The ‘Improvised’ South African Truck That Stole Enemy Guns and Fought From Tobruk for Sixty Years D

1942, somewhere in the Western Desert, 80 mi south of Tobruk, an armored car crosses a stretch of open ground at 50 mph, trailing a ribbon of dust that can be seen for 10 mi. It weighs barely 6 tons. Its armor is 12 mm thick at the front, 6 mm on the sides, rifle caliber, the kind of protection that stops a bullet and nothing else.

Its original armament, a .55 caliber Boys anti-tank rifle and a Bren light machine gun, has been ripped out entirely. In their place, bolted to a crude steel pedestal where the roof used to be, sits a captured Italian Breda 20 mm cannon. The ammunition feeding it is Italian. The gun shield welded around it is British.

The chassis underneath is a Canadian Ford truck. The four-wheel drive conversion was shipped from a factory in Indianapolis. The armor plate was rolled in Pretoria and the three men inside are South African. It looked improvised. It looked like something built in a garage from whatever parts happened to arrive that week.

Three countries had manufactured it. A fourth country’s weapon was bolted to its roof. Nothing about it was standard. Nothing about it was supposed to work. It would go on to fight across North Africa, East Africa and the Pacific. It would equip more than a dozen nations on four continents. It would see combat in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, survive the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974, and remain in active military service with the Greek Army in the Aegean Islands into the 1990s, six full decades after the first prototype rolled onto a test track in South Africa. Its official designation was the South African reconnaissance car. The troops who drove it Monkey Harry. The British Army, noting the American manufacturer’s name stamped on the front wheel hubs, called it the Marmon-Herrington. And it was the most improvised fighting vehicle of the Second World War. To understand why the Marmon-Herrington existed, you need to understand the problem South Africa faced in the late 1930s. The Union of South Africa in 1937 had no armored vehicle industry. It had

no tank factories. It had no domestic weapons manufacturing base of any significance. What it did have was a small professional army, the Union Defence Force, that was expected to defend a vast territory and contribute forces to the British Commonwealth if war came. And war, by 1937, was clearly coming. The catalyst was specific.

In early 1937, the Ford Motor Company’s assembly plant in Port Elizabeth on the coast of the Eastern Cape obtained technical drawings from its Canadian offices in Ottawa. The drawings showed an experimental armored car that had been built for the Canadian Department of Defense, adapting a Crossley armored car body to a standard Ford truck chassis.

The South African War Supplies Board examined the concept and saw an opportunity. If a Ford truck could carry armor in Canada, a Ford truck could carry armor in South Africa. By late 1937, local manufacturers were shown preliminary designs, but progress was slow. According to the academic record published in Scientia Militaria, detailed development was held up by a lack of trained technical staff in the South African Defense Department.

In April 1939, South Africa placed an order in the United States for 22 American pattern armored cars on a Ford six-wheel chassis, but by June a South African inspection team visiting the Marmon-Herrington factory in Indianapolis found problems adapting the design to the available Ford chassis. The American order was cancelled.

Instead, two soft steel prototypes of a domestic design were ordered, one on a standard Ford chassis, one fitted with a Marmon-Herrington four-wheel drive conversion kit. Then, in September 1939, South Africa entered the war. The program that had been moving at peacetime speed suddenly became urgent.

By December 1939, the design of the Mark I was approved and production arranged. What emerged was a genuinely multinational machine. Ford of Canada supplied the truck chassis and V8 engine. The Marmon-Herrington company of Indianapolis supplied the four-wheel drive conversion kits. ISCOR, the South African Iron and Steel Industrial Corporation, rolled the armor plate at its mills in Pretoria.

Dorman Long Africa built the armored bodies in Johannesburg and Ford Motor Company of South Africa performed final assembly back in Port Elizabeth. Five manufacturers across three countries building a vehicle that no single nation had designed from scratch. The Mark I was a crude beginning. It used a long wheelbase chassis with rear-wheel drive only. Carried 2.

