The “Ugly” Canadian Truck That Outproduced Every German Factory Combined –  Hw

1940, Oshawa, Ontario. A Chevrolet assembly line that had been stamping out civilian sedans 6 months earlier rolled its first military truck off the floor. It looked wrong. The cab was stubby, the hood was short, the whole thing sat like a bulldog on wheels. British officers inspecting the prototype looked at each other.

Australian troops would soon call it the monkey face. New Zealanders called it the baboon. Nobody thought it was pretty, but within 5 years two Canadian factories would produce over 400,000 of these trucks. A number that exceeded every German military truck factory combined. The country that built them had a population of just 11 million and was still climbing out of the Great Depression.

The truck was the Canadian military pattern built by Ford Canada and Chevrolet Canada. It would become the single most important vehicle the British Commonwealth put on the road during World War II. To understand why the CMP mattered, you have to understand what happened at Dunkirk. When the British Expeditionary Force evacuated France in May and June of 1940, it left behind virtually every vehicle it owned.

Trucks, carriers, artillery tractors, ambulances, all of it abandoned on the beaches and roads of northern France. Britain’s army was now an army without wheels. Domestic truck production existed, primarily Bedford and Austin, but British factories were already stretched to breaking point building tanks, aircraft, and naval vessels.

The Bedford QL, Britain’s best 4×4 truck, produced only 72 horsepower and managed a range of just 156 miles. Factories could not keep pace with demand. Britain needed a massive external source of military trucks and it needed them fast. Germany, meanwhile, had its own logistics crisis that propaganda worked hard to conceal.

Joseph Goebbels gave specific orders that only mechanized traffic was to be filmed and shown in cinemas. The real picture was staggering. According to Wehrmacht records, horses pulled 2/3 of German vehicles and supplied 80% of the army’s motive power. Germany used 2.75 million horses during the war. 750,000 of them died.

A standard 1940 German infantry division fielded 800 motor vehicles alongside 6400 draft animals. Before Colonel Adolf von Schell’s rationalization attempt in 1939, the Wehrmacht operated 114 different lorry types and 52 passenger car types. The Schell plan aimed to reduce lorries to 19 standardized types. It largely failed.

Germany kept absorbing captured vehicles from every conquered nation. French Renaults, Czech Tatras, Polish trucks, Italian Fiats, compounding a spare parts nightmare that would never be solved. The Opel Blitz, Germany’s most produced military truck, managed only around 130,000 units across the entire war. The Mercedes-Benz L 3000 added roughly 30,000 more.

Canada would dwarf both of those numbers with a single program. The solution came from an unlikely partnership. Ford Canada and Chevrolet Canada were bitter corporate rivals. They shared nothing. But the British War Office issued specifications demanding something radical. Two competing manufacturers would build trucks using interchangeable parts on standardized chassis.

A Chevrolet cab had to bolt onto a Ford frame. A Ford axle had to fit a Chevrolet drivetrain. The only visible external difference between the two would be the radiator grill mesh. Diamond pattern for Chevrolet, square pattern for Ford. The man who led the cab design effort was Sid Swallow at Ford Canada. The CMP came in a brilliantly simple model range.

The first letter identified the manufacturer. C for Chevrolet, F for Ford. The number indicated payload in hundredweight. A C15 carried 1500 weight, about 760 kg. A C60 carried 3 tons. Suffix letters indicated drivetrain. A mental wheel drive. L meant long wheelbase. X meant 6×6. The system meant that any quartermaster anywhere in the world could identify a truck’s manufacturer, payload, and configuration from its designation alone. Two engines powered the range.

Ford offered its 239 cubic inch Mercury flathead V8 producing 95 brake horsepower. Chevrolet offered its 216 cubic inch stovebolt inline six producing 85 brake horsepower. The Chevrolet was 10 horsepower weaker on paper. In the field, it proved far superior. According to Long Range Desert Group operational records, the Chevrolet achieved roughly 12 miles per gallon in desert conditions. The Ford managed six.

