USMC Ford/Marmon-Herrington

[Bill Murray]

In no particular order:

I do not know if the Netherlands had access to the USMC Ford/MH trucks for evaluation but I do know that the USMC trucks were all LHD.

I agree with Hanno that the pic of the Persian arty tractor, the second one, was probably a mistake on the part of the MH advertising dept. As far as I know all Persian vehicles were LHD.

Hanno, as to Ford not producing the volumes of military trucks compared to the other US makers, this is a long subject, perhaps not for this particular thread.

However, I can add this much. In the US, we had something called the War Production Board which determined which companies would be the best choice for producing which products.
Similar organizations existed in the UK, Russia and of course, the famous Herr Speer ran his own show in Germany.

A Google search will tell you more than you want to know about this process in the US, but the short version is that for whatever reason, probably a little of Henry Ford's change of heart to renounce his "neutral" stance and in part because of Ford's demonstrated mastership of mass production, Ford was chosen to build aircraft, more specifically bomber aircraft.

Amongst other things, this resulted in the building of the Willow Run complex that turned out B-24 and later B-29 aircraft in truly mind boggling numbers.

Luckily, the US had sufficient capacity from manufacturers other than Ford to manufacture enough trucks for the US effort and Canada, thank goodness, had also the same capacity but in this case Ford was a major player as regards vehicles.

Editorial comment:
The two MH USMC official pics on this thread were dug up by me in the USMC archives and passed on to both Bart and Fred Crismon.
As regards IHC taking over of the Ford MH business for the USMC, I have from BGEN USMC Fred Robillard himself a lot of the original file materiel of IHC's proposal to the USMC and a couple of sales prospectus binders with photos, data etc.
It is not really well known, but IHC had a fairly good relationship with both USMC and USN both before and after WWII.

Well, time to eat so will sign off for now.
Bill