It's been a long, long time since I extracted vehicles using chains, all the way back to my drilling days. We did use old tires a lot, as a rubber band connecting two lengths of chain, and as "catchers" in lieu of heavy canvas tarps, but that was the extent of our "safety equipment". Before those days, my college buddy put a chain into the windshield of his new 1973 K-5 Blazer while trying to snatch a blown down tree off of a trail in the Blue Ridge Mountains of NC.
With that experience, it astounds me to see the modern day truck sales ads showing chains in use to drag logs and pull stumps. It's been a short while since I've seen one, but that might be because I rarely watch TV. You'd think the manufacturers liability lawyers would have put the kibosh on that silliness long ago.
My dad and I once encountered a towing operation as we traveled down a paved NC rural highway, circa late 1960s. The chain-through-pipe rig was in use and I remember Dad saying "Those guys know what they're doing".
Probably the greatest success story in the annals of towing a disabled vehicle with a chain occurred in 1940 in the Libyan desert. The British recon outfit known as the Long Range Desert Group (LRDG) ran 2WD Chevy pickups heavily laden with fuel, water, food, and ammunition. On a raid over 1,000 miles from their Cairo base, one truck kept snapping half-shafts. Maybe a bent axle tube? They went through all of their spares so with 900 miles yet to go they hooked up the towing chain and towed the disabled truck all the way back to base, starting near the Chad-Libya border and thus crossing parts of Libya, Sudan, and Egypt's Western Desert. The Brits, Kiwis, and Rhodesians in the LRDG were the real deal.
Foy
