Humvees in Canada

[David Pope]

A few weeks ago I came across these brand new HMMVVs in Saskatchewan about 100 miles north of the US border. They haven't any insignia or markings of any kind and they're in Canada. Why would this be? Anybody got any ideas? It would be nice if Canada got some to replace the Iltis instead of the G-wagon but I can't imagine that happened.

[dilvoy]

Those Humvees sure are sitting low. They don't look very different except for the doors. They look to be armored with armored windows. The latest Humvees that I have seen leaving the docks in Oakland Ca. were very up armored. I sat in one and checked it out. It has a louvered air intake in the left sponson. The doors themselves have the regular slide down windows, but they are very heavily armored and instead of the typical pin and latch for door locking they have lugs like a submarine door and it's hinge is like that of a piano lid. The roof looks to start out as a normal steel roof, but has about two inches of filler or padding on top and then a larger steel cap over that. It had armor in the floor as well. They however, did not sit as low as those in the above fotos. George

[Bobcatt]

Well having loaded a number of them on trucks and rails we really crack the chains down loading up the suspenssion so they don't bounce and fall off the vehicle while in transit.

[dilvoy]

Possibly they are being given to a foreign country, like those jets that were given to Israel, just before they bombed the Iraqui nuke. Did they have any serial number plates on them? George

[hmrbri]

hi,
i thought i had the only HMMWV in Sask !!?(dave, do you have one?)
actually, i did talk to a trucker a while back that said he brought a few loads of humvees up here from Colorado Springs last winter, for cold weather exercises.
they might have been headed for military bases at Cold lake, Alberta or Shilo, Manitoba.
b

[David Pope]

I wish I did have one. The thing that gets me about those vehicles is the lack of markings. If the US military was sending them up here for exercises or on their way to Alaska they'd have US insignia and vehicle numbers on them. If they were headed overseas they wouldn't be in Canada. If they were shipping them from a Canadian port for covert reasons they'd be covered up on the truck and they wouldn't be parked in Estevan. They had a sheet of paper on the inside of the windshield (you can see them in one of the photos) that said army but no mention of whose army. I didn't climb over them looking for serial numbers.

[ReconHumvee]

It isn't uncommon for allies to have the same vehicles that we are using in combat, cost effective is usually the issues, the humvee may cost more than the average range rover combat vehicle. But for certain situations they may need the up armored version of the humvee. For example in the run up to the Palaces in Iraq the mainstream forces used light skinned and up armored humvees yet the special forces used Toyota 4x4 Pickup trucks with M2 mounted in the bed. The problem was that the SecOps guys were viewed by the Tankers and Bradleys as Technicals and lost a few trucks to 25mm. Thank god they SpecOps guys were out of the vehicles when the trucks were destroyed. That is why as cumbersome and slow as the Humvee can be on the open planes of the desert, the Spec Guys use a combination of both technical vehicles and up armored. Same would go to foreign nations (allies) who need a mixture of certain vehicles to accomidate the mission at hand. Semper Fi carry on!!!