Stuntman and classic military vehicle enthusiast Jim Dowdall looks back at the use of military vehicles in the movies
Oozing with ignorance as a young armourer while working on the 1967 film The Dirty Dozen, I was amazed by the number of military vehicles on set. I assumed they were all World War Two vintage and correct for the period, thinking the art director must know what he is doing. But then I started to look closer and realised that just because a vehicle had a ‘Balkankreuz’ painted on the side, it was not necessarily German. Just one example was a Daimler Dingo, which had been turned into a completely unknown German armoured car with the addition of some tin plate and the black cross painted on the side. Meanwhile, a Bedford QL doubled as a German truck and so it went on. We had some Stuart tanks on set which thankfully appeared as US vehicles. They were supplied by the late Cyril Groombridge, a collector and enthusiast, who had bought them as Stuart Kangaroo armoured personnel carriers with no turrets. Cyril made turrets out of plywood and the gun barrel was a scaffold pole which wobbled when the vehicle drove across rough ground.
In one sequence where the ‘heroes’ were taking part in an ex…
