28-07-2007, 04:07 PM
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#11 (permalink)
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| Legendary Member
Join Date: May 2005 Location: Melbourne, Australia
Posts: 8,182
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Originally Posted by Gerry Chester  Hi Ron,
At the conclusion of hostilities in North Africa, the large numbers of abandoned German and Italian vehicles, everywhere to be found, became a hunting-ground for each tank crew seeking personal transportation.
Dick Hayward (my Churchill's driver) and I came across a beautiful Bugatti Open Tourer only to find, on opening the bonnet, the distributor cap to be non-existent. After searching in vain for the cap we eventually settled for Lancia diesel powered open-deck lorry which Dick, being the expert mechanic he was, fine-tuned the engine. The fun the crew of Bangor had, swanning around Northern Tunisia, was not lessened when later we discovered that "our" Bugatti had been salvaged by another tank crew.
Alas, the use of personal transport ended two weeks later when the Army Command issued orders that ALL Axis vehicles, by a certain date, had to be handed in. Taking the order literally, before the deadline, the Bugatti became a British vehicle when it was repainted, appropriately numbered and ceremoniously presented to the OC for his personal use. The car stayed with the Squadron while in Africa but I cannot recall whether it was, in fact, shipped to Italy.
Cheers, Gerry | No insinuation of officer privilege there is there Gerry?
__________________ Spidge, 
------------------------------------------------------- My Avatar is the memorial to the 22 Commonwealth Coastwatchers at the Temakin Cemetery on Betio (Tarawa Atoll) who were beheaded by the Japanese on 15th October 1942. http://www.dva.gov.au/media/publicat...mem_beito.html
"You were given the choice between war and dishonor.
You chose dishonor and you will have war."
(Winston Churchill made this prophetic pronouncement in a House of Commons speech in 1938, just after Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain signed the Munich agreement with Hitler. Chamberlain returned from Germany with the signed agreement in hand, proclaiming that "peace in our time" had been achieved. Churchill attacked Chamberlain's "politics of appeasement" in this and many other speeches.)
What did the Australians do in ww2 and other conflicts? Check out this site:
http://www.diggerhistory.info/00-pag...ster-index.htm |
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