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History
The introduction of the nippy and nimble American Jeep to the battlefields of World War Two revolutionised the light utility vehicle sector. Although the Japanese produced the all-wheel drive Type-95 ‘Kurogane’ as a field car in the thirties, the Jeep was the first real military light off-roader, and it was quickly adopted for service by all Allied armies. Germany used the Kubelwagen, essentially a militarised version of the Volkswagen civilian car which evolved into the Beetle, in a similar role but as it only had rear wheel drive it was nothing like as versatile as the Jeep.
Late in the war Britain drew up its own plans for a Jeep-like vehicle to replace the ageing light commercial truck designs upon which the British Army had been so dependent until the arrival of Jeeps and other light 4x4 trucks under the Lend-Lease scheme. However, the war had almost ended by the time that the specification had been agreed for the vehicle, designated FV1800, and it would be seven more years before series production commenced, by which time the Land Rover had appeared on the scene.
In the inter-war years the Rover Company had built a reputation for producing quality motor cars, but six years of conflict killed design work on new models, plus the company’s factories were turned over to aircraft component production during the war. As Britain slowly regenerated and commenced paying off its wartime debts, steel was heavily rationed with production of goods suitable for revenue-generating export receiving priority, so motor manufacturers without established export markets had to diversify.
Maurice Wilks, brother of Rover’s managing director Spencer Wilks, who had been using a surplus wartime Willys Jeep as a run-around and light agricultural vehicle on his Anglesey farm, hit upon the idea of creating a four-wheel drive utility vehicle along the lines of the Jeep, utilising a steel chassis powered by existing Rover drive train components married to simple folded aluminium alloy body panels. As company employees had several years of experience in working aluminium for aircraft production, and this material was not rationed to the same extent as sheet steel, it looked like there might be a stopgap product to tide the factories over until the economy picked up. The Land Rover was born.
First conceived in 1947, the Land Rover was launched on 30th April the following year at the Amsterdam Motor Show as a multipurpose light agricultural vehicle, capable of undertaking the dual roles of tractor and cargo vehicle. Right from the start, it was envisaged that the vehicle would be a platform for conversion to specialist roles, and it was designed with a power take-off as standard to allow agricultural implements and accessories to be powered in the same fashion as if a tractor.
Although the prototype FV1800 military utility vehicle had been produced by this time, though it would not go into full production for four more years, the Fighting Vehicle Research and Development Establishment at Chertsey quickly spotted the military potential of Rover’s new baby. Indeed three of the initial pre-production batch of Land Rovers were speedily procured for evaluation, and by 1949 the first batch order for fifty vehicles was placed to allow widespread user trials to be undertaken. The rest, as they say, is history.
Fifties
When the Land Rover was first procured for the British Army, it was intended not that it should be a replacement for the FV1800, more commonly known these days as the Austin Champ, but that it should carry out rear echelon support duties to free up the Champ fleet for battlefield use. The Land Rover, however, soon proved it was made of tougher stuff and wormed its way closer to the front line. Indeed by the time that General Matthew Ridgway succeeded Douglas MacArthur as commander of United Nations forces in Korea in April 1951, the little British utility vehicle had sneaked into the war and even popped up in newsreel footage transporting the new commanding officer to meet his British subordinates.
Throughout the remainder of the fifties, the Land Rover nibbled away at what should have been the Champ’s domain, proving itself to not only be considerably cheaper than the committee-designed FV1800, but in many situations a much more capable off-roader. Unlike the Champ, which had limited load-carrying space, the Land Rover could multitask, changing configuration from personnel carrier to cargo truck, or a combination of both, in literally seconds.
As previously mentioned, the Land Rover had always been envisaged as a base vehicle for conversion, with variants such as a mobile welder and rough terrain fire tender being designed and displayed from the outset, so it was natural that FVRDE discussed the possibility of producing a staff car body on the utility vehicle chassis. This conversion actually reached prototype stage, but proved to be too costly an option, though when a van body was introduced to complement the canvas soft top model, this was quickly procured by the armed forces for specialist roles, including command and control.
By the time that the Series 2 model, now available with both 88 inch short and 109 inch long wheelbase options was introduced in 1958 – the original wheelbase was 80 inches, the same as the Jeep, but increased in stages during the first ten years of production – the Land Rover had pretty much replaced the Champ in all but very frontline service. Having said that, the supposedly rear echelon Series One Land Rover played a major part in the Malayan Emergency and many took part in the Suez Campaign alongside the Champ.
