Are the lost Tatraplans of B.C. lying in waters off Victoria?
Legend has it a boatload of the odd Czech cars was dumped at sea
This machine kills fascists. That’s the legend, anyway. The Czech-built Tatra V8 was so fast, so beloved by the elite of the invading Nazi forces and so damned dangerous in the curves, that it killed more jackbooted SS officers than the bombs of the Allies (at least, that’s how the story goes, but no one seems to have the facts to back up the claim).
Gary Cullen, owner of the only known driving Tatra T87 in Canada, snaps the wheel to the left at low speed.
“You feel that?” the retired engineer says with a grin. “When I had the bias-ply tires on it, I learned how to slide it a bit.”
This spaceship-shaped 1948 specimen is worth something around $250,000.
I appear to have inadvertently stumbled into some kind of lost 1940s-era communist car-drifting subculture.
Maybe this thing snuffed out SS members and maybe it didn’t. There is, I remember reading, something similar spoken about the Messerschmitt BF 109s that the Czechs were forced to build; they put the landing gear struts a little closer together so the fighters flipped and crashed more often.
Whatever the case, it’s a different mystery that’s sent me to Cullen’s garage, a story that doesn’t involve the Nazis, but does echo with the results of their aggression. It’s a tale of Communism, the Red Scare, Senator Joe McCarthy and dozens of cars sleeping beneath the waves of B.C.’s Georgia Strait.
What happened to the lost Tatraplans of B.C.? That, too, is only rumour and legend, and the people who maybe once knew for sure are long gone now. What follows is what we do know.
When I first arrive at Cullen’s house in Tsawwassen, there’s a cheery little red Citroën 2CV parked out front. Simple, robust, relatively easy to repair, the 2CV may be thought of as the gateway drug to weird-car ownership. Most people who’ve bought one of these charming little people’s cars end up driving and enjoying them, but for a certain percentage of the population, it’s the entry point into full-blown motoring madness.
Cullen rolls up the garage door to reveal a Citroën DS hunkered down on its hydro-pneumatic suspension, a Tesla Model S, and the gleaming alloy air-car that is his Tatra T87. The garage walls are covered with shots of previously owned vehicles, and there are stacks of models and collectible vintage cameras. On one high shelf there’s a pair of commercial-grade cadmium lasers, and on the right-hand wall of the garage hang blownup photographs showing UFOlike Tatras navigating the wilds of the Yukon and the Dempster Highway.
Before Cullen had his T87, he had a Tatraplan, the stunning, teardrop shaped car built by the Czech company Tatra, and the garage has a few promotional posters of that car as well. He found the car in the possession of one John Minnie, an older gent living in North Burnaby who Gary describes as a sort of Italian communist. Minnie bought the Tatraplan — his very first new car — at the age of 41, and drove it for 41 years. Finally, age caught up with both car and man, and Cullen was able to convince Minnie to sell him the Tatraplan.
“But he wouldn’t sell it to me until we had it up and running again,” Cullen says.
Prior to this, Cullen had another Tatra T87, one that’s now sitting at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, classified as a sculpture. This is the big Tatra legacy: it would influence many cars, to the point that the equally wild Tucker Torpedo is sometimes called an American Tatra. It and the smaller T97 “influenced” Ferdinand Porsche’s design of the Volkswagen Beetle so much that Porsche was successfully sued after the war for plagiarism.
Aerodynamically tested in a Zeppelin wind-tunnel and capable of running above 100 miles per hour on the Autobahn, the Tatra T87 would attract owners ranging from Field Marshal Erwin Rommel to author John Steinbeck.
It was an aristocratic machine, but in the postwar period, something more proletariat-friendly was needed.
Designed by Julius Mackerly, the Tatraplan married the principles of the Hans Ledwinka-designed T87 to a 1952-cc 52-horsepower air-cooled four-cylinder engine. To give it short shrift, it may be thought of as analogous to a four-door Beetle.
That stunning dorsal fin is smaller, the engine is smaller, and there are just two headlights, rather than the three on the T87. The Tatraplan might not have shocked and stunned the world the way the T87 did in 1936, but it is nonetheless a beautiful machine. According to an auction listing of a Vancouver-based car I found from six years ago, fewer than 170 of the 21,000 Tatraplans built from 1948 to 1951 were ever imported into North America. Values appear to be somewhere around half that of a T87, so it’s still quite a collectible machine.
Thus, resting on the sea floor some miles from the port of Victoria, there are between two and 10 million dollars worth of rare Czechoslovakian automotive oddities. How did they get there?
I first read the story of the lost B.C. Tatraplans in the pages of Greg Long’s novel, Found. Half fiction, half fact, the book leaves us wondering what’s real and what isn’t. Is there a lost V8-powered Traction Avant? Was a missing Jaguar D-type stolen during a factory fire? And what’s this about a barge-load of Skodas and Tatras being towed into the sea and dumped?
Greg and his brother John Long are childhood friends of Gary — there are pictures of them all together in Jay Leno’s garage and standing alongside Hans Ledwinka’s son Erich.
Greg and Gary first heard the tale from John Minnie, who claimed that one day a dockworker came up to his parked Tatraplan and boasted, “I haven’t seen one of those since we pushed them into the water in the 1950s!”
From old newspaper clippings gathered by Cullen, a story emerges. In exchange for shipments of wheat, and possibly as partial war reparations, a boatload of Tatraplans and Skodas left Antwerp, Holland, bound for Canada.
A headline in The Vancouver Sun, circa 1950, shouts “1,600 Czech Cars Coming,” further noting that, “a half-dozen of the vehicles were streamlined ‘Tatras’,” and, “other vessels are now at sea with 700 more.” Sheer optimism, I’m afraid. The Tatras arrived in 1950 into a new era of paranoia and suspicion. Senator Joe McCarthy stood up before the Republican Women’s Club of Wheeling, Va., waving a piece of paper and claiming that the State Department was infested with communists. The Soviet Union had The Bomb. Klaus Fuchs had just confessed to conveying secrets from the Manhattan Project to the Soviets. Everyone was willing to see a Red threat anywhere.
Tatras and Skodas alike were vandalized in the streets, threatening notes left under their windscreen wipers. In Victoria they were to be sold by Shorters Electric, a refrigerator company, and in Vancouver by Campbell Motors on Kingsway, but there were few takers. Eventually, they were marked for a watery grave.
Some years ago, Cullen was approached by a stranger while sitting in his T87.
“That looks just like the cars we towed out and dumped!” the man exclaimed, possibly confirming Minnie’s story. Gary quizzed him for details, but all these decades later, the tug worker didn’t remember.
How many are out there beneath the waves? Nobody seems to know: could be six, could be 50. Moreover, knowing they were about to be thrown away, how many of these machines might have been squirrelled away and forgotten? How many were tucked away in garages by owners terrified of the reception their teardropshaped machines were getting?
It’s a mystery, but the lost Tatraplans are out there, somewhere. The Victoria car that once belonged to John Long now sits at the incredible Lane Motor Museum in Nashville, Tenn., alongside oddities such as the propeller-powered 1932 Helicron and a replica of the rear-steering Buckminster Dymaxion.
It’s good that such a piece of history is preserved, but I almost prefer them missing, hidden away like buried treasure. Like all legends and rumours, sometimes the truth isn’t as important as the layers of myth and hearsay that surround it.
The lost Tatraplans of B.C. are out there somewhere, waiting to be discovered.