K-50 truck

The K-50 telephone repair trucks were used by the US Army Signal Corps during and after World War II for installing and repairing hard telephone lines, primarily in territories liberated from Nazi Germany by the Allied forces. The Signal Corps needed a light telephone repair truck at the start of the war and contracted first with GMC-Chevrolet and later with Dodge and Fargo for truck chassis carrying a standard American Telephone and Telegraph tool box bed. The original bed followed the Streamline Moderne motif of the 1930s, and the second style, the K-50B, was a plainer square box with the ladder on top. The first 82 trucks were GMC-Chevrolet half-ton rear-wheel-drive units, and every later truck was a half-ton or three-quarter-ton Dodge or Fargo, almost all four-wheel drive. All were eventually replaced by the Dodge M37 series V-41 trucks.