Camionetta Desertica AS.42

In the Western Desert the British Long Range Desert Group had demonstrated what a light, unarmoured, long-legged truck could do: cross hundreds of kilometres of open sand, appear far behind the front, and be gone before a response could be organised. The Regio Esercito had nothing equivalent, and asked for one. The answer was built by SPA and Viberti on the chassis and mechanics of the AB 41 armoured car — components that were sound, proven and already in production.

The prototype was presented on 9 July 1942 and the type went into production at the SPA–Viberti works in Turin from August. The first batch of 14 vehicles reached the army between September and November 1942, and the AS.42 went into action in November with the Raggruppamento Sahariano. The desert campaign it had been designed for ended in Tunisia six months later.

Everything about the vehicle served range. Alongside a 145-litre internal tank it carried twenty jerrycans of 20 litres — two rows of five on each flank, 400 litres of petrol — with four more cans on the front wings and some 80 litres of water. Sources disagree on what that bought: figures run from 1,200 to 2,000 km, against roughly 535 km on the internal tank alone.

The mechanics came from the AB 41, simplified. The armoured car’s second driving position, facing rearwards, was deleted, and its four-wheel steering went with it — on the AS.42 only the front wheels steer. A rear-mounted SPA six-cylinder petrol engine, given as ~100–110 hp depending on the source, moved 4.5 tonnes across a hull 5.62 m long, 2.26 m wide and only 1.80 m high, on large-diameter sand tyres with 0.35 m of ground clearance.

It had no armour. That was deliberate and it was the LRDG’s logic exactly: the Chevrolets had none either, and what kept them alive was not being found. Weight saved on plate went into fuel, into range, and into a gun heavier than the vehicle’s size suggested.

The main mount took a 20 mm Breda 20/65 Mod. 35, a 20 mm Solothurn S18-1000 anti-tank rifle, or — on some vehicles — a 47/32, the same class of weapon the M13/40 carried in a turret. One to three 8 mm Breda machine guns (Mod. 37 or Mod. 38) went on secondary mounts. The crew was five, and the payload 1,500 kg.

The first vehicles went to the auto-avio-sahariane companies, the long-range desert units the Italians had been running since the 1930s, and it was with them that the AS.42 saw the closing stage of the Libyan campaign.

The second operator was new. The Reggimento Arditi had been raised at Santa Severa, on the coast north of Rome, on 20 July 1942, and was designated X Reggimento Arditi on 15 September under Colonel Renzo Gazzaniga. It was built in three specialities — paracadutisti, nuotatori, camionettisti — and by 1 March 1943 fielded three battalions with companies numbered 101–103, 111–113 and 121–123. The camionettisti companies were the 103ª, 112ª, 113ª and 123ª, and the 103ª went to Tunisia in February 1943 with the Mannerini grouping.

In Sicily the II Battalion worked from Acireale with the 112ª, 113ª and 120ª companies. At the Primosole bridge, between 14 and 17 July 1943, Captain Paradisi led about fifty men in camionette against the British airborne troops fighting for the crossing.

Between 30 July and 1 August the IV Patrol of the 112ª da sbarco went in from the sea at Augusta and destroyed fuel stocks. On 13 August 1943 the surviving camionette and their crews were withdrawn to Santa Severa to reorganise, three weeks before the armistice.

By 1943 the desert was lost and the vehicle was being asked to work in Italy. The response was the AS.42 II, known as the Metropolitana. The two upper rows of jerrycans came off each flank — there was no longer any reason to carry 400 litres — and two large ammunition lockers took their place. A canvas top went over the fighting compartment, and the wide sand tyres were exchanged for Pirelli Artiglio and similar patterns cut for mud and snow.

How many were made is genuinely disputed. Italian sources give ~140 Sahariane and ~50 Metropolitane; English-language accounts put the total at about 100 of all types; and one account holds that of the 140 ordered in August 1942 only a few dozen were actually delivered. What is certain is the order, the two versions, and that no source claims more than around two hundred.

On 8 September 1943 the armistice was announced and German troops moved on Rome. The 111ª compagnia paracadutisti and the 122ª camionettisti of the X Reggimento fought them at Porta San Paolo on 8 and 9 September, in the last organised defence of the capital.

The regiment dissolved, but its parts did not stop. The I Battalion, in Sardinia, refused a German demand to surrender on 12 September; it landed at Naples on 10 February 1944, was redesignated the IX Assault Section on 20 March, and joined the Legnano Combat Group in September 1944 as the “Col Moschin” battalion, finishing the war with 60 killed and 200 wounded. The Italian Army’s special forces regiment carries that name today.

The camionette taken in Rome went to the other side of the war. Forty-six Arditi of the 10º formed the Gruppo Italiano Arditi Camionettisti and were attached to the German 2. Fallschirmjäger-Division.

They scouted on the Eastern Front from late 1943 into the summer of 1944, and afterwards in France, Belgium and the Netherlands. A vehicle drawn for Libyan sand, with mountings sized for jerrycans it no longer needed, spent 1944 doing reconnaissance in Russian snow for a German parachute division.

One Metropolitana can be followed through the photographic record, which is rare for a vehicle built in these numbers. The camionetta marked 1197B was photographed in the autumn of 1943 with its crew standing beside it in Arditi uniform.

It appears again on 4 June 1944, wrecked in Via Nazionale in Rome, hit by a round from an American M4 Sherman on the day the city fell. Of the survivors, about ten Metropolitane went to the Polizia after the war — weapons, pioneer tools and jerrycan racks stripped off, the hulls repainted — and served at Udine and Bologna until 1954.

• Enrico Finazzer & Luigi Carretta, Le camionette del Regio Esercito: FIAT-SPA AS/37, SPA-Viberti AS/42, FIAT-SPA AS/43, Desertica 43, e i reparti che le impiegarono.
• Nicola Pignato & Filippo Cappellano, Gli autoveicoli da combattimento dell’Esercito Italiano (Ufficio Storico dello Stato Maggiore dell’Esercito).
• Filippo Cappellano & Pier Paolo Battistelli, Italian Armoured & Reconnaissance Cars 1911–45 (Osprey, New Vanguard).