News Summary

Few now remember "The Famine-Flighting Fleet" of 10 International Harvester trucks that traveled from Beirut to Bagdad, then on to Teheran on a 1925 humanitarian mission.

But the tale is preserved on a poster in the archives of Mc-Cormick-International Harvester Collection at the Wisconsin State Historical Society. And the truck shown on that poster resembles two in the collection Clark County Historical Society, one recently refurbished.

The story began "when famine threatened Teheran ... last winter, (and) the Persian administration ordered its first 10 heavy-duty trucks from the International Harvester organization," according to the poster, which also was used as an advertisement.

Putting a hold on orders from Europe, International gave the Persian-bound trucks a higher priority, and its world service department had the trucks dropped off at the Mediterranean port of Beirut, then a part of Syria.

There followed "a test of truck quality" on a trip of 1,350 miles "across trackless desert and over snowbound mountains," the poster said.

The trucks first spent 26 days in "axle deep mud and sand," the poster said. When their English, French Italian, Syrian, Arabian and Druse drivers arrived in Bagdad — which the ad described as the "ancient city of romance" — they were wildly cheered.

Replacing some of the cement they had hauled with motor fuel and wheat, the convoy, which was protected by British armored cars, continued on a seven-day, seven-night trip to Teheran. The drivers immediately unloaded and made the 200-mile round trip to Kasvin "bringing back great loads of the precious wheat."

The International Trucks' performance so impressed the Persian government it "immediately ordered 20 more of them," the poster said, "and these have since duplicated the travel history of the first fleet."

By 1925, International clearly had gone international.

Contact this reporter at (937) 328-0368 or tstafford@coxohio.com.

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