Throughout the fifties, the vast majority of Land Rovers in British military service were conventional light utility vehicles with canvas tops, but specialist conversions were also developed in small quantities, particularly by the Royal Air Force. The simplest of these was the adaptation to the airfield crash rescue fire tender role, through the addition of a simple ladder carriage frame and stowage for the necessary rapid response tools and extinguishers needed for the extraction of aircrew from crash-landed aircraft. More complex conversions, undertaken on the 107 and later 109 inch long wheelbase chassis, provided hard-bodied airfield ambulances for crash rescue duties.
Sixties
In the sixties, when the Cold War was at its height and large sums of money were being allocated to equipping Britain’s new all-professional armed forces, several experimental Land Rover designs were conceived, including fully amphibious and up-scaled cargo truck variants, plus even a hovercraft version. None of these went into series production, but a lightweight airportable variant on the short wheelbase chassis was produced right through to the mid-eighties, and a forward control design prime mover to tow the forthcoming 105mm Light Gun Came off the drawing board, though it would be well into the seventies before this model entered service.
Back in the sixties, the government’s Fighting Vehicle Research and Development Establishment (FVRDE) at Chertsey, later renamed the Military Vehicle Engineering Establishment before eventually becoming part of the Defence Research Agency, was the driving force behind military vehicle design, trials and testing. Forty years ago manufacturers like Rover worked very closely with the ‘boffins’ at Chertsey, but most initial experimental work on military vehicles was either undertaken or commissioned by this wing of the civil service. If the armed forces had a requirement for a vehicle to undertake a particular task, they would set FVRDE the challenge of finding the solution. Dependent on precise requirements, the team at Chertsey would then produce prototype or experimental designs, based on either off-the-shelf vehicles and systems, or from a mix of existing and all-new componentry and technology, before issuing a highly detailed specification for manufacturers to work to.
It was during the sixties that the specialist Land Rover converters also started to make their mark, mostly with ambulance and fire tender conversions. The most famous of the ambulance producers, though by no means the first or last, was Marshall of Cambridge. Their four-stretcher field ambulance, built originally on the 109 inch Series 2a long wheelbase chassis and later on the Series 3, entered service in the mid-sixties and served British Forces in all theatres for four decades. Towards the end of the type’s service life, one of the original batch which provided safety cover for an Airborne battalion drop was actually older than the doctor deployed in it to treat drop zone casualties.
By the end of its second decade of military service, the Land Rover had well and truly supplanted the Champ, and though still theoretically a rear echelon vehicle, it had also proved its worth as a light and nimble rapid deployment vehicle for out-of-area specialists. In addition to the short wheelbase Airportable variant, more commonly referred to as the Lightweight, which was now in service with the Royal Marines the Parachute Regiment and the Gurkhas, the standard long wheelbase version had been converted for long range patrols by the Special Air Service.
The SAS had actually started using the little Series One during the Malayan Emergency, rigged with machineguns in the same manner as their WWII Jeeps, but by the mid-sixties their role as a self-sufficient deep penetration recce and strike force required vehicles with much greater payload to allow them to carry sufficient fuel, ammunition and supplies for their long range patrols. The now legendary Pink Panthers, converted for the Regiment by Marshall of Cambridge, would serve for a full two decades before eventually being replaced by the Desert Patrol Vehicle which achieved Scud-busting fame in the 1991 Gulf War.
Seventies
By the time the Series 3 model, essentially just a product-improved Series 2a, entered production at the start of the seventies, not only was it the light and medium utility vehicle of choice of the British Army, but the armed forces of countless other nations were using it as well. Over the previous decade, assembly plants had sprung up around the globe to allow Land Rovers to be built for government and military use without incurring the high import taxes paid on fully assembled vehicles, using kits of components supplied by the Solihull factory.
The essentially simple construction of the Land Rover allowed the supply of CKD (Completely Knocked Down) kits to countries, particularly in the Third World, which did not have the skills and resources to design and build motor vehicles from scratch, but had a manual labour pool that could be employed to build Meccano-like trucks. This CKD approach not only provided much-needed skilled jobs for the buyer nation, but in some cases could provide export sales too, as the finished product could be sold-on to friendly neighbouring countries under licence from Land Rover. By the end of the seventies, it was claimed, the green oval badge was in government and/or military service in over one hundred fifty countries … but the Japanese manufacturers were beginning to make serious inroads with new military vehicle procurements.
