1953 m38a1 cdn

[rob love]

I never saw militarised CJ5s in Cdn service. There were some CJ6s back in the day, but they were painted in the old lincoln commercial green, same as the panel vans. There were also some Jeep Commandoes. We used them as training aids in Borden after their regular service had ended. They were purely commercial trucks, with no blackout lighting or other military features.

What David may be thinking of was the 1982 and 1983 CJ7 fleet, which was procured initially for the armoured militia because the M38A1Cdn2 and 3 were getting too unreliable to depend on to provide training. Later there was another small purchase of 1985 for the militia service battalions. Why is a mystery, since the Iltis was ready to be released and all the CJ7s became excess to entitlement. The CJ7s were numbered in the next sequential block of available CFR numbers as they came into service, and were not related to the earlier 1/4 ton CFRs. They did have the next block or ERNs though, which was 30106. C30105 was the earlier M151A2, and the M38 family covered C30100 to C30104. Iltis ended up as C30108. There were some Jeep YJs bought that may have used the 30107 code, but I can't be sure of that.

The 30 family of ERNs was supposed to be for SMP vehicles, however that does not explain the C30-656 number on the attached DJ5 data summary, except to note that the C30 portion appears to be corrected from C31, which would have been correct for a commercial vehicle. Nowadays the C306XX block is used for light armour like the AVGP or the old M113A2.