Re: Fiat Tractor History

Posted by oldtanker on September 24, 2016 at 05:21:57 from (66.228.255.59):

In Reply to: Fiat Tractor History posted by Bill VA on September 23, 2016 at 17:26:03:

Interesting.

When I did my first tour of Germany in the mid 70's we did a lot of maneuvering in the German countryside. Got to see a lot of farms and because we couldn't move our tanks after 10PM, got to meet some German farmers. Saw a lot of their equipment and some of the practices. Was pretty interesting. Back then the most predominate tractors were JD, IH, Ford and Mercedes. Not many of the Fiats around. Most of the farmers lived in small towns and if you drew a circle on a map around the town the farms were more or less slice of pie shaped. MFWA was pretty common there too, long before it became the norm here. One interesting thing they has was a pull behind self contained forage harvester that cut, chopped and loaded the freshly harvested hay. Then they would drive it over to the livestock and feed it fresh. You didn't see many FIAT cars around either. Most Germans considered them as unreliable. A standard joke at the time was that a FIAT car was the only car in the world that came stock from the factory new with at least 2 rust spots on it. Standard equipment, no extra cost! I also saw mini excavators over there for the first time. I was years later before I saw one in the US. The Renault cars were few and far between too. The Le Car was called the "OH Jesus" car by soldiers. That was because the were known to have structural failures while going down the road and about the only thing you could do was hold on and yell "OH Jesus"!

There is a big JD plant in Mannheim a few miles west of Coleman Barrack were the US Army prison is. IH had a factory there that made in "German diesels" used in some of the more popular tractors of the 60's and 70's.

On a side note: There were a lot of older German men around who were WWII vets back then. Of all those I met only one admitted to fighting against American forces. The rest all claimed to have fought the Russians. He was captured in North Africa and spent the rest of the war in a POW camp in LA right here in the US. He was one of the work release POWs who worked on an American Farm. We were in a night position around that town and the tank I was assigned to was basically in his back yard. Cold wet night. He moved his car out of his garage and set up cots for us to sleep on. His wife made us a late supper and fed us breakfast in the morning before we moved out again. His son and DIL were on the farm too. interesting experience! After supper that night he got a bottle schnapps and 5 shot glasses. He served each of us by rank and indicated as we were served that we were to drink it right away. It was explained to me that he did this to honor his company, acknowledging the rank structure and placing himself below his "honored" guest. Then he refilled our glasses and we had a toast. Interesting custom. There were damage assessment teams that followed us around who figured out "maneuver damage" on each piece of property we maneuvered on. Farmers were compensated per square meter for crop damage and soil compaction.

Rick

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