303 Vickers machine guns, one in a small cylindrical turret and one in the hull, and weighed roughly 6 tons. About 135 were built before production shifted to the Mark II in 1941. The Mark II was the breakthrough. It was the first true four-wheel drive armored car in Commonwealth service using the Marmon-Herrington front drive kit on a shorter wheelbase.

887 were produced in two variants. One for the Union Defence Force Mobile Field Force and one for the Middle East theater. The latter armed with a Boys anti-tank rifle and a coaxial Bren gun. But the vehicle that would define the family was the Mark III. Production ran from May 1941 to August 1942. It was more compact than its predecessors with a shortened wheelbase of just under 118 in, a three-man crew, an octagonal open-topped turret, and strengthened front suspension.

Armor remained thin, 12 mm at the front, six on the sides and rear. The Ford V8 engine produced roughly 95 horsepower, enough for a top road speed of 50 mph, and a range of about 200 mi according to most production estimates. Between 2,200 and 2,600 Mark IIIs were built, though the exact figure varies between sources.

It was the most produced variant and the backbone of Eighth Army Reconnaissance from late 1941 through mid-1942. The Mark IV, arriving in 1943, was a complete redesign, a monocoque hull, a rear-mounted engine, and a proper two-man turret carrying a 2-pounder gun and a coaxial .30 caliber Browning machine gun.

Over 2,100 were built in two versions. The second using a Canadian Ford chassis to overcome shortages of Marmon-Herrington conversion kits. Total production across all marks reached approximately 5,746 vehicles, but the numbers alone do not explain the Marmon-Herrington’s reputation.

What made this vehicle legendary was not what it was built with. It was what the crews did to it after it arrived. The standard armament of the Mark II and Mark was inadequate. The Boys anti-tank rifle could not penetrate any German armor heavier than a half-track. The Bren gun was an infantry weapon.

Crews operating in the Western Desert, where they were expected to conduct long-range reconnaissance against German and Italian armored formations, needed something that could actually hurt the enemy. And in the desert in 1941 and 1942, captured enemy weapons were everywhere. It started with the 11th Hussars. After the British victories in early 1941, enormous stocks of Italian weapons and ammunition fell into Allied hands.

The Hussars suggested mounting captured Italian Breda 20-mm anti-aircraft cannon onto their Marmon-Herringtons. The conversion was brutal. The roof was cut away. The turret was opened up. A steel pedestal was welded in. And the Breda, with its large British-made gun shield, was bolted on top.

The result was the Breda car. It was ugly. It was exposed. And it gave the crews a weapon that could actually destroy a soft-skinned vehicle, suppress an anti-tank gun position, or damage a lightly armored target at combat range. Eventually, according to contemporary accounts, most regiments operating Marmon-Herringtons had Breda cars in their squadron headquarters.

But crews did not stop at the Breda. German 37-mm Pak 36 anti-tank guns were mounted on stripped-down hulls. Italian 47-mm anti-tank guns appeared on improvised pedestals. The German 2.8-cm Schwerer Panzerbüchse 41, a squeeze-bore anti-tank gun, was fitted to at least one vehicle. French 25-mm anti-tank guns captured from Vichy stocks in Syria found their way onto Marmon-Herringtons operating in the Levant.

In September 1941, the Fourth South African Armored Car Regiment salvaged a two-pounder gun from a knocked-out British tank, fitted it to a Marmon-Herrington, and found it was a great success. By February 1942, at least one car in every troop carried a captured or salvaged anti-tank gun. When a modified car went back for depot maintenance, the crew usually stripped the captured weapon off first because no one wanted to lose a gun that had taken weeks to find and fit.

This was not chaos. This was a culture of tactical improvisation driven by necessity, and it worked. The lessons learned in field workshops fed directly into the official Mark IV design, which finally gave the Marmon-Herrington a proper anti-tank gun from the factory. Now, before we get into where the Marmon-Herrington actually fought, if you are enjoying this deep dive into wartime improvisation and armored car history, hit subscribe.