That difference was not academic. It meant the Ford had to carry twice the fuel to cover the same distance. Fuel that displaced ammunition, water, and food. The LRDG eventually abandoned its Ford trucks in favor of Chevrolets for precisely this reason. Both engines drove through a four-speed crash box manual transmission with no synchromesh paired with a two-speed transfer case on 4×4 models.

Claimed top speed was 50 mph. However, as The Globe and Mail noted, almost no CMP could actually achieve that figure. The cab design evolved through three iterations. Each one stranger looking than the last. The number 11 cab of 1940 had a fixed windshield, rear-hinged suicide doors, and a stubby profile that earned it the monkey face nickname.

The number 12 cab of 1941 added a windshield that opened slightly for ventilation and a hinge bonnet section that gave it the name alligator cab. But the number 13 cab, introduced in late 1941, was the design that defined the CMP for the rest of the war. It was radical. A completely flat-fronted cab with two windscreen panels angled deliberately forward and downward.

Every single panel was dead flat. Not a single compound curve anywhere. Troops called it the Pekingese after the flat-faced dog breed. The cab 13’s ugliness was pure engineering genius. The forward-sloping windscreen eliminated sun glare for the driver and prevented reflections visible from enemy aircraft.

A life-saving detail in theaters where Axis air power hunted supply convoys relentlessly. The all flat panel construction slashed manufacturing time and cost because flat panels required simpler stamping dies. And the cab forward layout shortened overall vehicle length so dramatically that short wheelbase CMPs achieved an almost cube-like profile allowing maximum trucks to be packed into Atlantic convoy ship holds.

Every ugly angle on this truck served a purpose. Nothing was accidental. Now, before we see how this performed in combat, if you are enjoying this deep dive into Commonwealth engineering, hit subscribe. It takes a second, costs nothing, and helps the channel grow. Now, let us get into the combat record. The CMP saw action in virtually every Commonwealth theater of the war.

The British Eighth Army fought the entire Western Desert Campaign using almost exclusively CMP trucks. They appeared in Sicily, mainland Italy, the Normandy breakout, Burma, East Africa, and the Philippines. They served with British, Canadian, Australian, New Zealand, South African, Indian, Free French, and Polish forces. The Long Range Desert Group wrote the most extraordinary chapter in CMP history.

The LRDG operated behind Axis lines in North Africa almost continuously from December 1940 to April 1943, missing only 15 days during the entire period. Allied agents and SAS raiding parties called them the Libyan Desert Taxi Service. Enemy troops called them the Ghost Patrol. Their Chevrolet 1533X2 trucks were stripped to bare essentials.

Cabs were removed entirely. Doors, windscreens, and roofs all gone. Bigger radiators and water condensers replaced standard equipment. Bodies were heightened with wooden planks to increase cargo capacity. Each truck bristled with six to eight gun mountings carrying Vickers K machine guns, Lewis guns, and captured Italian Breda 20 mm cannon whose recoil was powerful enough to lift the tires off the ground.

Operation Caravan, the Bards raid of September 13, 1942, stands as the LRDG’s most dramatic CMP mission. 47 men in 12 Chevrolet trucks and five Jeeps under Major Jake Eason-Smith traveled 1155 miles over 11 days to reach their target. Double-crossing the Great Sand Sea, T1 patrol attacked the Italian airfield at Bards destroying up to 35 aircraft on the ground.

During the withdrawal, Captain Wilder reportedly rammed an Italian L3 tankette at full speed with his Chevrolet truck pushing it off the road to clear a path for his patrol and kept driving to safety. When Rommel captured Tobruk in June 1942, his greatest logistical windfall was approximately 2,000 captured CMP trucks. German forces eagerly pressed them into service.

According to veteran accounts, German prisoner Frederick von Althen stated that the Canadian trucks were the elite of their type and were much sought after. Italian General Gastone Gambara reportedly proposed exchanging two Fiat Lancia heavy trucks for any single captured Commonwealth light truck. Rommel ended up chasing the British army using Canadian trucks while the British army was also supplied by Canadian trucks.

Against the Opel Blitz, the CMP held decisive advantages. The Blitz’s 3.6 L inline six produced just 73 to 75 horsepower, weaker than either CMP engine. The vast majority of Blitz trucks were 4×2 only. The 4×4 all rad variant reached just 25,000 units out of the total production run. The CMP was almost universally 4×4 giving it a crushing advantage in mud, sand, and rough terrain.

