Tuesday 1 May 2012

Another wreck and again it’s a Ford. What is so nice about these is the evidence of hastily welded on bits to take machine guns and sand ladders. It looks like these were cobbled together from bits of steel lying about on various workshop floors in the back streets of Cairo back in 1941. The upright tubes are just bits of pipe. Maybe gas pipes in civilian life, but welded onto the tub of the truck to take a Vickers, or similar. The sand ladder brackets were clearly too low at the first attempt, then lengthened a bit later on by about 3 inches. I assume they were lashed in place with rope. Sam found a genuine LRDG sand ladder that would have been fitted into these carriers in a shop in Siwa. A lucky find - especially for the shop keeper who had his best sale of the day! He was using it as a shelf.

3 comments:

  1. Beautiful photos. Thanks for share.

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  2. Fascinating! I can't imagine how spooky it must feel to come across a wreck like this....just lying there as it was left 70 years ago! But I have a question: do you dig around to see what is under the sand? Or just leave it undisturbed?

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  3. Affer, my old sausage, we in too much of a hurry. I little probing, but no more. Our schedule of 200+ kms a day meant little time to dawdle.

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