-pattern assembly at Southampton and Dagengham. Thanks for that one....I have been able to correct a misnomer just in time.

Oh! I forgot to mention Lynn that the answer to your query about both companies supplying is that they had no intention of doing so ab initio...Ford had led the Cab design and that lent itself to an agreement that Ford would supply for instance all cabs, including to GM at Oshawa, and GM in turn would supply axles and diffs where necessary because as an aside it was felt that the 1939 and even the better 1940 Ford axles were not strong enough. This contrasts with the Timken-Detroit design that GM bought in for the 1937-on COE trucks*. Fords realised that they needed a COE axle design because of the layout of the cab to satisfy War office Specifications that the DND slavlishly adhered to. Fords did not initially have anything to offer and it was then convenient to split production and supply. Then with war under way and shipping, parts supplies and general ramoing up of demand problems, this splitting of supplies was exposed as unworkable and as regards axle/diff/transfer case and steering compoent supplies the intial agreement was relaxed and this resulted in the mixing and matching that has been evidenced by the pasrts books until matters settled down.


*GM had thus a wealth of experience on both sides of the border with COE truck axles and steering, compared with Fords. The evidence shows that Windsor had considerable problems with trying to get a suitable axle design for their pilot orders from 1937 through 1940. GM could however just call on parts bins or standard components from Timken-Detroit.