Polish Armoured Truck

[David_Hayward (RIP)]

http://www.achtungpanzer.com/kubus.htm

will take you to a very interesting Chevrolet armoured truck! It appears to be a 1938 Model TC 157" wheelbase. I have also seena photo in the '44 Warsaw Uprising of a comandeered pre-war Chevrolet truck. These were assembled by Lilpop Rau i Loewenstein, which was established around 1860 in Tsarist Poland as a heavy engineering company producing railway locomotives, rails, etc. The company got into motor car bodying int he Twenties and then in 1935 secured a licence to assemble Opels in Warsaw, and then in 1937 Chevrolet cars and trucks and Buick cars. In 1939 the Nazis took over the facilities, having destroyed 89 Chevrolets on railroad cars in the meantime, and then created Lilpop Rau und Loewenstein A.G. which became a munitions factory until 1944.

[Martin IJdo]

Gee, i wonder what the top speed of this contraption could have been, with a hefty steel body, 12 men inside, rear wheel drive and one 78 hp chevy engine to shift it !
How accurate where calendars back in those days ?.......................

Martin.

[David_Hayward (RIP)]

Yes it must have been lumbering but academic if you were fighting in close combat in the rubble of Warsaw. It just needed I suppose to get down a road and then do the business.
I have now found a photo of what was it seems a 1938 German Reichs Postal Service armoured 3-ton truck which was a modified panel van. This was captured on 14 August 1944 and then used as an improvised armoured car until it was damaged by a bomb. The cab reminds me of Antwerp-built cabs as seen in Wheels & Tracks and may therefore have been a Belgian or Dutch truck that was sequestred by the Germans in 1940..perhaps a baker's van?

I would be interested to know if any sequestred Chevrolets survived to be captured by the allies and then sold off at auction for further service post-war on the continent.