It takes a second, costs nothing, and helps this channel keep making these videos. The Marmon-Herrington saw its first combat not in the Western Desert, but in East Africa. In January 1941, South African forces under Major General George Brink launched their offensive into Italian-held Abyssinia and Somaliland. The First South African Division, operating in the Gala-Sidamo region of Southern Abyssinia, used flying columns of armored cars and motorized infantry to outflank and overwhelm Italian garrisons that had been dug in for months. The Mark I and the early Mark II, the mobile field force variant, equipped South African armored car companies, including number one South African armored light tank company and number two and number three South African armored car companies, that led these columns through some of the most difficult terrain on the African continent. They supported the capture of the Italian fort at Mega on February 18th, crossing ground that would have been impassable for tracked vehicles. They punched through the Marda Pass on March 21st, took the city of Harar on

March 25th, seized Dire Dawa on March 29th, and drove on through Kombolcha and Dessie to the final Italian stand at Amba Alagi, which surrendered on May 19th, 1941. The vehicles were crude, the roads were often nothing more than goat tracks cut into mountainsides, dust clogged the air filters, heat warped the springs, but the Ford V8 engine started first time, every time, and the cars kept moving when nothing else could.

After the campaign, number one South African Armoured Car Company sailed from Mombasa for the Middle East on August 15th, 1941, carrying with them the experience of 5 months of continuous mobile operations. After East Africa, the war shifted west, and the Marmon-Herrington went with it.

By January 1941, the first Marmon-Herringtons were issued to the first King’s Dragoon Guards in the Western Desert. By April, the 11th Hussars had re-equipped entirely from their old Rolls-Royce and Morris Armoured Cars to the new South African machines, patrolling a 50-mi front from Acroma to Bir Hakeim. The 11th Hussars then trained the 4th South African Armoured Car Regiment in desert reconnaissance techniques, passing on everything they had learned about navigating, surviving, and fighting in open desert.

Tobruk was where the Marmon-Herrington proved it could endure. When the siege began in April 1941, C Squadron of the King’s Dragoon Guards was trapped inside the perimeter. Two of their Marmon-Herringtons had been sent to the Tobruk Ordnance Depot to have Breda anti-aircraft guns fitted.

The work was unfinished when the Axis forces closed the ring. Those two cars, half-converted and bristling with improvised weaponry, joined the garrison’s air defense instead. For 8 months, C Squadron held inside the Tobruk perimeter, running patrols along the wire, screening gaps in the defensive line, and surviving daily air attacks in vehicles whose open-topped turrets offered no protection whatsoever from above.

When Operation Crusader finally broke the siege in November, C Squadron led the breakout. Crusader itself, the great relief offensive of November and December 1941 saw the Marmon-Herrington in constant action. The King’s Dragoon Guards operated with A and B squadrons plus an attached squadron from the 4th South African armored car regiment under 7th armored division.

The regimental war diary records specific episodes. Sergeant Dasher’s troop and Sergeant Canfield in his breeder car attacked 0.199 at El Arid destroying three enemy lorries before being driven off by artillery fire. Lieutenant Fraser engaged German eight-wheeled armored car in a running fight across open ground.

Lance Corporal Hughes was killed instantly by a direct shell hit on his vehicle. These were not anonymous machines. They were crewed by named men fighting and dying in vehicles held together by improvisation and will. At Gazala in 1942, the 4th South African armored car regiment tracked Rommel’s southern flanking advance reporting his progress to headquarters three to four times every hour.

South African crews in up-gunned Marmon-Herringtons reportedly stopped the first Sturmgeschütz three assault gun seen in the desert near Bir Hakeim not with the original Boys rifle with a captured gun bolted to a truck chassis fired by men who had taught themselves how to use it. El Alamein was the Marmon-Herrington’s last major desert battle.

