David Fletcher looks at the many forms taken by the Humber armoured trucks and Hornet missile launcher
The idea of a lightly armoured truck goes back quite a long way. Indeed you can go back to before World War Two and the origins of the American White scout car if you like. Which although it served as a scout car with the United States Army was used more as a general purpose armoured truck when issued to British armoured car regiments.
Then again, others will point to the Canadian C15TA, built by General Motors (Canada) on their 15cwt 4x4 chassis starting in about 1943. Whichever you choose it must be admitted that, unexciting as it sounds, the general purpose armoured truck can be a very useful vehicle. Not that the origins of the armoured Humber were anything like that. In fact there were no plans at all to produce such a vehicle to start off with. At the end of World War Two, despite having more transport than it needed, the British Army laid plans to construct a range of military vehicles, all to be powered by eminently reliable (and horribly expensive) Rolls-Royce engines already prepared for waterproofing.
In the event only two, the quarter-ton Austin Champ and the one-ton Humber entered servic…
