Forklifts in the military 1930's

[tigercat]

What if the British Military in say 1935 agreed on pallet standardisation and started acquiring fork lifts for use in their storage facilities and warehouses

Military Logistics - A History Of Pallets During World War 2: A Call To Action

While the techniques of palletized handling had begun to take shape during the 1930s, the practice was not yet widely used in commerce. There had been little impetus for more widespread introduction of palletized handling with forklift trucks. The surplus of labor in the work force, in...

packagingrevolution.net

 

[marathag]

smaller, sturdier crates strapped to pallets won't be appreciated by Stevedore/Docker/Longshoreman, but they will find away to damage them 'accidentally' to get at the contents anyway

 

[Driftless]

The form of the forklift truck also depends on the surface they will normally operate on. Fork trucks operating on nice flat concreate warehouse floors typically back then and now had narrow diameter hard rubber tires on steel rims with no shock-absorbing suspension - that's efficient on a smooth surface, but your teeth will get jarred out if you run over a coin. (Ok, a bit of hyperbole there....) If they're going to be used on any rough or soft surface, then you've got to make some hard choice on suspension and how much float the tires need to have. Even rubbled streets or Marston PSP mats need bigger diameter rims or a suspension to work.

Old school, your probably looking at some kind of powered winch to raise and lower the forks? Nowadays, they're mostly hydraulic pistons.

All doable on a large scale, it just wouldn't have been one-size-fits-all