Both carried 3-ton payloads at similar road speeds, but produced its CMP in three to five times greater numbers than Germany managed with the Blitz. The deeper irony is remarkable. General Motors had acquired Opel in 1929. The Blitz engine evolved from a GM Buick straight-six and was so similar to Chevrolet engines that advancing Allied mechanics could repair abandoned Blitzes using Chevrolet and Bedford parts.

GM’s Canadian division built CMP Chevrolets for the Allies while GM’s German subsidiary built Blitzes for the Wehrmacht, Ford occupied the identical position. Ford Werke in Cologne built trucks for Germany, while Ford Canada in Windsor built CMP’s for Britain. Against the American GMC CCKW, the 2 and 1/2 ton workhorse known as the Deuce and 1/2, the CMP filled a complementary role.

The CCKW was heavier, 6×6, and had greater range at roughly 300 miles. It powered the Red Ball Express across France. The CMP countered with significantly lighter weight for easier shipping, a more compact profile, a simpler drivetrain, and unmatched body type diversity across 90 distinct configurations versus the CCKW’s 50.

The production numbers tell the strategic story. Chevrolet’s Oshawa plant produced roughly 201,000 CMP’s. Ford’s Windsor plant built approximately 209,000. By June 1943, according to Canadian production records, 900,000 Canadian workers were producing in a single week over 4,000 motor vehicles, 450 armored fighting vehicles, 80 aircraft, 940 heavy guns, and 25 million cartridges.

As historian J.L. Granatstein observed, almost none of these weapons and equipment had been produced in Canada in 1939. By 1945, half the war factories operating in Ontario had not existed 6 years earlier. This industrial transformation was driven by C.D. Howe, the American-born MIT engineer serving as Canada’s Minister of Munitions and Supply.

Nicknamed the Minister of Everything, Howe recruited top business executives as dollar-a-year men, loaned by their companies for a token annual salary. He created 20 Crown Corporations to bypass government bureaucracy, and turned a nation of farmers and fishermen into the fourth largest Allied industrial power. After the war, CMP’s served for decades across the globe.

Israel converted them into improvised armored cars during the 1948 War of Independence. Denmark designated them M6 Mosegris. Portugal, Spain, South Africa, India, and Malaya all used them into the 1960’s. In civilian life, they became forestry trucks, grain transports, fire engines, and snow plows. In New Zealand, a one monkey face Ford V8 spent decades spreading lime on a farm before restoration.

The most haunting legacy lies in the desert itself. In 1980, an LRDG Chevrolet was discovered in the Egyptian desert, where it had lain since 1941. Truck number eight of W Patrol named Waipapa, a Maori word, recovered in 1983, it now sits in the Imperial War Museum in London. Desert camouflage still visible after four decades under the sun.

Retired Colonel Ian Newby, who owned six CMP’s and drove one from England to Normandy for D-Day’s 50th anniversary, offered the most honest verdict. If you can drive a CMP, you can drive pretty much anything. They are absolute pigs to drive, but we won the war. That flat-faced, cramped, deliberately ugly truck that everyone mocked on first sight, went on to outproduce every German factory combined.

It carried Commonwealth armies across six continents. Enemy generals traded two of their own trucks for a single captured example. A country of 11 million people, still shaking off the depression, built it in numbers that changed the course of the war. The CMP was not glamorous, it was not comfortable, but every ugly angle served a purpose.

Every flat panel saved manufacturing hours, and every forward-sloping windscreen hid a driver from enemy aircraft. That was not luck. That was Commonwealth engineering solving the biggest problem of the war, how to keep an army moving with a truck so good that even the enemy wanted it.

QQ4 Bob Dylan and Keith Richards have been close friends for nearly 40 years. The friendship began on a live television program in November of 1986 in the 11 seconds after Bob Dylan called Keith Richards music derivative on camera. Keith Richard’s response to that assessment, one sentence said without anger, without performance, with the specific directness of a man who has nothing to prove and knows it made Bob Dylan laugh.

