It was the middle of the Second World War. Soldiers came across a rusted-out jeep. It was destroyed, but there was still a shell-shocked corporal sitting in it. He was crying. They could not comfort him. They offered him another jeep, but he just cried and cried. “You don’t understand! I love this jeep!” he finally sobbed. They did not find the scene comical. Boys who fought on the bloody battlefields of the Second World War, whether allied or enemy, simply loved their jeeps. Their versatility and indestructibility literally took their breath away 75 years ago. Many even christened theirs. Predictably, almost all of them bore women’s names.
“My God, I don’t think we could have continued to fight without the Jeep. Do everything. It goes everywhere. It is as loyal as a dog, as strong as a mule and as agile as a goat”, the vehicle, which was designed for military use but has become a civilian icon, captivated war correspondent Ernie Pyle.
Someone else added: “A mule will often resist if it feels its leader is not using common sense, but a jeep will at least try.” For indeed, Jeep could do everything, “except bake a cake”, as someone else said.
Simply stunning
Almost everyone who has ridden in a jeep has had something to say about it, whether it was cruising at 95 kilometres per hour, crawling up a 40-degree hill, wading through mud, jumping over small ditches, negotiating raging torrents, riding on railway tracks and doing a whole bunch of other things that a jeep shouldn’t theoretically be able to do, but which the ingenious soldiers taught it to do.
Jeep history highlights its virtual indestructibility, even though the US military leadership initially thought it would not last more than a month and a half on the battlefield. “The jeep, the Dakota [aircraft] and the landing craft were the three tools that won the war,” General Dwight D. Eisenhower said after the war, placing the jeep in the triumvirate of victories in which there is not a single combat vehicle.
Although a jeep could also be that, when it was fitted with a machine gun and used to, for example, shoot at planes, or fitted with a mortar, as in Saipan, when the Japanese were shelling dug-in Japanese from jeeps.
Yet the jeep was essentially a reconnaissance vehicle, and so reliable that General Eugene Reybold remarked after the war: ‘In all my travels I have never met a jeep that didn’t work when you needed it’.
American correspondents Daniel DeLuca and Darrell Berrigan really needed theirs. When the Japanese occupied Mandalay in Burma in 1942, they escaped in a jeep and drove 2,000 kilometres to India.
When they arrived in Imphal and told their story, at least one person did not believe them. There are no roads where they say they were driving, he admitted, so they are lying. “Shhh. Not so loud. Our jeep hasn’t found out there are roads yet. Let’s keep it that way,” one of them reportedly replied.
Bill Mauldin’s Jepp knew the roads, having driven 16,000 kilometres on them in Italy and France, but he was fickle. The Jeanie, as the comic strip artist called it and also depicted it in his comics, was “the most neurotic jeep in Europe”, at least according to the mechanics who often held it in their hands.
But it was still infinitely resilient, despite the fact that, according to legend, it was built in just five days, after the French surrender in June 1940 had left Britain alone to fight the Nazis, and the United States of America had begun to prepare for battle, even though it did not formally enter the war until 7 December 1941, after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
They knew the battlefields of Europe from the First World War, and if they learned anything then, it was how devilishly difficult and impassable France, for example, is when it rains and the ground turns to mud. In the First World War, many carts got stuck in it, and many horses also fell victim to the mud and the torrents, so now they wanted a carriage that would stand up to all the trials and tribulations.
They weren’t barefoot in 1940, but it was crystal clear to them that their military trucks, while suitable for rough terrain, were too slow and too conspicuous.
Even the sidecar motorcycles, which did well during the First World War, could be faulted. They were faster than lorries, easier to move behind battle lines, relatively cheap and also quite powerful, as they could be fitted with machine guns, but unfortunately they were not allowed to carry too much weight and were not versatile enough for the needs of the day.
So they looked for something new, but by the start of the Second World War they had found nothing that convinced them.
The British were not so lucky, although Herbert Austin, a self-taught engineer who grew up on the Island, founded the Austin Motor Company in 1905 and brought his new car, barely one metre wide, to market in 1922. It was an unattractive name, but the Austin 7 was poison in a little bottle.
Soon it was being built in France, Japan and Germany, and American Austin was conquering the market across the channel. But in 1929, the Great Depression hit, there was no money for bread, let alone cars, and the American company went out of business, but not before the US Army tested their four-wheel-drive baby. They were not convinced.
No Churchill
The company was bought by Roy Evans and renamed American Bantam. He knew he couldn’t save the company by doing good work alone, so he tried to win the ever lucrative business with the US Army. He failed and was on the verge of collapse when, on 11 July 1940, the Army sent an invitation to 135 American companies with any connection to the car industry to enter a competition to choose the best design for a new military vehicle, which had to be …
There was a whole list of requirements that had to be met by those interested in taking part, such as four-wheel drive, a load capacity of 300 kilograms and a weight of no more than 600 kilograms, a folding front windscreen and a number of other technical requirements.
