In the previous two blog posts about these toy cars we looked at two pairings of vehicles and in this post we will look at the last of our pairs. The third pairing is the army vehicles.

First up is the Series III station wagon in the camo livery with the classic spare wheel on the bonnet. This car just looks like it belongs in a war film, driving through the gritty land, mud everywhere. And they were used a lot, not just by the British Army, but also the Australian and New Zealand armies too.

In my research into the military usage of the Series III, I was shocked to find that a lot of the time they did not use the hard top like in this example here, but instead would use soft top models.

The other car in this pair is a Series II LWB Fighting Vehicle that was designated FV18061/2 which stood for General Service or Fitted for Radio. That meant that this truck was customised to fit its purpose. It was fitted with twin fuel tanks, pusher bumpers, military electrical equipment and had longer spring hangers, which allowed the use of larger section tyres when needed.

The Sankey trailer behind the car is also a fighting vehicle designated FV2361. It was a ¾ ton trailer, equipped for either carrying cargo or fitted with specialised equipment, such as water-purification plants, radar equipment or welding equipment. The body was designed to be watertight so that it could be floated across bodies of water.

On the box it states that this vehicle was used by the 1^st Battalion, Royal Green Jackets, which would date the model between post 1966 as that is when the Royal Green Jackets were formed. They were a light infantry unit, and the 1^st Battalion were based in Weeton. The unit is most known for being deployed to Northern Ireland in the 1980’s as well as West Germany prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Looking at all six of these cars, it shows how influential and useful Land Rover were and still can be in the world. They are multi-purpose vehicles that can be applied to many different situations and are also highly adaptable. And yet whilst they may all be adapted to fit the job description, at the heart of it, is still the everyday civilian car that Land Rover make. And that makes the everyday car, that little bit more special, because it could be a police car, it could be saving lives on the beaches, or it could be delivering essential cargo in a warzone.