Posted by Gordon on Saturday, December 10, 2005 at 6:33AM :
In Reply to: WC-9 Dodge Ambulance posted by SFC Jeff Button on Friday, December 09, 2005 at 11:45PM :
Hello Jeff,
That one number tells us quite a lot about your ambulance. Normally I would refer people to the excellent " WW2 Dodge Motor Pool " site in Australia, but it seems to be down at the moment so here goes...
From the chassis number, and the Dodge Master Parts Listing, I can see that your ambulance isn't a WC-9 but a WC-27 half ton military ambulance from 1941. It would be a T215 engineering code truck, and it would have been built on contract W-398-QM-10327 for the Quartermaster Corps as the only other ambulance contract in that series was for export on Defense Aid.
Since the starting chassis number for that run of trucks was 81500001, your machine is only 59 trucks into the run. The ambulance hood codes for those trucks were W-75400 to W-77080, so although it was quite common for chassis to be put on the line out of numerical sequence the original hood number would have been somewhere quite close to W-75459.
There's no real way to get much history on it except to scrub down the doors and bumpers to look for unit markings, but you can get an exact build date from Chrysler Historical (for a fee) if you just quote them the chassis number. I'd guess around Easter 1941 but the listing of all the known dates is one of the things normally found only on the WW2 Dodge Motor Pool
Gordon McMillan
Follow Ups: