Question for you Brian - I read somewhere in all of this long and detailed thread that the Universal Carrier was the most produced armored vehicle in history. That’s not a small claim. More than Shermans or T-34s? How many were made?
I have no idea - I’m really not a Carrier Ninja - just intrigued by Hermann’s original post and stimulated enough to consider making a Bundeswehr version.
I suppose it’s feasible with Commonwealth countries and even the US chipping in and producing them, but final stats? I haven’t a clue.
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As my curiosity was piqued, I just had glance at Wikipedia (well, you’ve got to start somewhere!) and they cite 113,000.
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Found this, no idea where it is but err.
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Yeap my checks come up with the same with Canada alone building 29,000.
Oh apart from being a fan of all things Universal carrier along with the Loyd and the predecessors like the Dragon and cavalry I do have a small connection to the carrier as my father drove one in the post war (around 1948) Italian army.
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I mentioned that, because it’s true. More than Shermans, T-34s, M113s, T-54/55s — put the numbers for any two of those together and you get into the ballpark of Universal Carrier production.
AFV Profile No. 14, Carriers, oddly gives numbers produced for the early vehicles — 1173 Bren Carriers, 647 Scout Carriers, etc. — but no total for the Universal Carrier. It does state that Canada built 33,987, and mentions things like 1500 Australian-built ones being supplied to China without giving a total production there, never mind indicating even a rounded-off figure for UK production. However, it claims those 34,000-odd Canadian ones were “more than one fifth of British carrier needs” which implies much greater numbers were made in the UK.
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Well Luciano, here’s one in use by the Alpini (a Mortar Carrier) - could be another modelling tangent coming on…?
Interestingly enough, when I was at a Div HQ in the south of the UK, we had an Italian exchange officer on the establishment. This was back in the mid 70s.
Fast forward a million years and he was Deputy Commander of the Brit-led ACE Rapid Reaction Corps. It was great calling in on him just for old times’ sake.
Add on another million years and I met his son serving in Iraq, who was tragically killed when I was there, in an insurgent bomb attack at An Nasiriya. I was stationed there at the start of my tour; we were administered and given force protection by the Italian Army; their Brigade was operating out of Talil, adjacent to the ancient Ziggurat of Ur (the latter, albeit a restoration, just blew me away - now that is history!)
Small world sometimes, but as ever, a violent one too.
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Right, just to - well - more or less - get back on track, today the following kit arrived; the plan is to use all, or most, of the figures to populate my recently acquired Resicast T-16 Carrier
The Riich artwork is a bit naff I feel, but the figures look just fine:
I may not even have to resort to Hornet heads; as to when? I have no idea. The plan is to portray the Carrier alongside a Centurion, set in the mid 50s. I’ve seen such a pic on a regimental site somewhere, but foolishly didn’t save it. An Amusing Hobby kit should provide a decent enough Cent Mk V.
A reminder of the Resicast kit:
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I need to check out Resicast as I know they do a Bren and Scout carrier along with a T16 and Windsor.
I do have a load of Milicast 1/76 carriers, I need to dig them out.
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There are times when I wish I 'd never ventured beyond small scale - space alone! But sometimes if one wishes to amass say, a collection of variants, small scale is just the job.
Milicast stuff is pretty good I recall.
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