Quote:
Originally Posted by James Langham
I can see the standardised parts arriving sooner than we think, after all Iraq was very much a case of denying there was a problem. Maybe the best way to treat it is that a local pattern at a base workshop is standardised - I am basing that thought on the way the plows were created in Normandy in 1944 and fitted very quickly.
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True, but that was due to the nature of the fighting there. In an insurgency, there are rarely front lines, per se, and Coalition forces soon learned that unarmored and lightly armed trucks travelling more or less
anywhere in country were extremely vulnerable to ambush and IED attacks. Vietnam was a similar [guerilla] conflict, therefore gun trucks became a necessity. Same with Afghanistan (both during the Soviet occupation and currently).
In a conventional war in Europe, this would not be the case. In WWII, for example, there weren't really any gun trucks in the ETO. Only when the front line began to fracture and become more porous (after the war went nuclear), would convoys likely be in much danger from enemy raiders and/or marauders. It would most likely be at that point that units would begin constructing gun trucks.
I think the latter point you make with the Hedgerow plows is spot on. Once depots saw the need for gun trucks, there would have been a lot of sharing of ideas and procedures, resulting in a fair bit of standardization, at least at the Corps level. I still think that you'd see a good deal of local variance, though, especially between cantonments that were too far apart to share ideas and resources.