Commando Truck

I've always had a soft spot for the doings of the Special Air Service and the Long Range Desert Group in North Africa in World War Two. I don't think their deep raids were decisive, but they certainly make for gripping reading, and the photographs of SAS jeeps with hard-looking men at the wheel are never lost on me.

I have a Tamiya 1/35th scale SAS jeep in my collection to be built, but then I had a minor brainstorm. I also have a Skybow Dodge WC63 truck in my collection. I was always torn on what to do with that truck model, and wasn't too excited by the idea of making yet another model of yet another American cargo truck. But what if one did to the WC63 what the SAS did to their Jeeps? That is, make the WC63 into a truck that the SAS might have used had they used such trucks?

Not a convoy-protection gun truck, but an SAS-style commando thing, brimming with gas cans and water cans and sand rails and boxes and bags and junk? With a forward-firing .50-cal on the passenger side and maybe a couple of Lewis, Vickers K, or even .30-cal M1919 machine guns in the back?

I have such a huge collection of spare parts for figures and armor that I figure I could load the thing down to the point of axle failure with parts and guns, and I find that I have some enthusiasm for the project - especially posing it next to the Tamiya SAS jeep when I finish it. Yes, I like the idea. It's completely inaccurate and has no historical context, so the really seriously historically-minded scale modeler will probably scoff at this bastardization, but it's the sort of thing that really appeals to the modeler in me, which isn't always all that impressed with total historical accuracy...