Then made Bob Dylan go quiet. then made Bob Dylan say two words that people who know Bob Dylan say he almost never said to anyone. This is the story of those 11 seconds and the 40 years that followed them. The program was a live music interview special broadcast on an American network on the evening of November 3rd, 1986. The format was simple.

Two musicians, a host, an hour of conversation about music and the state of it. The producers had assembled the pairing of Bob Dylan and Keith Richards with the specific calculation of television producers who understand that two people with equally strong and potentially incompatible views about what music is and what it should do will produce better television than two people who agree about everything.

The calculation was correct, though not in the way the producers had anticipated. Bob Dylan was 45 years old in November of 1986. Bob Dylan had released Empire Burlesque the previous year and had been on the road for most of the intervening period as part of the True Confessions tour with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.

Bob Dylan was in November of 1986 in one of the most prolific and restless phases of a career that had consisted almost entirely of prolific and restless phases. A career that had moved through folk, rock, country, gospel, and back again, that had been declared finished at least six times by the music press, and at each time continued with the serene indifference of a river to the opinions of people standing on its banks.

Bob Dylan had been redefining what music could be. Since 1962, Bob Dylan had invented and reinvented himself so many times that reinvention had become his defining characteristic, not in the superficial sense of a performer changing costumes, but in the deeper sense of a musician who had never allowed his work to settle into a form that could be anticipated or categorized from the outside.

Bob Dylan understood influence and originality and the relationship between them better than almost anyone alive in 1986. Bob Dylan had spent 24 years thinking carefully and specifically about where music came from and where music was going and what it meant that those two things were always in constant conversation with each other.

Keith Richards was 42 years old in November of 1986. Keith Richards had been playing guitar professionally since 1962. Keith Richards had built a career on a foundation of American blues and rhythm and blues. A foundation that Keith Richards had studied with the systematic devotion of someone who understood that the tradition he was building on was not incidental to the music he was making, but essential to it.

that you could not understand what Keith Richards did without understanding where Keith Richards had come from and what Keith Richards had been listening to since he was a teenager in Dartford with American Import Records and a secondhand guitar and no teacher except the recordings themselves. Keith Richards had never pretended otherwise. Keith Richards had in fact spent considerable energy across his career making the lineage explicit, naming the artists, citing the recordings, insisting on the acknowledgement of influence that the mainstream music

industry had a long history of suppressing or ignoring or crediting to the wrong people. If anything, Keith Richards was more transparent about his sources than most musicians of his generation. Keith Richards had always said openly that the Rolling Stones came directly from the blues, that Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson and the specific tradition of the Mississippi Delta were not background influences, but foundational ones.

The music Keith Richards made was in direct and sustained conversation with that tradition, something Keith Richards considered not a limitation, but a responsibility and a form of respect. The interview had been running for 8 minutes when the host asked Bob Dylan about the current state of rock and roll.

Bob Dylan answered with the density and the indirection that characterized Bob Dylan’s responses to direct questions, turning the question over, approaching it from an unexpected angle, finding his way to what he actually thought through a series of observations that moved like a river rather than a road. Bob Dylan was not a straightforward interview subject.

Bob Dylan had been asked about rock and roll in hundreds of interviews across 24 years and had developed the habit of treating the question as an invitation to think out loud rather than a request for a prepared position. The producer Gerald Sherman said afterward that in the first 8 minutes of the interview, he had been slightly anxious, not because anything was going wrong, but because nothing was going anywhere in particular yet.

The interview had the feeling of two conversations happening simultaneously. Bob Dylan’s internal one and the external one visible to the cameras. And Gerald Sherman was not certain in those first eight minutes that the two conversations would converge into something. Bob Dylan talked about influence. Bob Dylan talked about originality.

Bob Dylan talked about the difference between music that absorbed a tradition and transformed it and music that absorbed a tradition and reproduced it. And then Bob Dylan made his assessment. And then Bob Dylan said with the precision of a man making a musical assessment rather than a personal judgment that the Rolling Stones work, and Bob Dylan was specific, naming Keith Richards as the guitarist whose approach he was discussing was derivative in a way that Bob Dylan found limiting.

