After the war there were plans to restart production, building two hundred vehicles for Dutch reconnaissance units and perhaps a number for Belgium, but eventually it was decided to use light tanks for this role instead.
[1] Although officially the Netherlands adhered to a policy of the strictest neutrality, it was hoped that by secret negotiations it could be arranged that the British would send an expeditionary force in case of a German attack and that some communality of equipment would facilitate such future cooperation.
The Trado, named after themselves (Trappen — Doorne), consisted of a leaf-springed bogie with two actuated road wheels that could be easily attached to, driven by and rotate on the back axis of any commercial truck, thus adding a "walking beam" to the vehicle that significantly improved its cross-country performance.
In February 1936 they submitted a design of a double-ended small 6 x 4 armoured car/half-track, with a transversely mounted engine[2] and a crew of four, to the Commissie Pantserautomobielen, the army commission tasked with selecting possible candidates.
Meanwhile Van der Trappen himself had defended his proposal by writing an article in the authoritative Dutch military magazine De Militaire Spectator, claiming it was much more modern, especially more compact, than the Swedish Landsverk types.
The claim to superiority to British design had been based on the use of a welded monocoque construction combined with a consistent use of the sloped armour principle, which was predicted to lead to a much improved weight efficiency.
Also an extremely flat, eighty centimetres high, one-man armoured car was designed, armed with a single machine-gun in the hull, on the lines of certain British tankette-types from the 1920s.
The design was intended to use the Swedish Landsverk turret as there was no Dutch manufacturer capable of producing light guns in the 25 – 40 mm range and it would be more efficient to have a single armoured car gunnery training programme.
Whereas the M36 was incapable of crossing ditches, would get itself stuck on dry sand roads and had great trouble climbing steep slopes, the Pantrado 3 effortlessly overcame these obstacles.
After the favourable report was received by him in September, the minister of defence in November ordered the Ordnance Department to conclude a final contract with DAF, reaching an agreement on the desired changes.
Later in May twelve turrets were ordered from AB Landsverk for a total price of 218,400 Swedish Krona via the official intermediary of this company in The Netherlands, the NV Rollo, based in The Hague.
However, they had not yet been fitted with any armament because the Ordnance Department had decided to produce the needed 37 mm cannon itself in its arsenal, under a licence obtained from Bofors in June 1937 to equip the earlier M38, and manufacture had met with some serious delays.
Though the DAF M39 was primarily intended as a reconnaissance vehicle, the Dutch Army was painfully aware it lacked any heavier armour to back it up, so an armament had been chosen with an adequate antitank-capacity for the period.
Each driver had a rectangular hatch in front of him, that could hinge upwards to provide an unimpeded view of the road; due to the short nose there were no dead angles in his field of vision.
In the summer of 1939, the Inspector of Cavalry and Bicycle Forces rejected this plan because the hussar regiments lacked the technical support to ensure a successful introduction of the new and advanced type.
For this purpose it prepared a special DAF M39 manual, creating a first draught, the Ontwerp Beschrijving van de Pantserwagen M. 39, the final version of which however, would not be ready in time to be published.
Also the old Bison and Buffel armoured cars were used, that in 1932 had been built by the Ordnance Department on the chassis of Morris trucks to assist the security forces in suppressing riots during the Great Depression.
When the Battle of the Netherlands started on 10 May 1940, of the twelve vehicles manufactured, four were in Eindhoven with DAF, eight at Delft; of the last, two were still lacking their main armament and none were fully completed, though some had been equipped with machine-guns.
The German attempt to seize The Hague failed, partly because Landsverk armoured cars destroyed many Ju 52 transport planes and thereby blocked the runway of the main city airfield, Ypenburg.
As a result the next waves of planes landed on meadows and roads, dispersing the airborne troops into many small groups which, unable to be reinforced, in the following days tried to break out towards Rotterdam, the southern part of which city was firmly in German hands.
Finally arriving in Delft, two of the armoured cars were in the late afternoon ordered to support an advance of some depot companies to the south, in the direction of Rotterdam, that soon was blocked by enemy fire.
In the same evening of 10 May the third car, III-2203, that experimentally had been fitted with bulletproof Michelin tyres, positioned itself on the southern edge of Delft, without making enemy contact, but in vain trying to shoot down a low-flying German aircraft with the main gun.
Now responding with its main gun and hull machine-gun the M39 forced the Germans to take cover, but the gunner suddenly reported: "I am wounded" and sagged bleeding to the floor of the fighting compartment.
In the morning Wim van Doorne, the brother of Hub, phoned the military authorities in The Hague to remind them of this fact, because the German invaders might soon overrun the area.
The latter asked DAF to drive the cars to Vught, where they were transferred to the 4e Compagnie Korps Motordienst, a motorisation unit of his main force, the Peeldivisie, that would remain in the province.
On this occasion the steering mechanism was reinforced and radio sets were fitted, using very high and large antennae of the "bed frame" type, attached to the turret roof.
Lieutenant-Colonel Piet van der Trappen and Major P. Scheper would make a study trip to the Indies to investigate the local conditions to prepare a tropicalised version.
Apparently, no vehicles used by the Germans survived the war; an inquiry in the late nineties by the Dutch authorities with the Russian Kubinka Tank Museum, whether it had any knowledge of still existing exemplars, proved fruitless.
Its directorate that year successfully requested the German Industrie-Beauftragte des Oberkommandos der Wehrmacht to be allowed to add this car to the collection of a planned heavy equipment display of the Dutch Army Museum.
Later historian John Bom doubted this identification however, because he considered it unlikely the Germans would abandon a battle-worthy vehicle, assuming instead it was the original DAF prototype, which could not be operationally used as it was made of boiler plate.