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Got Snippy out of bed and we're about to leave, gonna see if I can finagle a ride on this Stuart from Mr. Greenberg.

Big tanks for the memories Armored vehicles, including one owned by Steve Greenberg of Wilsonville, go on display in Clackamas this weekend

Saturday, May 15, 2004

The next time you're crawling along a clogged rush-hour freeway, think how things might've been different had Steve Greenberg tossed you the keys to his M3A1 Stuart light tank.

Not that it has keys to toss, nor is it, at 14 tons or so, what most of us think of as light. But there's no doubt that a Stuart tank would be the ticket for forging through traffic.

"They'll get up to 35 or 40 miles per hour," Greenberg shouted over the rattle and rumble of its Continental 7-cylinder radial engine. "I've had it on the road once or twice and it's fun -- I've driven it up Broadway a couple of times."

Both times during sanctioned parades, we should quickly note.

Greenberg lives in Wilsonville where he runs a tree service, but his tank is on loan to the Oregon Military Museum at Camp Withycombe in Clackamas. For which his neighbors are probably just as glad, although were I an evildoer, I know that one of my main criteria in choosing future sites of evildoing would be the absence of armored vehicles.

The upside is that Greenberg won't have to bug his buddy with the flatbed to help move the tank out to the museum for Saturday's 7th Annual Living History Day.

The early-WWII era Stuart will line up with a later M4 Sherman tank, an M18 Hellcat tank destroyer and the army's current main battle tank, the M1 Abrams. "They're all bigger than my tank," says Greenberg, "but the M1 dwarfs it -- it weighs about 100,000 pounds more than mine."

Entirely unsuitable for heavy traffic, plus the mileage is atrocious -- three gallons to the mile, which makes the Stuart's mile-and-a-half to the gallon seem like hummingbird sips. But it's not all beer and skittles aboard the Stuart.

"It's a five-speed transmission and it's hard to shift," he says, pointing to a large lever that sprouts near his right shoulder. The later M5A1 Stuart had twin Caddy V-8s and an automatic transmission. Luxury, indeed.

But neither was roomy -- four guys somehow wormed into a space where machinery intrudes on every side. At tune-up time, there are 14 spark plugs to change and one expert advises hoisting out the engine to reach the inner row. And that long crank handle bolted to the back fender is for turning the engine -- all 670 cubic inches of it -- before starting from cold, so oil trapped in the lower cylinders doesn't bend a rod.

But what the heck. Greenberg has his own tank, and how many people can say that? And it arrived on his doorstep mostly correct and complete, which is something that Staff Sgt. Mark Stevens can't say about the Oregon Military Museum's Type 95 Japanese tank.

Stevens led us on a tour of the building where his National Guard crew maintains and restores old military vehicles such as the 1918 Liberty Truck, much of which they built by scaling from photos. The Japanese tank will be a bigger job: for years, it had been a target on a Nevada bombing range and is rusted, twisted and gutted, with its engine in the next room and no turret or upper deck visible.

"We got two of 'em," says Stevens, "One was quite a bit better than the other -- this is the good one."