Ford (Australia) Armoured Car Mk.1

[puddingwrestler]

Big Jacko Jackson belched lugubriously and tossed his empty stubby onto the pile on the veranda of the Tennent Creek pub.
He jabbed a thick finger at the Sydney Morning Herald, which had arrived a few days before, only a few weeks out of date.
"It says here," said he, following along with his finger, "That the Japanese sunk most of the American fleet and orl their bloody aircraft carriers at some joint called Pearl Harbour."
Bluey struggled to put two and two together, and finally managed to come up with four. "Bloody oath, that means we can't get them ter help stop the Japanese coming down here."
"Reckon so." Said Jacko, swatting an attentive fly away from his face. "I reckon we need ter get ready ter fight them when they invade, mate. I can't see our navy stopping them without the bloody yanks."
"Yer reckon?" Asked Bluey, "Our bloody navy's bloody good!"
"Too bloody right!" agreed Jacko, "Best bloody navy in the bloody world, but them Japanese have got oodles of bloody ships. Stands ter reason we'ze gotta run out first."
"We'll be buggered." Said Bluey, the master of strategy.
"Yep."
There was a pause of a few minutes as both men thought deep and doom ladden thoughts.
Jacko stared out across the vast redish wastes which surrounded Tennant Creek and idly scracthed at his blue singlet.
"Yer know," he said at last, "That's a bloody lot of ground out there. I reckon if the Japanese invade, we'll never bloody be able to move tanks around that lot bloody fast enough."
Bluey MacKenzie blinked away the fug resulting in several pints of beer at lunch, and slowly focused his eyes on the desert.
"Bloody oath." he said at last.
At that moment they were interrupted by the rattling clamour of old man Murphy struggling into town in his clapped out Ford ute. Jacko looked at the rusted vehicle thoughtfully until it subsided with a sigh of relief outside the general store. Suddenly, the light of invention sprang into his eyes.
"I reckon I've had a bloody idea!" he exclaimed.
"Bloody oath mate, I hope it's better than the last one. Bloody kangaroo racing'll never take off!"
"Give it a bloody rest," grumbled Jacko, "this is a bleeding ripper! How many of them utes der yer reckon Ford can build a month?"
Bluey thought for a while. "Dunno," he said at last, helping himself to a hefty slug of beer, "Coupla thousand?"
"Yeah," said Jacko, "but suppose yer took them all, an' yer stuck armour all over them, yer could make thousands of armoured cars every bloody month!"
Bluey leanded forward, and stared at the clapped out ute.
"Yer reckon?" he asked at last.
"Too bloody right mate! Them utes're already great off road, they go faster than any bloody tank an' there bloody close to inde-bloody-structible! C'mon mate, I'm goin' round Stone's garidge ter buy a ute, and then we're turnin' it into a bloody armoured car!"
But bluey had succumbed to the gentle sleep of the man who drinks seven pints for lunch in the savage heat of central australia.

Colonel Richard 'Dicko' Dunlop mopped his brow in the burning sunlight of Tennent Creek, and stared at the strange machine in front of him.
"This is the, er... armoured car then?" he asked.
"Bloody oath mate!" said Big Jacko Jackson enthusiastically. "Isn't she a beaut?"
Colonel Dunlop ran his eye over the machine. It was roughly the shape of a small truck, with a turret on top. It looked a serviceable enough design, except that it was made from corrugated iron, bailing wire, old cast-iron pipes and innumerable beer tins beaten flat. A few bits of what appeared to be a very forlorn Ford Ute stuck out here and there, and a mangey dog was relieving itself on the wheel.
"Er..." he said, "Er... I'm not sure that corrugated iron could stop a bullet."
"Yer bloody right, we tried it," said Jacko, happily cracking another stubby, "That's just ter give yers the idea of how it'll look. It's one of them proto-type things."
"Ah." Said Dunlop helplessly, wishing he'd ignored the mis-spelled and chaotic letter from this strange inventor.
"We've stuck sandbags an' stuff inside ter show how it'd weigh with armour on. Fancy a spin?"
Dunlop was unable to think of a good enough excuse, and was hustled into the hot and airless interior of the once-ute. Jacko slammed his door happily, and turned the ignition. The dash board was still stock, but had numerous extra instruments strapped to it including a compass and what looked like a great war fighter plane's gun sight. The noise of the flathead spluttering to life was deafening in the echoing metal cabin.
"We're gonna fit sound-proofing soon as me new mattress arrives from Darwin!" bellowed Jacko over the roaring engine. He engaged first gear, slammed his foot to the floor, and the improvised armoured car roared down the main street and out into the desert. Dunlop took a death grip on the dash, mentally adding 'mad driver' to the list of Jacko's atributes.
Jacko gunned the ute down the road, then swerved onto the red sand. The ute didn't slow down, and a glance at the speedo informed Dunlop that they were doing 55M/P/H.
He took the opportunity to go white.
"We souped up the bloody engine," roared Jacko, "And we rigged up four-bloody-wheel-drive usin' bits of the ute tyhe Jones boy wrapped rounda camel last month!"
The ute roared upo a rise, found nothing after the rise, and joyfully leapt skywards.
By the time the machine had landed, Dunlop, who had worked his entire military career in supply and administration had fainted. It was something to do with the expression on the face of the Kangaroo they were aiming for.

