In 1940, the standard US Army Tank transporter
was the M19. This consisted of the
M20 Diamond T tractor and the M9 12-wheel trailer. Actually, it's 24 wheels, but the US Army considered it dual wheels to be
single installations. The trailer was a
stand-alone item. Had eight wheels of
front and 16 behind, 45 tonne capacity could carry basically anything the
US Army had at the time. However, it had some
limitations in going off road. As a result, a design
was started to find an offload replacement
capable of doing this job. The final answer was the M25, which consists of
the M26 tractor and the M15 semi trailer, 40 tonne. Being a semi trailer, it's meant that the weight
of the front of the trailer was born by the
back wheels of the tractor, which means you
didn't have to like the diamond T filled
ballast which is added useless weight just to give the tractor a little
bit of traction. I'm at the Museum of American
Army in Long Island. They have an M25 available
for us to crawl over. That's very nice
one, I have to say. Now, when I first started
doing scripting for this, I thought, oh, it's just a tank
transporter this way easy. It's not. The manual,
it's quite specific. It states that the
purpose of the vehicle is not to get the tank
from A to B as much as it is to
recover vehicles on the battlefield and
then bring them to a location where they
can get repaired. That means that this vehicle
is actually a lot more complicated and
frankly interesting than our iteration
given credit for. To make things a lot easier, I'm fortunate enough that
I'm able to be joined by the owner of this
particular private vehicle, Mr. David Levy. I'm now going to cut over and bring David in to talk about
the details of the vehicle. David, thank you very
much for joining us. First question
before we get into the details of this very
impressive piece of equipment, what possessed you to buy it? Quite honestly, it came
up for sale and back then the museum is in its infancy
and we've a lot of space and we picked up to
bring it over here. You're taking up a quarter
of the space of the museum. Back then the museum was vastly open and we
have lots of room. Things have changed
since then. Yeah. Didn't have any great
difficulty getting it? Actually, getting in it
came in two parts and I needed a flag vehicle in
front and rear working. I had gotten it from Wisconsin so we got the tractor first. You had the flatbed basically? Exactly. Yeah. Each
piece had been flat bedded when the trailer came, the wheels were
hanging over the back of the trailer that
came with it and they had to wait at the
bridge to cross until 5:00 in the morning
before they could crossover. It was a big deal getting in here and then
unloading it was tough to do because we needed to get a crane to lift the back
off of it to get it down on the ground because the
ramps that they had with the truck weren't able to sustain the weight of it,
getting it back off again. Wonderful. To move it, we took the outer wheels off the
back just to keep it under width as actually
still over width but it wouldn't have
been too far over width the rear wheels on it. The tractor came, we took
these rear wheels off and put them up on
the back of the bed. Does that mean that
if you were to hypothetically
register vehicle and drive it onto public highway, it is too wide to be
a legal vehicle or? Honestly, I don't know. I
don't know if you could register it to be legal vehicle. But I do know that I wouldn't be able to keep
up with today's traffic. Last question then. What condition was it
in when you got it? It was actually cosmetically, it was fairly restored,
but there were lots of mechanical
issues with it. For example, one of the spark
plug wires was a piece of 18 gauge like house wire running around to the spark plugs
and the brakes didn't work, it wouldn't shift right
but it looks descent. She is now fully operational? Many months and many dollars getting it
up to running and up to spec where it's
safe and it starts reliably and it runs well
and can move around. Well, we're going to start
off now with the semi trailer because we're going
to move to track down a little bit later and get us a slightly better view of it. The eight wheel
semi trailer, well, I guess we're talking
about changing the tire on a little bit because I'm
sure that's going to be fun. Features. I'm noticing
the jack strokes at the front or
whatever you call them, I'm used the ones
where you winch down and these don't winch. Yeah. The landing
legs to down here, they're mechanical landing
legs so you let them down and it gives you
a set height then the ones that you can crank them down and take the pressure off of the fifth wheel so you
can drive the tractor out. For these, you let it down. Usually I'll put some
wood under there to boost it up a little
bit just to keep the height when I
pull the tractor forward this way backing it
