British Military Land Rovers

The British military has always been one of the major customers for Land Rovers, buying thousands upon thousands over the years. Land Rover in turn has returned the compliment, developing special models to meet its needs, such as the Half-Ton or Lightweight and the 101 One-Tonne Forward Control.

Yet the British military Land Rover has always been special in its own way, particularly after 1961 when the basic specification was modified to incorporate elements that were never made available on contemporary civilian models. It has been modified and adapted in dozens of ways for its military rôle, the basic GS soft-top utility and FFR 24-volt radio models being supplemented by a wide variety of specialist variants that remain little known even today.

This hugely comprehensive book looks at the story of the leaf-sprung Land Rovers used by all three of Britain’s armed services – the Army, the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force. It lists and describes the different types, setting them in their context both as products of the Rover (and later, Land Rover) companies and as military equipment designed to meet a particular need at a particular time. There are copious illustrations, many never published before, and the lists of the vehicles themselves are as exhaustive as the authors have been able to make them in the light of surviving records.

British Military Land Rovers aims to cover every leaf-sprung type in use between the first deliveries in 1948 and the final ones in 1985 – by which time the core Land Rover product no longer depended on leaf springs but on a more modern coil-spring suspension design. It will be welcomed by military-vehicle and Land Rover enthusiasts alike as the most detailed book yet published about the subject.