Bob Dylan said it without hostility. Bob Dylan said it as a technical observation about the relationship between source material and the work that came from it. Bob Dylan said that Keith Richards played the blues the way the blues had already been played, rather than using the blues as a starting point for something that had not yet been played.

Keith Richards had been listening to this with the specific attention Keith Richards gave to things being said about music by people who knew music. Keith Richards did not interrupt. Keith Richards did not shift in his chair or display any of the visible signals of a person preparing a defensive response. Keith Richards listened to Bob Dylan’s complete observation all the way to its conclusion without interrupting and without displaying any visible signal of preparing a response.

Then Keith Richards said one sentence. The sentence was not a rebuttal. The sentence did not defend Keith Richards music or argue for its originality or challenge Bob Dylan’s characterization of what the blues meant in the context of rock and roll. The sentence was something else entirely, something that required a specific kind of confidence to say.

The confidence of a person who has spent long enough thinking about the same things as the person they are talking to that they can locate the exact point where their thinking diverges and say something useful about that point rather than simply defending their own position. The sentence acknowledged everything Bob Dylan had said, the assessment, the distinction Bob Dylan was drawing, the specific musical concern underlying the observation, and then turned it 90°.

Keith Richards took Bob Dylan’s own framework, the one Bob Dylan had used to analyze Keith Richards relationship to the blues tradition, and applied it back to Bob Dylan’s work with the same precision Bob Dylan had used to apply it to Keith Richards. Spare aimed. The sentence asked Bob Dylan something about Bob Dylan’s own music, about the relationship between Bob Dylan’s sources and Bob Dylan’s output that Bob Dylan had not been asked on television before.

The sentence did not attack. The sentence illuminated. Bob Dylan laughed. The laugh was not the polite laugh of someone responding to a joke. The laugh was the involuntary laugh of someone who has been genuinely surprised. The specific kind of surprise that a person of exceptional intelligence experiences when someone else’s intelligence exceeds their expectations.

Bob Dylan laughed for 4 seconds. Then Bob Dylan stopped laughing. Then Bob Dylan was quiet for 3 seconds in the way that Bob Dylan was quiet when Bob Dylan was thinking rather than performing thought. Then Bob Dylan said, “You’re right.” The producer in the booth, a man named Gerald Sherman, who had been working in television for 14 years, said afterward that in 14 years of live television production, he had never heard Bob Dylan say those two words in a public forum.

Gerald Sherman said he had worked with Bob Dylan on two previous occasions and had observed Bob Dylan in numerous other contexts and that you’re right was not a phrase that Bob Dylan deployed easily or often because Bob Dylan had spent 24 years being right about music in ways that other people eventually caught up with. And the experience of being right ahead of everyone else does not generally produce a man who says you’re right readily when someone else makes a point.

The host of the program, a journalist named Patricia Wells, who had been interviewing musicians for 12 years, said afterward that the 11 seconds between Bob Dylan’s assessment and Bob Dylan saying, “You’re right,” were the most extraordinary 11 seconds of television she had been present for. Patricia Wells said that what she witnessed in those 11 seconds was not a debate or a confrontation or a celebrity exchange of competing opinions.

Patricia Wells said what she witnessed was one musician recognizing another musician as an equal, which was in the specific context of Bob Dylan in 1986, not something that happened in public very often. The interview continued for another 42 minutes after those 11 seconds. The conversation between Bob Dylan and Keith Richards in the remaining 42 minutes was described by everyone who watched it as fundamentally different from the first 8 minutes.

The host, Patricia Wells, who had been conducting music interviews for 12 years and understood the difference between the performance of conversation and actual conversation, said that at approximately the 9-minute mark, something shifted in the studio. That the formal interview, architecture dissolved, and what replaced it was something less structured and more genuine.

Bob Dylan and Keith Richards talked about influence and originality and the blues and what it meant to build on a tradition without being consumed by it. They talked about specific recordings and specific musicians with the specificity of two people who had spent their entire adult lives thinking about these things and rarely found another person who had thought about them with equivalent care.