up and reloading it on there. I doesn't have to
adjust the height of the trailers so much. But mechanical leg
that comes down, you pin it in position
and that's what you have. You just release to
that strike forward and if it's a little high,
it just go slam? Right. Essentially I'll
put the trailer brakes on. There's a glad hand upfront. We can apply just
the trailer brakes so this where the
trailer will move, I released the fifth
wheel and dropped legs and I should just be able
to pull it right forward and it'll just going
to almost sit there. We have plate here, tie down points, of course,
pretty much required. Stewart on the back, not really challenging the
trailer very much. Now, the Stewart tank
is 30,000 pounds. This particular trailer has a load rating of 100,000 pounds. You can get really three
Stewart plus on here. These design on the sides so
we have girder frames here. This is an improvement
on the original. The original trailer
was an M15 trailer and you see pictures of it has storage box along the side. This is where you
put your chains and your come alongs
and some of you are lifting devices and
the side pockets. Then they came up with the M15, a one version of the trailer where it looks very
similar to this, where it has these reinforced girders on the side to give it extra payload capacity
because as time went on, our vehicles that we had to
recover were much heavier. This is the M15A2 version, which has these flarings on the outside and again
reinforcements to the girdle structure and these
flarings are removable but it gives you some protection against the rear
tires in the back. Otherwise, they stick
out pretty far. Rear axels, how do you
make this narrower? Each pair of wheels is on an axle and there's a
walking beam between them. All four wheels are
connected in this one unit. [inaudible] basically. Essentially, right. It'd be this whole unit
that actually pivots up and down and the whole
unit rotate side to side. If you want to make
it more narrow depending upon your load, you would jack up the back
of the trailer and part of the equipment with the trailer
is a 32-10 model jack. You jack it up and
then you drive this shifting screw and
that would actually move the whole carriage of four
wheels in together or out. It's four wheels
together not that they didn't narrow the carriages,
moves everything in. Correct. All four wheels will
move together to unit in. The outside of the wheel will be about level with the
outside of the tractor? Exactly right. They'd
be parallel and that would give you a clearance
and then without that, you can take off that
wheel flaring there. Got you. Bless shipping space even on the shift to get
over here, for example. Exactly. The wheels are the same
as those on the tractor. Right 14 by 24. That makes it nice
and easy. 14 by 24. 14 by 24 NDT tread wheels. Non-directional
tread. Is it curious. The overall trailer it carry is, the base weight is 36,000 pounds as I recall and
capacity 40 tonne. Correct. We have our ramps
which are stowed up. I presume that's
for the suspension. You need clearance
over the wheels. If you're bringing a recovering
vehicle up over here, a tracked vehicle obviously, you can't run on top
of these wheels. She drop these ramps down and
by dropping his ramps down, that would give you a
pathway to come over. They're notched to clear the edge of the wheels
when you come around. These things are super heavy. There's holes in
here. We can put bars in to help move them. For leverage. For leverage. But then also, you can see some of
the cables here and you have another
drive screw here. You'd crank this and that
would actually crank this bar up and down and then
you can pin it in place. That gives you a
mechanical advantage to move them up and down. Got you. That's the same for the drop ramps
at the back here? Yeah. These are manual and these are really heavy and
we had actually, it took us about six guys to
lift it up there to get it into position where it
wouldn't fall into somebody. Actually the rear ones, you can see when they
come around that you can actually take them off and position them to the
width of the vehicle. You take out the pin that
holds them and you can move them anywhere along
the back edge there. Got you. The other interesting
thing of air on the trailer is the
pocket. The pocket there. There's a pocket
there you can see it across the way
at the other side. That's for the crane. You can use a crane to lift the tires up if you need
to change them out. You come over, you use the
tongs to grab the tire. It comes up and the crane
will just swivel outwards. It swivels and
drop it down here. Cool. Storage here for something, obviously. Why waste space? Actually, when I first got this, I'm like, "I need to
get a lifting frame." Basically, it was an I-beam
and a tubular structure. I'm like, "Where am
