09/23/2026
The American Secretary of War told President Roosevelt it was probably the first time in history a naval vessel had been rescued by an Army truck, and he waited until the Secretary of the Navy was close by before he said it.
The story reached Henry Stimson from Vannevar Bush, who ran the government's wartime research office that had developed the truck, and Bush put it in his book afterwards. It had happened on Cape Cod in December 1942. A gale was blowing, and a Coast Guard yawl called the Rose, out on lookout for U-boats, had gone aground near Provincetown with seven men aboard. The usual ways of getting men off a stranded boat could not reach her.
There happened to be a handful of the new army amphibians in town for trials. One of them drove down the beach, straight into the surf, out to the yawl, and brought all seven men back.
It was a DUKW, the Duck, and the thing to understand about it is that it was not a boat that could drive. It was an ordinary American army six-wheeler, and the boat was built round it. The army's own manual, dated October 1942, puts it plainly: the chassis and the drive were attached inside the hull, and the springs and axles hung underneath it, in the water, whenever it was being a boat.
One engine did everything. On land it drove the six wheels, up to fifty miles an hour. In the water the driver engaged a propeller, set in a tunnel at the rear, and went on steering exactly as he did ashore. The front wheels still turned, and a rudder in the tunnel turned with them, worked from the same steering column. The manual gives its top speed in the water as 6.4 miles an hour. Two bilge pumps ran off the propeller shaft, a small one of sixty gallons a minute and a large one of a hundred and sixty for when the small one could not keep up.
It was designed in a hurry, and largely by people who were not soldiers. Palmer Cosslett Putnam, a yachtsman in Bush's research organisation, took the problem to General Motors' truck works at Pontiac in Michigan, and the hull came from Rod Stephens of Sparkman and Stephens, a firm of yacht designers. Several people in the army objected to the whole project. What Bush said of the Cape Cod rescue, once the President had heard about it, was that it "eased off some of the opposition."
Some.
By June 1944 the British Army was running its own. The Imperial War Museums hold a photograph of the DUKWs of a Royal Army Service Corps beach group company, 21st Army Group, lined up to be loaded onto landing ships in the first week of June, and another of Ducks being driven up the hillside at Arromanches to the point where their loads went into lorries. That was the whole idea. Nothing had to stop at the water's edge.
The manual gave forty pounds as the correct pressure for the tyres and about fifteen for soft sand, and the truck carried its own air pump to put the air back in. It also left the driver one decision to make before he went into the water: set the tyres for whatever he expected to find at the next landing.
