I was watching a video on Dunkirk and was told that soldiers would run truck engines dry to cause them seize and rendering them useless to the Germans. What is an engine seize? Can those engines be salvaged? Or would the Germans in this scenario know it’s hopeless and scrap the engine completely?
In: Technology
A seized engine is an engine which does not turn over any more. Even if you try hand cranking them or bump starting them the engine will not physically be able to turn.
In an engine there is a lot of metal components moving against each other with a thin film of oil between them to slide on. But if you remove the oil from the engine the metal will just scrape against each other “dry”. This will make a lot of heat and scrape up the metal. The heat weakens the metal causing even more damage and may also warp it. The end result is often that the metal pieces in the engine which is supposed to be a tight fit is now crashing into each other and the engine does not turn over.
If this happens to your car and you notice the oil pressure light turn on and immediately pull over and stop then you might not have damaged any components at all. And even if you did some damage it is possible to swap out those components of the engine and it will be good to go. And in the late 30s swapping engine components were a regular maintenance task so these components would have been readily available. The problem was that most of them were back in the UK as German and French cars were built with different engines then the British cars. In addition the cars were run dry as long as possible which would have likely damaged a lot of the internal components. They might even have damaged the engine block which is the biggest component of the engine. At that point it is cheaper to just get a new complete engine then to replace most of the components of the old one. In any case it would have been a lot of work for the mechanics. So I doubt any of the trucks that were run dry and left on the beach would have ever been operational again. They might have been used for spares to help maintain the trucks that were abandoned intact. It is also possible that some Belgian farmers would get a hold of a few of the trucks and spent a good amount of their spare time getting one of them working again.
Latest Answers