Wagoneers in Military Use?

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altayd9
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Wagoneers in Military Use?

Post by altayd9 »

I was looking through some old family photos the other day and I found an old photo from the Turkish Army of a family friend standing in front of what appeared to be a Wagoneer with an army flagpole attached to the bumper and it got me wondering, did Wagoneers ever see any use in militaries both here in the US and internationally? I'm not too sure if the Wagoneer in the photo is US made or from Iran since they did make Wagoneers under license back then, but the bumpers seem to match what I've seen from Iranian Jeeps.
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tgreese
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Re: Wagoneers in Military Use?

Post by tgreese »

The main use of these vehicles in the US military was the M715 series of military trucks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaiser_Jeep_M715

I recall some examples of Wagoneers in the panel truck version that were used as radio trucks or something similar. If you go through old posts at IFSJA looking for related words, you may find some references to these Jeeps. https://www.bing.com/search?q=site%3Aifsja.org+military

Jeep sold quite few vehicles for "agency" purposes; government agencies including the armed services, and federal, state and local departments. These would be optioned-out at the factory as close as possible to the agancy requirements, then additionally fitted out by the agencies. Lots of references in old posts to bare-bones Cherokees or Wagoneers sold to forestry or fish and game services, for example.

The US military services have funding to develop their own front-line service vehicles, like the M38A1 or the M151 or the Hummer. Friendly foreign countries could purchase vehicles for military service that were based on the current or older domestic production vehicles. If the Turkish Army needed and paid for some military-spec Wagoneers, I'm sure they could have bought them. Suspect that records of such sales are long gone, at least domestically.
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Re: Wagoneers in Military Use?

Post by fulsizjeep »

The United Nations had some Wags/Cherks in the late 70s.
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Re: Wagoneers in Military Use?

Post by Stuka »

There was definitely FSJs used on bases for on base transportation. The military would use basically whatever was being sold at the time. The HMMWV took over a lot of this once it entered production. But even afterwards, regular civilian-esk vehicles were used.

But deployed or seeing action, I believe the M715/M725 was the only one. And they were generally disliked due to their lack of power. Which is understandable as a 6-8k pound vehicle with 100hp is not going to be an enjoyable vehicle to drive.
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