In October and November 1942, the 4th and 6th South African armored car regiment fielded 55 Mark IIIs with the 3rd South African armored car regiment fielding another 55. On November 4th, 1942 at 6:30 in the morning, A and B squadrons of the combined regiment broke through at the junction between the 15th Panzer Division and the 90th Light Division creating the impression of a major armored breakthrough that accelerated the German retreat.

The armored cars raced west shooting up supply columns and communications vehicles doing exactly what a reconnaissance force was designed to do turning retreat into confusion. By April 1943, the South African armored car units in the desert were disbanded. The Daimler armored car and the Humber were arriving in numbers.

Purpose-built machines with proper anti-tank guns and thicker armor, and the Marmon-Herrington’s frontline days in British and South African service were over. The men who had fought in them moved on to other vehicles and other wars, but the cars themselves were far from finished. In the Dutch East Indies, 49 Mark IIIs had been purchased by the Netherlands in 1941.

They reached Java just before the Japanese landings, arriving in poor condition and without weapons. Dutch technicians managed to get 27 operational and formed two reconnaissance platoons based at Bandung. Their one major action came during the counterattack towards Subang and Kalijati airfield at the battle for the Chiater Pass in early March 1942.

Lacking radios and infantry coordination, the attack failed. The surviving vehicles were captured by the Japanese and some were later operated by Japanese forces and during the Indonesian Revolution of 1945 to 1949 by Indonesian nationalist fighters as well. A vehicle designed in South Africa, built from American and Canadian parts, armed with Italian guns, was now being fought over by the Dutch, the Japanese, and the Indonesians on the island of Java.

The Marmon-Herrington had a talent for turning up in wars it was never designed for. Of the 5,700 vehicles built, roughly 4,500 served with South African units. The remainder were distributed across the Commonwealth and beyond. British, Indian, New Zealand, Free French, Polish, Greek, Rhodesian, and Belgian forces all operated Marmon-Herringtons.

The Rhodesian British South Africa Police used Mark IIIs until 1972. The Transjordanian Arab Legion took a number of Mark IVs into the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. Jordan later modified some dramatically, lengthening the turrets to accept 6-pounder guns or removing the turrets entirely and mounting 3.7-in mountain howitzers.

Israel captured several from Arab forces and pressed them into service on the opposite side of the same war. On paper, the Marmon-Herrington should not survive comparison with its contemporaries. The Daimler armored car, which began replacing it in British service from 1942, was a far superior machine.

It carried a 2-pounder gun from the factory. It had fully independent suspension, disc brakes, a pre-selector gearbox, and a purpose-built hull designed from the ground up as a fighting vehicle. It was faster, better armed, and better protected. But, it was also more mechanically complex, slower to reach production, and never available in the numbers the desert war demanded in its critical early years.

The Humber armored car, the most numerous British type with over 5,400 built, was heavier and better protected, carrying 15 mm of armor and BSA machine guns as standard. But, it filled the same reconnaissance role and arrived on the same timeline as the Daimler, not earlier. The American M8 Greyhound, with its 37-mm gun, six-wheel drive, and thicker frontal armor, was a better-designed vehicle by every measurable standard.

But, it entered service in 19 43, two years after the Marmon Herrington had already fought the battles that mattered most in the Western Desert. The Marmon Herrington’s advantage was never sophistication. It was availability. It was there in numbers when nothing else was, and it started first time, every time.

The most extraordinary chapter in the Marmon Herrington story is not the war it was built for. It is the six decades that followed. Greece received Mark IVs during and after the Second World War. The Royal Hellenic Army used them against communist forces during the Greek Civil War from 1946 to 1949, often with refurbished mechanical components.

