What I hadn't thought of was the space saving aspect. We've all seen images such as this, cars being loaded by Crane into cargo vessels. But these weren't dedicated vehicle transporters; so once there was a layer of cars across the bottom of the hold, that was it.
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The series War Factories compares the Allies Capitalist Free Market approach to the Nazi 's running of factories, how the war was won by different aspects of the Allies industrial base.
But one I watched last night mentioned the USA output of GM trucks and how they were shipped around the world to every theatre.
They built 572,500 of the 2.5T truck across several variants.
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To save space on the Liberty Ship Freighters, they were frequently driven off the assembly line, broken down into sections and crated up before being loaded on trains to the docks for shipping.
GM has dedicated assembly plants built in different parts of the world; one of the biggest was in Iraq for the Middle East theatre, where it took just 30 minutes to assemble a truck and drive it away.
Now here's the thing that surprised me.
The CKD cargo of just 8 Liberty ships was the same number of 2.5T trucks as it would take 1000 ships to carry if fully assembled!
I wonder how that data was factored into the concept of using CKD Minors for Australasia etc...?
