3 replies to this topic

[Vitesse2]

A little pre-Christmas curio for you all. Obviously not racing as such, but I have to wonder why anyone would have thought that a race-bred car like a Bearcat was a suitable vehicle for the purposes of traversing the roads of Germany and Poland in order to gather film of the German army. They were certainly solid, but a two-seat racer wouldn't be the most obvious choice for such a task.

 

I found this story via the Franco-German TV station Arte - there's currently a 30-minute documentary on their website, available until February 14th 2020. Commentary is in French, with English subtitles. An interesting tale about two American journalists from Chicago who spent much of 1915 in Germany, with lots of unusual footage, most of which would have been unseen for a century, as the film was withdrawn in 1917 when the USA entered the Great War and only rediscovered a few years ago.

 

https://www.arte.tv/...ny-at-war-1915/

 

The Stutz features quite often in the film and presumably it must have been a bit of sponsorship/product placement by the firm - although there's no obvious connection to Chicago, given that Stutz were an Indianapolis company. Note the early Dutch number plate - they travelled to Germany via the neutral Netherlands.

 

 

There's more detail - including a much longer film reconstructed from the surviving footage - on the Library of Congress website.

 

https://blogs.loc.go...e-germans-1915/

 

 

[Bikr7549]

ARTE broadcast unfortunately not available in the US, but the longer one is. Thanks for posting. Interesting that they apparently had to get a Netherlands license plate for the car.

Edited by Bikr7549, 29 November 2019 - 21:20.

[Vitesse2]

ARTE broadcast unfortunately not available in the US, but the longer one is. Thanks for posting. Interesting that they apparently had to get a Netherlands license plate for the car.

R prefix seems to indicate a temporary import, which would obviously be the case here - although the examples shown on this page don't include the NL Dutch international identifier.

 

http://www.dna.nl/nether05.htm

 

The French film actually highlights the fact that the car continued to carry its US plate as well as the Dutch one.

[robert dick]

The Stutz was owned by Wilbur H. Durborough, a well-known war photographer, member of the Newspaper Enterprise Association and of the corps of American correspondents with the German army at the Berlin headquarters. The Stutz was shipped to Europe via Rotterdam.
It seems that Durborough's trip through Germany to the firing line of the East front was backed by Stutz and Firestone.