Trick Trux

I actually wrote most of this last night only to have it disappear into computerland.
Who cares, right?
I've just gotten over a brief and instructive obsession concerning the vehicles pictured - a military adaptation in particular.
To begin, the top photo is my Dad's truck.

See, here's a place where our hard line between "pickup" and "truck" blurs.
"Old Faithful" (the Daddy's name for it - naming cars/trucks... embarrassing) was a half-ton, but had a stake bed so...
I'm in the photo if my Mom's caption is to be believed. The driver is my older brother so I assume somewhere in all the glare and shadows, I may have been visible when she took the picture but I'll be damned if I can see anybody there.
Taken, probably in 1957 when I was three.
This is the grill design Chevy used between 1941 and 46.
Next picture, a 1 1/2 ton model.
These seem to have been very popular. You can still see them around sometimes.
When I first moved to Oregon after the Navy, my first job was for a firewood guy.
The oldest of his fleet of three trucks was a ton and a half Chevy.
It didn't burn-up the road by any means but it was cool nonetheless. The bitchin' windshield that cranks out, the starter switch on the floor - and gears so low that the starter could move it in low. I didn't do such a horrible thing to it. It my teenaged co-worker.
Now a brief digression: Below is a picture of the predecessor, once removed to the humvee.
In the Navy we called them "weapons carriers" but I've heard other folks referred to them as "five-quarters".
It always struck me as being very practical, to just go with the basic body, such as it is, rather than reinventing the wheel. I don't know if American Motors made any 1 1/4 ton trucks for the civilian market and this probably only existed as a contracted "tactical vehicle".
I just always thought that the coolness factor was upped significantly by the look of the thing, kind of a tactical Mad Max.

Okay, apply the same principle to the truck with the huge mouthful of teeth, in this case a 1941 Canadian Chevy with right-hand-drive and you get the next rig, as used by the British Long Range Desert Group in North Africa.

I'll finish the rest of this later, maybe put it in two chunks as it's getting a bit large.
Later