The Land Rover had been in existence for well over twenty years before the company produced its second distinct model, at the start of the seventies, in the shape of the Range Rover. Combining the now legendary off-road ability of the Land Rover with the comfort of a road-going car, the Range Rover was an immediate success. Indeed so successful was this multipurpose vehicle that immediately after the SAS were ordered to form a Counter Revolutionary Warfare wing, following the 1972 Munich Olympics Massacre, they went out and procured the first of many batches of Range Rovers.
However, the most familiar military variants of the Range Rover are the RAF Police patrol vehicles, which were essentially very similar to the motorway patrol vehicles that Britain’s constabularies of the day used, and the 6x4 airfield crash rescue tender. At the end of the sixties a three-man Truck Airfield Crash Rescue variant had been designed on the uprated One Ton long wheelbase Land Rover chassis, and this would see tri-service use throughout the seventies and well into the eighties, but it was soon realised that the V8-engined Range Rover would give an even faster rapid intervention vehicle for airfield use.
The very first 6x4 Range Rover conversion was actually carried out by Land Rover themselves, with the prototype then being sold on to Carmichael of Worcester, who had already built a reputation as Land Rover fire tender converters. Both Gloster Saro and Carmichael produced early fire and rescue 6x4 Range Rovers for the RAF and Royal Navy, but it was the latter whose name is most synonymous with what became known as the TACR2.
The seventies was also very much the decade of the armoured Land Rover, though the concept was dreamt up in the early sixties in the workshops of the Royal Ulster Constabulary. It was mostly the police in Northern Ireland, in response to what became known as The Troubles, who were responsible for the evolution of the armoured steel Land Rover, with the cash-strapped military being mostly reliant on appliqué kits of fibreglass armour for limited protection against pipe bombs and low velocity pistol or sub-machinegun bullets; but this was to change in the next decade.
Eighties
The Land Rover, though always successful as a model in its own right, was very much dependent on development funding from an at times less successful parent car company, so sometimes much-needed design improvements were delayed considerably. This was very much the case with the introduction of coil suspension, which of course had been around in the Range Rover since the start of the seventies, but it was to be well into the eighties before this went into production on the Land Rover; first in long wheelbase One-Ten version, and later in the short wheelbase Ninety.
Sufficient money was made available by Rover to tool up for the chassis changes required for the new suspension and the resultant wider wheel track, but there was simply not enough left in the coffers for a reworked body so, other than extended wheel arches and a one-piece windscreen, the One-Ten of 1983 was essentially visually identical to the Series 2 109 introduced twenty five years earlier. However, both road handling and off-road ability were enhanced considerably plus the option of the V8 petrol engine, introduced in small numbers in late Series 3 models, at last gave the power required to propel a fully laden military Land Rover at motorway convoy speeds.
This additional power also made fully armoured Land Rover personnel carriers a viable option – the earlier Series 3 armoured models, mostly developed based on the experiences of the streets of Northern Ireland were really best suited to local policing operations – and it was not long before the One-Ten Armoured Patrol Vehicle, manufactured by Glover Webb for the British Army, became a familiar sight on the newsreels. On the Internal Security side, Shorts of Belfast were quick to spot the international market for V8-powered coil-sprung armoured Land Rovers, and reworked their already popular Shorland armoured car and personnel carrier range to incorporate the new changes.
The conventional One-Ten and Ninety models were soon purchased in bulk by the UK Ministry of Defence, in the Truck Utility Medium and Truck Utility Light categories respectively, but such was the reliance on the Land Rover that it would be nearly fifteen more years before the last of the leaf-sprung Series 3 fleet was demobbed. Incidentally, the SAS were one of the first to specify a specialist variant on the One-Ten chassis, with Marshall of Cambridge producing the V8-powered high capacity pick-up bodied Desert Patrol Vehicle for them as a replacement for their near twenty year old Pink Panthers.
Around the same time as the SAS were getting their new steeds, Otokar in Turkey was commencing bulk licensed production of the One-Ten for her national army and gendarmerie, and they quickly derived their own armoured patrol and scout vehicle models based quite closely on the Shorland family. Turkey’s escalating internal security problem with breakaway Kurds in the Iraqi border region was the catalyst for armoured Land Rover development, but today the Otokar Armoured Patrol Vehicle in Iraqi Security Forces service is a more common sight on the newsreels, and Turkish-built stretched wheelbase Defender 130 ambulances are also to be found in military colours and bearing the Red Crescent in Iraq.