When the civil war ended, the vehicles were not retired. They were kept in service, not as museum pieces, not as training aids, as operational armored cars deployed in mechanized infantry battalions on the Aegean islands, alongside M113 armored personnel carriers and Leonidas armored fighting vehicles. The Greek Army continued operating Marmon Herringtons into the 1990s, finally phasing them out only with the of the French VBL light armored vehicle roughly six decades after the type first entered production. The Cypriot National Guard inherited approximately 40 Mark 4F’s from the Hellenic Army equipping the 21st armored reconnaissance battalion. The Cypriots re-engined them with Perkins diesel power plants to extend their operational life. One was destroyed by Turkish air attack at Kato Pyrgos on August 9th, 1964 during the Battle of Tillyria. A decade later during the Turkish invasion of July and August 1974, Marmon-Herrington saw combat for what may have been the last time in a major military operation anywhere in the

world. A vehicle conceived in 1937 built from truck parts in 1941 was fighting a modern war in 1974. The remaining Cypriot examples lingered in service into the mid-1980s before being replaced by Brazilian EE-9 Cascavel armored cars. The vehicle also left a legacy far beyond its own service life.

The Marmon-Herrington was the first major military vehicle ever produced in South Africa and it founded a tradition of locally designed and built wheeled armor that continues to this day. That lineage runs directly from the wartime Marmon-Herrington through the Eland armored car developed from 1963 as the South African Defense Forces first major post-war armored vehicle program to the Ratel infantry fighting vehicle, the first wheeled infantry fighting vehicle to enter service anywhere in the world, and on to the Rooikat armored car of the 1980s and 90s. Dorman Long, the company that built the Marmon-Herrington’s armored bodies in Johannesburg during the war, evolved into the DCD Group which produces protected mobility vehicles for African and international clients today. The improvised truck of 1940 became the foundation of an entire national defense industry. Surviving examples are rare, particularly of the combat era marks. The Ditsong National Museum of Military History in Johannesburg holds the sole surviving Mark 1 and one of the two Mark

6 8×8 prototypes built during the war. The other Mark VI prototype sits at the Tank Museum in Bovington, England. A restored Mark IV F in 1947 Greek Army markings is displayed at the Athens War Museum. The Wheeled Foundation in the United Kingdom is currently restoring two Mark IIIs, one early production and one late.

Pre-Mark IV combat veterans are exceptionally scarce outside Southern Africa. 1942, the Western Desert. An armored car made from a Canadian truck, an American transmission, South African steel, and an Italian cannon bolted where the roof used to be. It was under armored, 6 to 12 mm of plate that would not stop a heavy machine gun round beyond point-blank range.

It was undergunned by design, carrying weapons that could not threaten any German vehicle heavier than a motorcycle. Its open-topped turret left the crew exposed to air attack, which was the single greatest killer of armored car crews in the desert. Its suspension broke under hard use. Its engine overheated in a following wind.

It was never, by any technical measure, a good armored car, and yet it worked. It worked in the red dust of East Africa, chasing Italian garrisons through mountain passes at altitudes that made the engine gasp. It worked in the open desert south of Tobruk, where Sergeant Canfield in his Breeda car destroyed enemy transport under artillery fire.

It worked at Gazala, tracking Rommel’s flanking advance, and reporting it in real time. Three to four updates every hour. It worked at El Alamein, punching through the gap between two German divisions at dawn. It worked in Java, in Jordan, in Cyprus, and on the windswept islands of the Aegean.

Half after anyone expected it to still be running. It was not elegant. It was not powerful. It was not designed by a single brilliant engineer working in a single purpose-built factory. It was assembled from whatever parts could be shipped across two oceans, armed with whatever weapons could be stolen or salvaged from the enemy, and crewed by men who learned to fight in it by fighting in it.

Over 5,700 were built. More than a dozen nations operated them across four continents. The last ones were not retired until the 1990s, 60 years after the first prototype was tested on a dirt road outside Port Elizabeth. That is not luck. That is what happens when a nation with no armored vehicle industry decides to build one anyway and gets it right on the first attempt.