Big Jacko Jackson felt uncomfortable in a suit in a city. His deep central autralian tan made him stand out like a sore thumb amongst all the southerners at the Ford plant in Geelong. But Jacko was able to forget his discomfort when the big reddish-brown machine rolled oiut of the factory doors and pulled up infront of him. It was made from armour plate, and much more refined, but it still bore the unmistakable shape of the insane machine he'd knocked together a few months ago in Tennent Creek.
"Bloody oath," he said, "Coupla thousand of these an' she'll be bloody apples!"


The Ford Mark One armoured car, based on a design by bush mechanic Big Jacko Jackson entered service with the Australian army in 1942, based on the only slightly modified mechanicals of the Ford Utility truck. It was initially built in ford's Geelong plant, but production licenses were granted to various other firms. Interestingly, GM Holden's was one of these firms; after the war they were to become Ford's main rival. The simplicity and ease of construction of the rather rough and ready armoured car meant that very large numbers could be produced. Their excellent off-road ability, long range and readily available spare parts made them a favourite with Australian army crews. The basic design was adapted into numerous variants, chief amongst them being the APC and light cargo versions. Although not as powerful, nor as durable as tanks, the Ford MK.1 was able to run rings around Japanese armour, allowing for effective hit-and-run attacks. Although incapable to carrying heavy weapons, the design prooved itself effective against the light japanese tanks. It is often credited as one of the key weapons which allowed Australia to push the Japanese invasion back to Cape York by 1946. The Japanese surrendered shortly after when the USAF dropped the first atomic bomb.


Big Jacko Jackson's prototype, now preserved at the Australian War Memorial in Caberra.


APC variant fitted with US pattern 50 cal machine gun and gunports.


Turreted anti-tank version. The gun was also produced by Ford.

[pyro-manic]

Love it!

[Jschmus]

I like it, but doesn't it look rather modern for 1946?  It puts me in mind of the Panhard VBL.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V%C3%A9hicule_Blind%C3%A9_L%C3%A9ger

That's not to say that it's not a good thing.

[puddingwrestler]

It's still got the seperate grille and fender assembly style of the 40s. There's only so many ways you can actually stick great flat slabs of armour plate together. The thing is, most of the armoured cars of ww2 actually look more primitive than the cutting edge of technology at the time - look at the SdKfz 222 and 223, they look about twenty years ahead of the various Russian designs. The Ford is merely very modern looking.
And it's not the '46 part of the saga, it's just the setup of where the basic machine came from. The 46 part comes later and involves the weapons fitted.

