Features
David Bentley couldn’t wait to try his newly-bought M29 Studebaker Weasel out when snow fell on the Pennines
‘St Lo Special’ is the name of a Weasel in a famous wartime photograph reproduced here INSET:The ‘St Lo Special’, an M29 Weasel of Charlie Company of the 121st Engineer Combat Battalion of the 29th ‘blue and grey’ US Infantry Division in Normandy (CONSEIL RÉGIONAL DE BASSE-NORMANDIE/NATIONAL ARCHIVES USA)
These days, the chances are that, every time you stop at the temporary traffic lights by some roadworks, there will be a mini digger on tracks: the machines have become ubiquitous among the paraphernalia of highway maintenance. It wasn’t always this way of course, someone had to invent them and, like so many aspects of technology, it was World War Two that provided the catalyst to push things forward.