Around the same time that the One-Ten was in final development, the Australian armed forces were on the lookout for a common platform family of utility vehicles ranging from command car all the way through to personnel carrying truck capable of carrying up to a dozen fully equipped troops in the rear. The result of the Perentie project, named after a large lizard found in the Australian outback, was a mix of near conventional 4x4 models plus a number of wide cab 6x6 variants with an aluminium space frame rear chassis.
These Perentie 6x6 variants ranged from general service soft top troop and cargo trucks to hard-top workshop and ambulance bodies to an open-topped three-man long range patrol vehicle used by the Australian SAS. Although clearly still Land Rover derived, the design of these three-axle monsters had gone off on a tangent and even their engines were non-standard; as Land Rover did not at that time produce a diesel engine that was powerful enough to propel such high gross vehicle weights, an Isuzu engine was fitted.
Nineties
When the Iraqi armed forces under Saddam Hussein invaded neighbouring Kuwait in 1990 the coil sprung Land Rover models, now re-branded as Defender following the recent introduction of the Discovery, were clawing back territories lost to cheaper Japanese competitors in the late seventies and eighties. The One-Ten Desert Patrol Vehicles of the SAS might have grabbed the headlines with their behind-the-lines exploits, but a remarkably large proportion of the Ministry of Defence fleet of an estimated twenty thousand Land Rovers silently also played their part in the liberation of Kuwait. Indeed so many different models of Land Rover in British service participated in what is now known as Gulf War One, that a popular photobook was produced on the subject.
The new Discovery model plus the Range Rover, both leased for the duration from Land Rover dealerships in the Gulf region, saw rear echelon service with British Forces, with the former earning its spurs as a staff car. A small number of discreetly armoured Range Rovers also served senior commanders, with at least one moving well forward during the decisive four day ground offensive. By the time Britain later became embroiled in the Former Yugoslavia under United Nations colours, the Discovery had been formally procured by the British Army and the type was in use by senior commanders as non-confrontational personal transport.
In the early nineties the company now known as NP Aerospace developed the extremely lightweight CAMAC compression moulded glass fibre reinforced composite armour monocoque body shell, and the Defender 110 proved to be the ideal base vehicle for this. Known as the Composite Armour Vehicle by the manufacturer, though the troops nicknamed it Snatch as its original primary role was to transport snatch squads in riot control situations, this armoured variant had a considerably lighter body than a steel vehicle offering the same level of occupant protection.
The CAV was designed primarily for the streets of Northern Ireland, where it replaced lesser protected Land Rovers bearing simple appliqué armour packages, but it was not long before examples found there way out to Bosnia, where it provided troops with a less aggressive looking patrol vehicle, and one which required considerably less maintenance, than the tracked Warrior mechanised combat vehicle. As Kosovo smouldered at the end of the decade, a batch of CAV Land Rovers was repainted bright orange for use by verification monitors.
Around the time that British Forces commenced the first of their peacekeeping duties in the conflict-struck Former Yugoslavia, the UK Ministry of Defence set out on its quest to find replacements for both the leaf sprung utility Land Rover fleet, most of which was already twelve to fifteen years old, and the even older four-stretcher battlefield ambulances. For the first time since it took on, and decisively beat, the post-WWII Austin Champ, the Land Rover was no longer the automatic choice of the procurement chain, and no less than eighteen other manufacturers or importers were also invited to tender for the new Truck Utility Light and Truck Utility Medium contracts.
Quite early on in the TUL/TUM procurement process it became clear that Land Rover was the only manufacturer being seriously considered, though both Iveco and Pinzgauer contenders were also trialled against the Marshall-bodied Defender 130 for the parallel ambulance contract, and the Pinzgauer 4x4 successfully out-performed a wide-bodied Defender 110 in the spin-off Truck Utility Medium [Heavy Duty] contract to find a replacement 105mm Light Gun tractor. However, being left in a field of one with no stalking horse against which comparisons can be drawn can be a recipe for disaster.
Initially Land Rover found themselves in difficulty with TUL/TUM, as they were in effect always going to come second to the 100% benchmark set when there is no competitor to run against. As they were not meeting the requirements of the onerous test regime, much of which was computer-evaluated rather than the seat of the pants testing of the Champ versus Rover era, the company bit the bullet and withdrew their trials prototypes, made full use of the latest computer design technology developed specifically for the new Range Rover model to produce a better and stronger vehicle, then submitted a new prototype batch for trials. This time, they produced precisely what the MoD required, and an order for eight thousand utility vehicles, plus another eight hundred ambulance variants, was eventually awarded.
