The French army obtained most of its 1/4 ton jeep trailers, both Willys MB-T and Bantam T-3, as war surplus from the Americans. The fact that there is a relatively plentiful supply of WW2 trailers today for jeep owners that want them is due in no small measure to the French Army and the fact that they repaired and rebuilt them as they wore out and also modified and improved the overall design. Trailers, like jeeps, were maintained and modified in various workshops including a rebuilding programme by the Etablissement de Réserve Générale du Matériel Automobile (E.R.G.M) at La Maltournee.
The above photos are pre-digital and getting rather tired now but they are the only record of how it looked after the restoration where I decided to mark it as it had been during service in the 1950s / 60s with the flaming grenade. It is worth mentioning that in the French army trailers havetheir own unique registration number, a cunning idea as they were towed behind various vehicles. The trailer had been converted to 24 volts complete with additional NATO hook-up cable but still had one of the two rear light units as a blackout marker / stop light in WW2 style which had to be replaced for road legality and safety.
The lighting system on French army trailers remained pretty much unchanged from the WW2 configuration until the mid 1980s when a specification was published to modify the rear lighting systems of both jeeps and trailers to conform with civilian requirements in France. Both jeeps and trailers regularly used on the road system were fitted with pretty much the same lighting clusters fitted to the Peugeot P4 jeep and trailers also had the standard trailer reflective triangles fitted to replace the WW2 reflector discs.
As part of this upgrade the original WW2style lead with four-pole plug was finally removed leaving onlythe NATO style cable and multi-pin connector. When not in use theNATO plug was stored in a cylindrical bracket on the oppositeside to the original L shaped WW2 bracket. It is worth mentioning that only trailers and jeeps that were in regular active use on the road were modified in this way; reserve stock was not upgraded.
The photos below (from JLM) show an unusual in-house modification made at the ETAMAT workshops at Metz for 1er RHP. The mounting rack fitted inside the trailer is to carry a generator for large High Frequency transmitters used by the transmissions section of 1 RHP. The hole in the side of the trailer is for the exhaust outlet. Instructions for carrying out the modification were given in the Fiche Technique bulletin FT12179 published in 1996.
