M75 armored personnel carrier

The M75 was a large, fully tracked armored personnel carrier of the early 1950s, built to replace the open-topped 17.5-ton M39 and the much larger M44, which rivalled a city bus in size. Earlier boxed infantry carriers had been adapted from cargo tractor chassis, while the M75 was a costly purpose-built carrier. It weighed 18.8 tons, or 41,500 pounds fully loaded, and carried twelve men: ten infantrymen, the commander and the driver. Its welded steel hull formed a box-like passenger compartment giving all-round protection, and it was powered by an air-cooled six cylinder horizontally opposed Continental AO-500-4 petrol engine with a CD-500-4 cross-drive transmission. International Harvester developed and built it, with FMC brought into production later, and 1,729 vehicles were made by February 1954, when production ended because each cost about 100,000 dollars. A small number were deployed to Korea in the summer of 1953 and used in the last stages of the fighting there, and its expense led to a cheaper successor being sought.