Yahoo Autos Aaron Robinson: After 70 Years, My WWII Ambulance Has Earned Its Ticket Home
From the September 2013 Issue of Car and Driver
This has happened to me twice. I embark on a search for an obscure vehicle that has become the unremitting fixation of my desire, a search that I expect will take many months if not a whole year of emails and phone calls and web trolling into the wee hours of sleepless nights—and then it’s over in two weeks. Done. Finished. The first time, a friend’s next-door neighbor in Sydney decided to offload a nice Australian-spec 1972 Chrysler Charger just as my epic quest began for one of those esoteric muscle cars. Then, this past February, I launched what I thought would be another protracted search, giving myself a generous 16-month window to get it done, and only days later was wiring around 10 grand to the British Isles for a 1942 U.S. Army Dodge WC-54 ambulance.
Here’s the short backstory: In June 2009, my wife, Tina, and I hit the shores of French Normandy in a World War II jeep. We camped at Carentan and roamed the battlefields where bunkers and bomb pits are still evident. We drove on Omaha and Utah, hiked up the bloody Colleville Draw, peered out the gun ports of the German battery at Azeville, and held our breath as frail veterans recounted to us their first night in combat as vividly as if it were 15 minutes ago. We also froze, because Normandy in June can be like San Francisco in January. The Channel dampness seeps into and under whatever you are wearing and turns your clothes against you. Even so, shortly after that trip, we committed to returning in 2014 for the 70th anniversary of D-Day, with the secondary goal of finding some way to reduce the bone chill. The Dodge WC-54, a precursor to the Power Wagon, was one of several three-quarter-ton truck models supplied by Dodge to the Army, but it was the only one with a heater. For four years I watched decent examples come and go in the classifieds, just a few per year as it’s somewhat rare, and by February, I was ready to pounce.
A few weeks later I was in England, attempting to start a WC-54 for the first time in order to move it 40 miles from the seller’s storage to a farm whose owner, a retired Lotus employee with a penchant for military machines, had agreed to take it in. Typical of wartime vehicles, there is no key. You turn an electric switch, pull the choke, pump the gas a few times, and step down on a sort of stick poking through the fire wall. Thus, your own leg muscles both thrust the starter pinion onto the ring gear and close the electrical circuit, engendering a leisurely whirring followed by a coughing combustion from the 230-cubic-inch flathead six. Red crosses resplendent in the rare March sunshine, the Dodge eased into the village lane and, all at once, I realized how big this thing is. It dwarfed a Range Rover that had to veer quickly around it, the startled driver’s head turning a full 180 as the ambulance, all slots and slabs and angle iron up front, bullied past.
The unsynchronized four-speed proved a cantankerous ’box full of crash and grind, requiring double-clutching both up and down, while a lever engages four-wheel drive. First gear, a granny ratio that Dodge provided in lieu of a high-low transfer case, tops out at just nine mph, making it useless on pavement unless you wish to be rear-ended by Judy Dench look-alikes in Daihatsus. At the first roundabout, I nearly had to floss a scooter out of the grille after failing to anticipate how 70-year-old drum brakes would meet the challenge of 5900 pounds.
The route toward Norwich passed slowly at 50 mph, the engine and road noise roaring into the uninsulated cabin while the two gurneys in back swayed gently from their ceiling straps. It hit me suddenly that the Dodge is unlike any vehicle I’ve ever owned. It’s not just an old truck; it’s a real war artifact, a genuine historic relic like a paratrooper’s helmet or a Nazi Luger. The seller claimed its 1st Division markings are based on old paint he discovered during an earlier restoration, which would have put the Dodge on the D-Day beaches on or around June 6, 1944. But it’s impossible to know for sure. The Army didn’t keep records, and the only verifiable fact is that this ambulance went with many American vehicles into the Greek army after the war, not returning to England until the mid-1980s.
The Dodge may have served at an airfield awaiting the returning B-17s and -24s, or run errands at a big hospital in England. It may have been assigned to Eisenhower’s headquarters, or landed at Anzio, or ferried wounded out of the green hell of the Hürtgen Forest. History has forgotten who rode aboard, who had embedded shrapnel or gangrenous feet, who laughed at their luck, dreamed of their sweethearts, cried out for their mothers, or gazed up at the paneled ceiling as they drew a final breath.
The plan is to ship the ambulance back to the U.S. after Normandy, maybe return it to Warren Truck in Michigan where it was built and where Chrysler still assembles the Ram pickup. After that, well, my garage is too small for it and I’m not sure where it’ll live, but as they did with Bigfoot in Harry and the Hendersons, we’ll make do. For this old veteran, and for the ghosts who ride aboard, it’s time to finally come home from the war.
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