New Millennium
For a period in the mid to late nineties it was considered that the days of the unprotected or lightly armoured utility vehicle were numbered, with many commentators saying that the Land Rover was a dinosaur. While the Wolf, as the mid-nineties military Defender became known, was still under development, the UK Ministry of Defence issued a requirement for a Weapons Mount Installation Kit (WMIK) which could be retrofitted to standard production vehicles to convert them into light gunships for specialist recce and rapid intervention roles.
Land Rover had already developed the Special Operations Vehicle for the US Rangers, who had spotted during Gulf War One that they had a heli-transportable vehicle shortfall on their inventory, which the Land Rover looked like it could fill. The resultant vehicle was capable of carrying six men plus their weapons and equipment, in addition to a heavy machinegun or automatic grenade launcher on a ring mount on the roll cage.
The concept models Land Rover developed out of the SOV were known as the Multi Role Combat Vehicles, which essentially had modular roll cage and stowage pods which could be dropped onto any base vehicle and expanded or contracted with removable sections to suit either specific mission role or wheelbase dimensions. On the drawing board this looked good in theory, but in practice the scheme was too complicated, though it provided Ricardo Engineering with the basic building blocks to design a functioning and much more practical WMIK on the Defender 110 Wolf.
Originally UK MoD only intended to produce a small batch of WMIK conversions, but no sooner had the first examples entered service than they proved their worth in the Sierra Leone crisis of 2000, where the rapid deployment of British Forces, initially just on a Non-combatant Evacuation Operation, helped stem the outbreak of full-scale civil war. By the time that Britain became embroiled in Afghanistan, the WMIK concept had been accepted as a key component in the inventory of the out-of-area forces – in Britain’s case 3 Commando and 16 Air Assault Brigades - and when Coalition ground forces invaded Iraq in 2003 WMIK Wolves were in the vanguard of the occupation of Basrah and the seizure of the southern oilfields.
Following the surrender of the Iraqi forces, Britain shipped large numbers of CAV Defenders, now near redundant following the success of the peace process in Northern Ireland, out to Basrah for low profile patrol duties, though a subsequent escalation in violence and the introduction of powerful improvised devices was to later curtail their use in that theatre. To cope with the climatic extremes CAVs operating in Iraq were retrofitted with air-conditioning and, as part of a mid-life upgrade the CAMAC bodies were refurbished and fitted to new diesel-engined chasses produced by Otokar, with mechanical upgrades also being undertaken by Ricardo.
As the war against the Taliban stepped up a gear in Afghanistan’s Helmand Province in 2006, the WMIK became the primary manoeuvre support vehicle of first the Paras, and then the Royal Marines. Supplementary lightweight armour packages were introduced to give additional protection to the three-man crew, and as threat levels increased Ricardo produced a modification package to give enhanced protection levels. Recently, a larger and more heavily armoured seven tonne GVW, three-man vehicle based on the Supacat HMT has entered service as the Jackal M-WMIK, but both the WMIK and E-WMIK variants of the Land Rover are likely remain in service until at least the middle of the next decade.
Future
The development and eventual procurement of the roughly eight-tonne Future Command and Liaison Vehicle, now in service as the Panther, was seen by some commentators as the final nail in the coffin of the conventional Land Rover as a medium utility vehicle. In addition to being heavily armoured, Panther has superb off-road capability, can carry a four-man specialist team with all their kit, is capable of mounting a remotely operated weapons station, has sufficient payload capacity to take the weight of a full Bowman communications package, and also has a small cargo compartment at the rear.
Numbering just four hundred, however, the Panther batch cannot possibly replace the thousands of ten year old Wolf generation Land Rovers proving their worth across the breadth of the British armed forces, and indeed it was never meant to. Britain also has several thousand other pre-Wolf Land Rovers on her military inventory, some of which are over twenty years old and slightly past their best. Being Land Rovers though, their elementary design makes them ideal candidates for refurbishment, and this is where Asset Management specialists like Hobson Industries step in.
Over the last forty to fifty years, whenever Britain’s armed forces have cast their Land Rovers as being beyond the point of economic repair, civilian buyers have stepped forward to snap them up and give them a second lease of life. At last the Ministry of Defence has awakened and smelled the coffee, not to mention spotted the environmental benefits of turning new from old, so the current service fleet is now expected to remain in service until at least the end of the next decade after administration of a little bit of tender loving care.
It used to be said that over seventy percent of Land Rovers ever built were still running. Old military Land Rovers, like many of their civilian world counterparts don’t die; they just get Asset Managed.
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