They talked about where music came from and where music was going and whether those two questions were actually one question or two. Patricia Wells said afterward that she had asked approximately four questions in the remaining 42 minutes because Bob Dylan and Keith Richards did not require questions. They required only a room and a camera and the shared understanding that what they were saying together was worth recording carefully.

She said it was the best interview she had ever conducted and that she had conducted the smallest part of it. After the program, Bob Dylan and Keith Richards were in the corridor outside the studio when the host Patricia Wells passed them. Patricia Wells said she did not stop because she did not want to interrupt.

She observed them for approximately 30 seconds from a distance. She said they were talking with the ease of people who had known each other for years rather than people who had met for the first time 2 hours earlier. She said that something had shifted between them during the broadcast that the broadcast had made permanent rather than temporary.

She continued down the corridor and did not look back. She said in her account of that evening that she had decided in that moment not to interrupt the conversation because some conversations are more valuable than any question a journalist might ask and that the conversation she had observed for 30 seconds in the corridor outside the studio was one of them.

She had been a music journalist for 12 years. She recognized the difference. Bob Dylan and Keith Richards have maintained their friendship across four decades. They have appeared together at various events, most significantly at the concert for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995, where people who were present described them as inseparable for most of the evening, occupying the same corner of the backstage area and talking with the concentrated attention of people who only have a limited amount of time together and intend to use it

well. Bob Dylan has spoken about Keith Richards in interviews with the specific thoughtful care that Bob Dylan reserves for musicians whose work Bob Dylan considers genuinely important rather than merely culturally prominent. Keith Richards has spoken about Bob Dylan in similar terms with the specific respect of someone who recognizes in another person a commitment to music that goes deeper than career.

Neither Bob Dylan nor Keith Richards has made a public statement specifically about how the friendship began or about the November 1986 interview. Bob Dylan has not mentioned the 11 seconds. Keith Richards has not mentioned the sentence. The interview exists in the archive. The 11 seconds are there. The laugh is there. The two words are there.

What is also there for anyone who watches the interview from its beginning and pays attention to the shift that happens at the 9-minute mark is the specific moment when two people who thought they were appearing on a television program discovered they were actually talking to each other. What Keith Richards said in that one sentence has never been officially reported.

The people who were in the studio that evening, Gerald Sherman, Patricia Wells, the floor crew, the two camera operators, the makeup artist who was watching from the side of the set, have described the sentence in consistent terms. They have described its effect. They have described Bob Dylan’s laugh and Bob Dylan’s silence and Bob Dylan’s two words.

They have not repeated the sentence itself in the specific understanding that the sentence was said between two musicians on a television program and that its power resided in the specific context of that exchange and would not survive removal from it intact. What can be said is this. Keith Richards said something to Bob Dylan about Bob Dylan’s music that used Bob Dylan’s own observation about Keith Richards as its starting point and arrived somewhere that Bob Dylan had not anticipated.

Keith Richards turned Bob Dylan’s assessment 90° and showed Bob Dylan something about the music they had both spent their lives making that Bob Dylan recognized immediately as true. And Bob Dylan said, “You’re right.” Two words said by Bob Dylan in public on live television in 1986 to Keith Richards in response to a single sentence Keith Richards had said about music.

Two words that Gerald Sherman, who had worked with Bob Dylan on two previous occasions, said he had never heard Bob Dylan say in a public forum. Two words that Patricia Wells, who had been interviewing musicians for 12 years, said were the most significant two words she had heard in those 12 years. Not because of their content, but because of who said them and what it cost to say them and what it meant that Keith Richards had produced them in 11 seconds from a conversation that began with Bob Dylan calling Keith Richards’s music derivative. And Keith Richards and

Bob Dylan have been close friends for nearly 40 years. The sentence did its work in 11 seconds on the evening of November 3rd, 1986. The work has been ongoing ever since. If this story moved you, subscribe and leave a comment below. Have you ever said something to someone that turned a potential disagreement into an unexpected and lasting connection? Tell us about it in the comments below.

Share this with someone who needs to be reminded that the right sentence said at the right moment can completely change the entire direction of a relationship. Ring the notification bell for more untold stories about the extraordinary human beings behind music’s greatest legends.