I ever going to find one?" I was just going around. I'm like, "It's in there." The lifting crane goes in here. You have a pin that drops in
here to keep it locked in. You just slide it in there and that's your storage space
for your lifting crane. Very convenient. Yes, very convenient. We're talking about moving
the ramps in and out. The ramps are narrower than the ones that
go over the wheels. But you say they come up
with a solution for this? Right. There's this
bracket up on top here to support either a block
of wood or a piece of steel that would go
across here and give it the extra width that was
needed to come across. When you lay it down,
it would give you a bigger ramp to come up. Just in case you missed. Right. This would normally
be changed back down to here just so it doesn't fall back down. That's some chains and
brackets that are issued. That could be very
embarrassing, I'm sure. That will make a lot of noise. Again, this is a
recovery vehicle, not a tank transporter? Right. Obviously, if you're going
to recover something, that something isn't
going to be able to drive on its own power off? Exactly. We have winch guides? Exactly. A lot of the
things they had to recover, you might have a
track blown off of it or damaged in some way and you'd be more dragging it back up onto the bed of here. You'd have the two
winches on the tractor. There's 260,000 pound
Garwood winches. The cable is 78-inch cable, the cable would come back and on here there's actually a
roller fixed and there would be a roller
fixture just to guide the cables across as
they're pulling it up.- Normally, if the tank is
a little bit off kilter, at least as far as here, it'll go straight to the winch? Exactly. Well, actually as
you're dragging, if we're doing a tank recovery with an [inaudible] these days, you anchor of the vehicle with basically like
a bulldozer blades. Does anything anchor the tractor when you're
recovering a Sherman? Not on this one. There's nothing
that anchors that right. The M74 has that bulldozer blades that goes down, you see, just park it and you'd
have to pull it up. I guess conceivably, you could, depending upon how much
torque you have to pull up.- You'll end up
dragging the tractor or the trailer under
the recovered vehicle. Exactly. Anything else in
here? Let's see. I'm just looking at, I guess, the air pipes for the brakes. Right. This is the air lines, that one is disconnected
because my air can leaks. That's mildly
embarrassing. I'm sure you'll feel fix it soon enough. Well, otherwise, it's a
trailer. Simple enough. I guess you can get a sense. Actually, it's hard to see. Even these beams up over here, you can adjust in and out too, depending upon the width
which you bring it up. This whole fixture here
can slide in and out. You have to unpin
it and move it in. I see they have a little
flange on it as well. Maybe that stops the
vehicle from sliding? Well, actually, so
for the Stewart tank, it was too narrow. That's why I put the
water on the outside. The Stewart tank is narrow
for the trailer really, so I put the water on the outside to give
it some support. But then depending
upon what you have, if you have something
wider, this way, it doesn't slide off. Steel on steel, it's
really slippery. Even given the weight of
it, it's super slippery. You have this in here which
should be inside the truck, now it's prevented from
moving one side to the other. Now, right side of the
trailer, we have what? There's actually this is the
storage place over here. Like you said before,
everything tucks in places. This is a pocket in
here where you put the beams to make their
rear ramps wider. You store them in
the back there. They're very spacious. This is space efficient
with their design. Maybe they talk about
this a fair bit. Yeah, exactly. They
had to make use of the available space that
they had and keep everything with them so they
did go with that. Looking forward,
spare tire, I see. Yeah. Just one on the trucker? Yes. You have the spare tire. Actually, the pole is interesting because
this has been published. You can loop the
cable round to get your mechanical
advantage increased , times you're pulling power. You're 30-ton winches
become 60-ton winches? They're 60-ton now,
so 60-ton winches. You can go to 120-ton if you're looping
back around again. You can go back through and lap there a couple of
times, there's doubles. Are the indicators original? I'm sorry. Are these original? Yeah. They look M-series
but they're not. This is what's on there. This is in the same picture in
the world or to manual. Cool. Yeah. This I thought my God, they put M-series lights
on them, but it's not. First thing, this is a big cab. It's what, six seats in here? It's actually a crew of
seven we get in here. You have three, one here, there's one back here, and
there's one in the middle, and then the same put
on the other side. I missed one in the middle.
