DAF TRUCKS since 1949

History of DAF – setting the wheels in motion

Hubertus Josephus van Doorne was clearly marked for 20th century greatness by being born on the very first day of the new century, January 1 1900, in America, a small village in Limburg, Holland. Despite his humble upbringing as the eldest son of the village blacksmith, he was destined to become one of the most imaginative vehicular engineers of the 20th century.

By the mid 1920s, having been turned down for employment at the Philips electrical company, Hub had worked his way up to foreman in the small engineering works of Sjef Mandigers in Eindhoven. This was where he came in contact with Mr Huenges, proprietor of the Coolen brewery and ice factory, who owned a splendid Stearns-Knight automobile with a sleeve valve engine. When the car developed an engine knock that the dealer could not cure, Hub proved to be the only person with the skills to fix it. Huenges was so impressed by Hub’s technical capabilities that on 1 April 1928 he offered Hub financial support to the tune of 10,000 Dutch guilders, to help him set up in business.

Combining Hub’s imaginative engineering talents with the commercial management skills of his younger sibling, Wilhelmus, the brothers opened a small engineering workshop known as Van Doorne’s Machinefabriek, producing ladder frames, ladders and metal cabinets in Eindhoven, in the south of Holland.

The van Doornes’ business began with four employees in a small workshop in a corner of the brewery. The business focused on welding, engineering and forging work, including repairs for the canal boats that called at Eindhoven. The combination of Hub and Wim’s complementary skills saw the business flourish, and the loan from Huenges was soon paid back.

Within a year the company had grown to the point where it employed 32 people, and two years later, now managed by Wim, it began manufacturing a range of commercial vehicle trailers and semi-trailers to take advantage of the fact that Holland was fast becoming one of Europe’s most prolific road transport nations.

An innovative automatic trailer coupling was patented by Hub in 1930, and a refined version was subsequently introduced in 1934. This coupling meant that the driver did not have to leave the cab to hitch up to a trailer, as vacuum and electrical lines were connected automatically, and the landing gear was raised hydraulically. In addition, the tractor unit did not need to couple in a straight line to the trailer, but could couple from any angle up to 90 degrees.

Following the success of the new trailer designs the company name was changed, in 1931, to Van Doorne’s Aanhangwagenfabriek NV (which translates to Van Doorne’s trailer factory). The name was too long and unwieldy for most customers, who just started referring to the company by its initials: DAF.

At the 1934 Amsterdam Show, Hub exhibited a new design of trailer that he had been perfecting the previous year. He called it the DAF featherweight trailer, and although it was no means as light as the name implied, it was estimated to be at least 40 percent lighter than other similar capacity trailers on the market. Not only did this produce useful payload and profit gains for hauliers, but it also provided cost-savings for the company, by virtue of using fewer raw materials to construct it.

DAF 5-ton trailer delivered in 1932. (Courtesy DAF Museum)

As a result, the featherweight was an instant success. Hauliers from all over northern Europe made the trip to the small factory at Eindhoven, seeking to improve the efficiency of their operations by using lightweight DAF trailers. Such was the demand for the new trailer designs that lightweight trailers of all shapes and sizes were now being built at the DAF workshop, and in a single year almost 400 large trailers were constructed. By 1935 the company was employing some 100 people, a number that would triple over the next five years.

However, despite the success of the DAF trailer business, both Hub and Wim had a secret desire to build a DAF motor vehicle – although with Europe flooded at the time by cheap mass-produced American imports, the brothers knew that competition would be fierce.

As word spread across Europe of the inventive genius of the van Doorne concern, Captain Van der Trappen, of the Dutch army artillery, approached Hub and asked if he could come up with a cheap, simple and reliable means of making light commercial vehicles more suitable for off-road travel. The Captain reasoned that should there be an outbreak of hostilities in Europe, large numbers of lightweight vehicles with off-road capabilities might be more effective than small numbers of specialised fighting vehicles.

The concept intrigued the van Doornes, and Hub set about designing a solution, which he called the ‘Trado drive’ (named as an amalgamation of Trappen and Doorne). This was a bogie arrangement, fitted in place of the axle hubs and brakes to create a double-drive unit. This enabled a 4x2 vehicle to be easily converted into a 6x4, and seemed to be an effective way of producing off-road vehicles during a period when there was insufficient funding from the Dutch armed forces to purchase the necessary all-wheel drive vehicles. As a result many army vehicles were retrofitted with the DAF Trado drive system.

Unfortunately, when hostilities did eventually break out, the sheer power and might of the aggressor proved that Van der Trappen had been right all along, but the authorities had waited too long to come to a decision to buy in large quantities. However, that’s another story ...

With the clouds of war forming over Europe in the late 1930s, the Dutch government negotiated the manufacture, under licence, of Humber armoured cars. DAF was asked to undertake the work, but Hub reckoned that he could come up with a more effective design.

The resulting DAF design, known as the M-39 armoured car, proved to be the most advanced of its kind in the world, and many of its principles were to be adopted years later in Soviet tanks. Inwardly, though, Hub was saddened that the first complete vehicle that DAF built should be used for war.

Trials of the M-39 proved so successful that Britain sought to build it under licence. However, the outbreak of war swiftly curtailed those plans, and in the end only some 20 were built in Holland before the country was overrun by invading German forces. Some M-39s were used to defend against the Germans, but the remaining vehicles were taken over and used initially for policing duties. Eventually they were sent into battle on the eastern front, and were subsequently destroyed by Russian forces.

The invasion of Holland effectively brought about the cessation of engineering work at the Eindhoven factory. Although the German aviation ministry in Berlin took control of the plant and drafted in pilot-engineer H Bröcker to run things, the DAF workforce adopted a policy of non-cooperation.

The company did build some steel hardware for tank defences, and the occasional trailer or portable building, as well as carrying out repairs on trucks and trailers under German supervision. But ultimately the Eindhoven workforce proved so unproductive that, thankfully, the allies never thought the factory important enough to warrant an air raid. However, DAF also cleverly used this time to develop two prototype trucks: the DT5, a five-ton chassis; and the DT10, a ten-ton chassis. Needless to say, this was a project that Bröcker took much interest in.

The DT5 was powered by a Burmeister & Wain diesel engine, while the DT10 acquired a Deutz unit. Parts for both were very hard to come by, and had to be sanctioned directly by Berlin. In fact, such were the shortages of components that the unit in the DT5 was one of a consignment that was meant to power generator sets destined for the German army.

Meanwhile, the van Doorne brothers