Dunkirk 1940

[Chris Garner]

Many will remember the photograph of a burnt-out Military Seven amongst other vehicles and equipment abandoned after the BEF were rescued from the Dunkirk beaches.
Dunkirchen 1940, a new book looking at the campaign from the German perspective, describes in detail the fight and eventual surrender of the British garrison in Calais.
Amongst the British dead covering the Mole, Oberleutnant Konig of the 7th Panzer Regiment describes how some of his men were trying " to get a lovely two-seater Austin into gear ". Such a contrast in images but it is highly probably that this again was a Military Seven.

[Mike Costigan]

Two images from the Dunkirk beaches showing APD military tourers:


  1940 Dunkirk abandoned Seven 2 (2).jpg (Size: 115.15 KB / Downloads: 620)


  1940 Dunkirk abandoned Seven.jpeg (Size: 90.98 KB / Downloads: 619)

[SJT]

Hi, my father was safely taken off at Dunkirk and I now own a Austin seven PD with five military wheels, not sure if it is a military one or not.Stephen.

[Archivist]

The whole world of Military Austin 7s is something that I am focusing on from an Archive perspective at the moment - hence the talk at the Open Day. But I am interested in expanding the collection of Military vehicle's representation in the Archive, so would be very onterested to hear of any specific materials that might be available.

Stephen, it might be interesting to see a photo of your car.

I am in the throes of finishing off the revamp of the engineering drawings on the Archive web site. We hold 3 'Assembly drawings' for military models, all of which have distinct attributes. The three are

http://archive.a7ca.org/collections/tech...em/TD0193/?
http://archive.a7ca.org/collections/tech...em/TD0189/?
http://archive.a7ca.org/collections/tech...em/TD0188/?

One of the outstanding strands of work is to improve the descriptions of these 3 drawings to point out all of the little attributes (eg, if you laook at the third drawing in the list, you can see the mounting of a Lee Enfield rifle between the 2 seats)

[Mike Costigan]

Hi, my father was safely taken off at Dunkirk and I now own a Austin seven PD with five military wheels, not sure if it is a military one or not. Stephen.

I believe all military PDs and APDs featured a scuttle petrol tank, something not seen on civilian versions.

[SJT]

Thanks mine does have a scuttle tank which I thought was a bit odd and it appears to have been reregestered however due to a lot of welding there does not appear to be any numbers on tunnel etc. I will try to take a photo but not great with computers .
Stephen.

[Reckless Rat]

There seems to have been a fair bit of scavenging of parts from all these vehicles. Could the photo be dated post war perhaps?

[Rick F]

The "scavenging" was probably done when they were abandoned, to deny their use by the enemy.

Lots of us did the same to our cars when we evacuated from Aden in 1967

[Mike Costigan]

Thanks mine does have a scuttle tank which I thought was a bit odd and it appears to have been re-regestered however due to a lot of welding there does not appear to be any numbers on tunnel etc. I will try to take a photo but not great with computers .
Stephen.

That certainly sounds like it's a military tourer; I don't think the lack of stamping on the transmission tunnel matters too much, as that would have just been a factory body number which didn't relate to the government contract. 
Are there any other 'puzzling' aspects; for instance there should be a plate recording the relevant government requisition - that may be missing, but are there a set of unidentified holes on the dashboard or scuttle? 
You say the car has been re-register, do you know what the original number was? All vehicles produced to government contracts were issued with number sequences that were not in the normal public sequences. 
Some requisitions required supplementary 24 volt installations - are there any unexplained holes in the dashboard, or evidence of non-standard battery housings?

[Mike Costigan]

There seems to have been a fair bit of scavenging of parts from all these vehicles. Could the photo be dated post war perhaps?

I believe both photos are of German origin and date from immediately after the evacuation; the first actually shows a dead British soldier in the foreground which I cropped out as being irrelevant to the topic.
My grandfather was with the Expeditionary Forces and described how the roads in to Dunkirk were littered with abandoned vehicles, including 'dozens' of Austin Sevens, and one of his duties was to punch a screwdriver through petrol tanks, radiators and batteries, just as Rick F suggests.