For sale: 1 2S7 “Pion,” a Soviet-produced 51-ton self-propelled artillery gun with a 203-mm cannon capable of lobbing a conventional explosive shell 23 miles or, when factors get really nasty, a tactical nuke nearly 19 miles. Parking this 43-foot-lengthy Cold War monster on the front lawn is confident to quell any disputes with the neighbors, although you will almost certainly have to make up new “This house protected by” stickers for the windows. Value? Someplace amongst $ 150,000 and $ 175,000, the sellers figure, based on how a lot of Second Amendment extremists want this point.
The large Pion, along with 120 other war automobiles collected more than 30 years by the late San Francisco Bay–area military maven, Jacques Littlefield, is going more than the auction block (figuratively, not actually) this weekend throughout a liquidation of the collection of the Military Automobile Technology Foundation in high-class Portola Valley, just south of San Francisco. Staged by Auctions America, the event’s bidding begins at 11:00 a.m. neighborhood time these days, Friday, July 11, but we got a likelihood to scramble about on leading of and inside a handful of of the cars ahead of the gavel comes down.
West German Leopard 1A1A4
Walking through the cavernous storage sheds exactly where the vehicles are parked nose-to-turret is a trip into the bizarre thinking that mechanized war created over the previous century as each and every side struggled to gain advantage. Although some vehicles, such as the 47-ton West German Leopard 1A1A4 main battle tank (pictured above), have a particular sleek beauty to them, most are constructed purely to the aesthetics of their function inside an attacking army.
For example, the M48A5 AVLB (armored vehicle launched bridge) under is fundamentally a tank carrying 2 halves of a folded road deck. It does not shoot anything or look especially attractive, and it can not on its own win a battle, except perhaps against potholes. Its primary promoting point is that the bridge sections deploy automatically, so that the crew does not have to leave the safety of the tank for the duration of a nuclear or biological attack. But the auction catalog estimates it could bring up to $ 125,000, which works out to about $ 1.00 per pound. You can just imagine what the neighbors will feel if you park that on your lawn.
U.S. M48A5 Armored Automobile-Launched Bridge
“Jacques by no means saw anything that was green and had tracks that he didn’t want to acquire,” says Rob Collings, executive director of the Massachusetts-primarily based Collings Foundation, which took handle of the collection following Littlefield’s death and is organizing the sale. “He also had a passion for the technology and the history.”
An amazing assortment of tracked and wheeled cars from about the world—including 6 automobiles with still-active guns that must be registered with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms—plus many sheds complete of components and spare engines, the Littlefield Collection is a 1 of a kind. It occupies 450 acres of a lush mountaintop preserve in the hills behind Stanford University with spectacular views of the San Francisco Bay. That alone tends to make this sale a bit of an oddity, as it is an exclusive address reached by a narrow, winding road that runs previous the gated entrances to the private estates of tech bazillionaires. No one is really confident how Littlefield, a descendent of the founders of the Utah Building Company, a massive public works contractor that, amongst other issues, helped develop the Hoover Dam, managed to get all this military hardware up the hill. But now that it’s becoming sold, obtaining it down is thorny issue.
U.K. FV214 “Conqueror” Heavy Tank
The auction has contracted with a single neighborhood heavy-equipment mover to take all purchases down the hill to a storage lot, from which they can be collected by any shipper of your choosing. If you get, say, the auction’s heaviest item, the 73-ton British FV214 “Conqueror” tank shown above, it’ll run $ 7920 just to get it down the hill to the holding lot, despite the fact that the charge involves a couple months of storage. Following that, figure up to $ 22 per mile of shipping charges, plus a $ 600 unique-use permit, plus wide-load escort fees, and so on.
Collings, who has overseen the selection and shipping of 83 automobiles from the collection that will stay with the Foundation in a new facility in Massachusetts, says it’s worth it. “The most overused word I hear at auctions is ‘important.’ Let me inform you, these automobiles are important. They stormed the beaches of Normandy, they liberated Europe, and they fought the Cold War.”
Aaron Robinson in the M561 Gama Goat
In the course of our go to, we had the chance to putter around the property in 1 vehicle for sale, the fabulously named M561 Gama Goat, a U.S. Army 6-wheel-drive cargo hauler from the 1960s that was at some point replaced by the Humvee. Common of military automobiles, it has zero creature comforts beyond padding for the seats. The 160-cubic-inch Detroit Diesel inline-3 behind the cockpit wouldn’t be louder if it was running in your lap, and the steering (which also articulates the wheels of the trailer, hook-and-ladder style) requires enormous effort. At 13 mph in third gear, the Goat is approaching a comfy cruising speed, although they can supposedly run at up to 50 mph. The auction catalog estimates a sale price of $ 10,000–$ 15,000, plus a $ 660 mountaintop-removal fee.
Globe War II German Panther A
Then we got a peek at the autos the Collings Foundation is maintaining. One particular glance and you see why the items have been chosen. Even though there are many pristine Sherman tanks plus Soviet WWII-era T-34s and other autos significant to warfare from World War I up to Vietnam, the headliners are 3 ultra-rare Third Reich panzers, such as 1 of Hitler’s earliest tanks, a Stug III mobile gun, and a freshly restored Panther A, the latter nonetheless operating its original Maybach gasoline V-12 and stated to be worth $ 10 million. Rescued from a river in Poland where it was destroyed in the course of the latter days of the war, it was hauled to the mountaintop in pieces and painstakingly place back together. Littlefield died just days following seeing the tank’s completion. Painted in characteristic brown-and-olive camo of the Panzer Kampfgruppes fighting on the Russian front, and coated with the suitable “zimmerit” rippled finish, a non-metallic applique utilized as a hedge against magnetic mines, it is a brooding icon of Third Reich evil.
The auction, a rarity for both its size and quantity of coveted pieces, has been broadly ballyhooed on military car sites for months. Collectors from about the globe are converging, and the benefits, which are anticipated to prove a surge in rates for military autos, will be closely watched.
“There are a lot of billionaires on the bidders list, a single king, and a former governor of California,” says Collings, who declined to be certain. He says a lot of wealthy auto collectors are becoming drawn into the hobby by the possibility to personal a war artifact. “If you have got a bunch of costly vintage cars in your garage and you inform somebody you have also got a Sherman tank, they’re going to want to see the tank.”
Littlefield Collection Auction
July 11–12, 2014
Military Vehicle Technology Foundation
499 Old Spanish Trail
Portola Valley, California 94028-81233
Gates open at 9:00 a.m. every day.
Bidders pass: $ 25
Rolling Out the Big Guns: Giant Littlefield Military Car Collection Heads to Sale [w/ Gallery]