This is a recovery. This isn't seats for the vehicle crew that's
being recovered, this is all for the
Dragon Wagon crew? This is just the
Dragon Wagon, correct. Where did the other guys sit, from the vehicle you recovered? At least they're on their own. They'll start walking. Yeah. It's massive engine right
in the middle of the cab? Exactly. Yes. The
engine is here, so when we started up,
it gets pretty loud. The panels on the engine
compartment are all insulated, but in the summertime it
gets super hot in here. Actually really interestingly,
I thought we had a veteran who drove this
during World War 2, this particular
vehicle, the M26A1. His pictures that he showed us, they had this canvas
enclosure on top of this. He said that's where they
made a monk up there. They put boards across and a whole canvas
enclosure and that was their sleeping
quarters up top. Okay. Where are the batteries? The battery is actually
on the backside?- Back over there, yeah. This is batteries,
go over there. When I turn it on, you're
going to hear a buzzer go. That's how low air alarm buzzer that we don't have
enough air pressure. Because until I get 60
pounds of pressure, there's no breaks then. We'd like to make sure
we have that pressure. You have two magnetos
that come on, and then the stator switch. The white bits or
electric or vacuum? Vacuum. Vacuum? Yeah. A spotlight. Yes, I saw. The almond version that has the spotlight
goes through the turret, this one here has a spotlight
right here and you can rotate around and see
where you go on there. You can disconnect the
head of the spotlight and as a hand clamped there
on a retractable cord, which you can take a pistol. A pistol metal. A pistol magic moved around. You have your coolant over here, you have your power
steering back there. That rearview mirror
on the far side, it looks almost useless to you. These are the original ones
that they had on there and they're looking through a
posting stamp in the back. I count on the ground crew a lot to give me guidance where
I'm and where I'm going. Let's see through here. First aid kit. Jerry cans. These are jerry cans
for water or fuel? Either one, and actually there's no spot here for another can right next to you, but
another can back here. It's 120 gallons and that's
a five-gallon jerry can. I'm just trying to think how far one jerry can
it's going to get you. Yeah, not very far. When I actually first got
the vehicle here, I got to now mix gases in it so there wasn't
much in there. I put five gallons in the back. We pulled it out front
and made a turn to go down the ramp to the main road. Just going that short
distance and going downhill, we ran out of gas and
things stalled out. Five gallons doesn't
get you too far. How often do you run it? How often to run this? Yeah. I try to start it up regularly, but really we only take it
out for the big events. With the trailer? Sometimes. Usually,
with the trailer because people like to see the trailer and the whole
thing together. When you don't have
the trailer, the thing drives like a sports car though. It has a lot of get up and go. We are down a little
alleyway here, at least 40 yards. That's some precision
driving in reverse. That's all these
guys on the ground, making sure they
don't hit anything. How long does it take you to
learn how to reverse this? Reversing is actually
really tough. I'm pretty good with
the regular trailer. This thing is challenging. Part of the reason is, front
wheels are back over here. Normally, when you're
driving a car or a truck, your front wheels
are ahead of you so when you turn your wheels, you can guide things back. Your perception is
really off and the way it handles and
response is different because the wheels
are behind us. You can actually see that too. I'm seeing right
another one there. You're right, on top of
the hump of the wheel. It makes it definitely more challenging
to get it back in. Well, let's hear what it sounds like and bringing it out into the light so we can have a look at rest of
all the game of this. Okay, you're right. There is a lot to this vehicle. We're going to call
them a toy break here. I hope you found the toy so far interesting and
informative and we will return to the Museum
of American Armour for part 2. I'll
talk to you then.