Certain things were changed later, such as the overall weight, which was raised to around 985 kilograms, but the Jeep as we know it today was tentatively envisioned by the US Army. Now all it needed was someone to translate all its requirements into reality. Only two applications were received, both from companies with a rich tradition but no money or production capacity: American Bantam and Willys.
Willys was immediately told that they were unable to produce 70 prototypes of the car within the unsustainably tight deadline of 49 days. They immediately dropped out. Bantam, which saw the army as a viable business option, did not complain about the short timeframe, even though it was nearly bankrupt by then.
After the Butler plant was closed and the development department disbanded, not a single engineer was left among the 15 remaining employees. They were faced with a problem: who would design their car?
Would the eminent Karl K. Probst do them a favour, even though they have nothing to pay him with and could only give him a percentage of the contract if they get it? No, they wouldn’t. Probst did not happen to be enthusiastic about cooperation either, but then he read Winston Churchill’s speech on BBC radio encouraging his fellow countrymen to fight the Nazis:
“We will go all the way. We will fight in France, we will fight on the seas and oceans. We will fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air. We will defend the Island, whatever the cost. We will fight on the coasts, we will fight on the plains, we will fight in the fields and on the roads, we will fight in the hills. We will never surrender.”
If the British won’t surrender, I won’t either, thought an inspired Prebst, already in his car. On the same night, 17 July 1940, he was on his way to Bantam’s headquarters.
There, he reportedly sat at a desk and drew up the “jeep” on paper in just five days. The Pilot, as it was called, although it was also called the Blitz Buggy and the BRC or Bantam Reconnaissance Car, won the competition, although it was unusual by military standards, to say the least.
But now the company had to make 70 prototypes and deliver them in 49 days, and they didn’t even have a factory to make them in. They saw no alternative but to buy almost all the parts for the vehicle. And they did, including the engine.
They were quickly assembled into a prototype. It was due at the Holabird test centre in Maryland on 21 September 1940. They decided to make the 270-kilometre journey there by road. They vowed to drive slowly so that the engine would run smoothly. “But as we wound our way over the hills of Pennsylvania, the fifth hour, that deadline we had been working towards for the past seven weeks, seemed to be getting closer and closer,” explained one of the participants, explaining why they suddenly started to press on the accelerator.
They soon drove the car to its “limits” and had endless fun, even though the clock was relentlessly chasing them. They reached their destination just 30 minutes before the deadline.
Who is the father of Jeep?
Major Herbert J. Lawes didn’t bother much with the four-wheeled stranger because he could immediately see that it would go down in history: ‘I have driven every vehicle bought by the army in the last 20 years. I can judge them in 15 minutes. This vehicle will be absolutely exceptional!”
But it is not quite the same as the one he knew. The military liked the prototype, but they were worried because the company was small and on the verge of collapse. Could it possibly make as many cars as they needed?
They carried out all the tests they could, then sent the prototype plans and the test results to Willys and Ford with a view to incorporating them into their plans.
Six weeks after the Bantam, or in November 1940, Willys launched its SUV, followed by Ford less than two weeks later. It had the best chance of winning, not because it was the best, but because it had the strongest production capacity.
In the end, however, the army liked the Willys prototype best. In July 1941, a contract was signed for the first 16,000 jeeps, each costing $738.74. But then the army got scared. Willys is small. Could it handle it? And what will happen if, for example, someone blows up the factory? Will they be left without cars?
No, they want a reserve. Willys was almost forced to give the licence to Ford to build the car, and Ford was forced to start building cars to Willys’ designs.
Bantam, who owns the basic plan for the jeep, is left without everything. It built 2,675 jeeps for the Russians and the British at the end of 1941, but then stopped production. During the war, it survived by making parts for torpedoes, planes and the like.
The mysterious jeep
Bantam had nothing more to do with the vehicle when it became part of history. Americans were first introduced to it in February 1941, when Willys staged a publicity launch of its prototype, the Willys Quad, in Washington.
Test driver Irving Red Hausmann drove it up and down the steps of the US Congress. Someone wanted to know what it was driving. While at the Holabird test centre, Hausmann casually overheard soldiers calling the car a jeep. Without thinking, he agreed: “Jeep.”
But Washington Daily News reporter Katherine Hillyer was standing nearby. She heard the remark and headlined her article with Jeep ascending the Capitol steps. It was the first mention of a Jeep in the media.
