I have been avoiding building the winches behind the cab because they are a pile of small details. Small details and rivets are not my favorite things to do. They are a pain in the rear end, and I don't mean the differential. I decided to do a simple interior for the cab. Nothing fancy, nothing will be very visible unless you get up close, so small details will not be needed.

While I was researching for interior photos, I ran across some photos of battle damaged Dragon Wagons. I saw a picture of an M26 with winches that had been hit by heavy machinegun fire. At this point a brilliant idea exploded in my brain. And just by a happy coincidence, my good buddy Jim Beam had stopped by that afternoon and he agreed that the photo was a great solution to my problem. Jim always encourages and inspires me to "Be all that I can be" and "Just do it". Or maybe it was somebody else, that's not the point here.

Since I can't post the photo of those damaged winches, I will explain the background story about what happened the best I can.

Here's the story as I remember reading the historically accurate report -------

It's late 1944. The war is almost over. The Germans make one last attack and their tanks are damaging a lot of American armor. Armour if your are British. There is a great need to get those Allied tanks repaired and back in operation so they can keep denting and scratching the paint on the Panzers. General Patton is racing to the front lines to kick some butt. As he crosses the Rhine on a pontoon bridge, he sees a Dragon Wagon alongside the road and stops to order the crew to get up to the front at top speed. The crew tells him that the winch motors are shot up and don't run anymore ---- there is no way they can pull a tank up on the trailer. Patton is furious!. He tells the crew to get those gosh darn winches working no matter what they have to do. The crew puts their heads together to figure out what to do. Since GIs are inventive, resourceful, and clever, they think of the Motor Pool slogan "Do the job with what ya got".

Here are some photos of a real set of winches and a great scale model.




Here are some photos of what the GIs did to make General Patton happy.