Last month, we admired a 1965 Ford Fairlane 500 US Army staff car in a car graveyard near Denver, Colorado. That car wasn’t the only one of Uncle Sam’s 1965 vehicle purchases to be found at that establishment, however. Today’s Junkyard Treasure is a 3/4-ton D-Series pickup that Chrysler sold to the Pentagon at around the same time as the Ford sedan.
This truck really is a W-200, because it’s a four-wheel-drive 3/4-ton model, but Chrysler’s build tag as well as the Army’s property tag on the glovebox lid refer to it as a D-200 and that’s the nomenclature I’m going to use here.
Fort Carson, located about an hour south of this yard, is the most likely place for this truck to have served its country. Since most of the Army’s vehicle records were destroyed in an early-1970s fire, there’s no easy way to check the history 0f a specific vehicle.
Once the Army was done with this truck, it was auctioned off and began its civilian career. Unlike the Fairlane staff car nearby, this Dodge kept working hard for decades. How many hundreds of thousands of miles did it travel, and how many tons of cargo did it haul?
The engine is some member of the Chrysler LA small-block V8 family. A 273-cubic-inch version was available as an option in the 1965 D-Series, but Detroit trucks of this era get so many engine swaps that we’re likely looking at the third or fourth engine to reside in this engine compartment. The transmission is a four-speed manual.
Colorado Auto & Parts placed better than 100 vehicles from the 1920-1975 period in the regular self-service inventory last summer, and this truck includes part of a bonus Dodge Brothers car in its bed. There’s not much to go by when determining year, make and model here, but the disc wheels suggest 1922 or later manufacture. The rear suspension and body shape seem to be from a pre-1924 Dodge Brothers sedan, so I’m calling it a 1922 or 1923.
1965 Dodge D-200 U.S. Army Truck in Colorado Junkyard