[puddingwrestler]

Now gentle reader, let us turn out attentions (with due cuation of course) to Dr. Alphonse D. Schplokenheimer, son of an Italian mother and a German father, and a member of the Jewish religion. Alphonse grew up in Vienna before fleeing religious persecution in 1937 and making his way to Australia (mostly to work on his revolutionary theories of genetics by attempting to combine kangaroo glands with horses to make better show jumpers).
Dr. Schplokenheimer quickly gained a reputation as Australia's foremost mad scientist, his bizzare inventions often cropping up in the nation's newspapers.
When the war came, and the threat of Japanese invasion loomed, Schplokenheimer naturally turned his attentio to weapons. Not for him the mundane art of making something go bang very violently to hurl an object down a tube, Doc Schplok was after a much more elegant solution. To be brief, he was working on harnessing the lightning.
After several months in his lab just outside melbourne (he'd been banned from the city ever since his experimental cat feeder exploded at took out most of Honest Bob Brown's Car Yard one night), Doc Schplok emerged with a new type of potato peeler, a Kangaroo repelling fence and a new type of paint for cars. Fortunmately for the nation, he also emerged with the Schplokenheimer Type One Electro-Static Discharge Device for Long Ranged Bereavement of Those Of Nipponese Origin (or the STOESDDLRBTNO - he was never much good at names). Upon demonstrating the weapon to the Government, they settled on the official name of Type One Lighting Cannon, and agreed to give him three Ford Mk.I armoured cars to fit his new weapons to for field trials. Doc Schplok moved his lab to Alice Springs, and set to work fitting his new gun to his new cars.
This process proved more difficult than anticipated. For a start, the Lightning Cannon needed to be shrunk some what, and it's generator miniaturized before it was a really viable weapon. Then there was also the little matter of the first three prototype cannons variously exploding, melting under the stress, and simply vanishing. Doc Schplok, ever the optimist set about constructing the fourth cannon while he worked on his monumental work 'Implications of Super-High Energy Fields on the Fabric of Space and Time as Embodied by the Lightning Cannon', a work which sold nearly three copies.
Finally, the fourth cannon was completed and went out on trials. The armoured car had been modified to accept the cannon and it's generator, and also fitted with Doc Schplok's experimental alcohol fueled steam engine, which required the fitting of a bonnet bulge as it was taller than the stock unit. Despite requiring a fairly lengthy time to cool off between shots, it proved and effective weapon and was mobilized. Unfortunately, it was impossible to mass produce due to the incredible complexity and delicacy of it's mechanisms. There was also the problem of no one but Doc Schplok understanding how it worked, and no one being able to understand a word he said when he explained it (Doc Scplok was given to inventing his own technical terms without notice, and changing them with even less warning). For this reason, by the end of the war only three working Lightning Cannon equipped Ford Mk.I armoured cars had been completed. And Doc Schplok had been distracted by a machine for automatically removing the seeds from watermelons.
Doc Schplok dissappeared in the 1960s when he was embroiled in the supposed death by drowning of then Prime Minister Harold Holt. He left behind a legacy of mad science, a note reading 'chinese alien submarines stole out prime minister' and a perfected under-water unicycle. While Harold Holt had a swimming pool named after him, Doc Schplok is now largely forgotten by history. His lab was demolished and replaced with a roller skating rink, which was then replaced by a super-market car park. The last remaining Lightning Cannon is held by the War Memorial in Canberra, but does not work anymore due to having suffered a catestrophic de-compression in it's womble-chamber (a Doc Schplok term), leaving 36% of the cannon in a melted mess on the floor.

[Taiidantomcat]

Cool!!! 

[comrade harps]

While Harold Holt had a swimming pool named after him

I've always loved the very idea (let alone the realty) of the Harold Holt memorial swimming pool:
http://www.stonnington.vic.gov.au/explore-stonnington/sport-and-recreation/harold-holt-swim-centre/

Nice armoured vehicle too.

[rickshaw]

The Harold Holt swimming pool is one of those nicely ironic touch which restores my faith in the Australian character.   

[puddingwrestler]

I learned to swim there. It's heritage listed, but only because it's so amazingly ugly. There is no other building like it because people realised how terrible they looked.

[Glenn]

I want one!!! Do you think you could convert my Ford Longreach PanelVan into one.....pplleeeaaasssssseeeeeeeeeee!!!   Think what it would be like going through a round-about in one of those....CRUNCH!
Glenn

[proditor]

Kangaroo/Horse crossbreeds!  BRILLIANT!! 

Love the designs, love the back stories even more.  Awesome job again!