At the time, nobody wondered why it was a jeep and not something else, but since then they often have. In fact, when the car was mass-produced, it had two names, which today are known only to true fans of this four-wheeled wonder: the cars that came out of the Willys factory were called Willys MP, and the Fords that came through Ford’s gates were GPWs, with the W revealing that the licence was still a Willys.
But how did the two acronyms almost immediately turn into jeeps? One explanation goes back to the First World War. At the time, military mechanics would call every new car they could get their hands on a jeep, and over the next two decades, almost all military vehicles.
The fact that the name is not new at all is confirmed by the version that says that in Oklahoma, as early as 1934, the word “jeep” was used to describe a civilian truck equipped with special equipment for drilling oil wells.
Another, very widespread, version says that people have mispronounced the abbreviation GP, which stands for general purpose or general use. Since GP is pronounced jeeps, it could be a jeep or jeep.
The only problem is that the army never referred to the Willys MP or Ford GPW as GP, but the two vehicles, which were identical even though they came from two different factories, were originally called truck or four by four because they were four-wheel drive.
One of the more amusing explanations is that it was named after Popeye. In 1937, a new character, Eugene the Jeep, was introduced in the Popeye comic strip. This small but deceptively clever animal walked through cliffs, climbed trees, flew and wandered between time dimensions, and incidentally solved very complex problems. When the soldiers saw what their new four-wheeled pet could do, they immediately named it Jeep, according to this explanation.
The other is governmental: GP is actually a governmental abbreviation, where G stands for government and P stands for vehicle, with a wheelbase of 203 centimetres. The Jeep was 3.33 metres long, 1.58 metres wide, 1.83 metres high and weighed about one tonne.
And another explanation: if you take away all the trimmings and leave the Jeep “naked”, its basic shape is so ubiquitous that its name, Jeep, is really an abbreviation for the English phrase Just Enough Essential Parts.
All-round wonderful
But whatever his name and however simple he is, on the ground he was simply miraculous. It was a reconnaissance car that seemed to know no obstacles. It could have been a van when it was loaded to the top with supplies. Although it was built for three passengers and a machine shop, it could easily carry six soldiers around. When it was loaded with communications equipment, it easily became a mobile communications centre.
Often it was turned into a field hospital, as on the beaches of Normandy, or, with a little effort, it could be modified so that four stretchers could be loaded onto it.
He drove on all terrains when necessary, including railway tracks, when special wheels were made for him to ride on the tracks. Sometimes he pulled a train behind him, sometimes an aeroplane that had to be brought to safety on the catwalk, and if he was modified a little, he could also turn into a plough, pushing snow or rubbish in front of him.
With a little technical ingenuity, the soldiers have made it a versatile helper that has never failed, not even in combat. For example, the Nazi airfield near Sidi Heneisha in Egypt was attacked. “Like a pack of mechanised wolves”, 18 jeeps, each carrying four machine guns, crawled up a steep slope with 75 men and then, silently, with engines that could barely be heard, crept onto the airfield. They destroyed some 25 German planes and disappeared into the desert.
With the awning down and maybe the windscreen up, the Jeep was so small you could hardly see it, but it was still beautiful. The front end, the iconic nine-slot radiator grille, was given to the Jeep by Ford in 1942, because it was cheaper to make and required less material, but also to leave a little bit of a mark on the Jeep. Today, the Jeep – the off-road vehicle, not the original Jeep – has only seven slots.
After the war, when Willys won the rights to build a civilian jeep, it was not allowed to use the nine-slotted grille because Ford protected it, so it made seven. He protected his net even more than Ford protected his, and now nobody is allowed to have one like it.
But as cute as the Jeep’s face is, it has never been comfortable to drive. It could only be sat fully upright or mostly hunched over, and in either case it risked developing a pilonidal cyst, which field doctors labelled “jeep disease”.
A pilonidal cyst is caused by hair ingrowth into the subcutaneous tissue in the area of the occiput and sacrum. It is quite painful if infected and also dangerous and needs to be surgically removed or drained. As the procedure leaves an open wound, the condition can easily become complicated, especially on the battlefield where soldiers have not had eight weeks to recover and their wounds have not been consistently cleaned and dressed.
But that was a small price to pay for such a loyal companion as the Jeep. It was so desirable that stealing a jeep was one of the most common reasons for punishment. As soldiers often lost their keys, the ignition was simplified in 1943, but unfortunately, by no longer needing a key to start the car, theft was also simplified.
Anyone could jump in a lone jeep and ride it. To protect them, the boys took off the powerheads, but the thieves soon started taking them with them.
But nobody thought of theft when he was disembarking on the Normandy coast. Since D-Day began on 6 June 1944, the Allies have also landed 50,000 vehicles there, most of them jeeps.
But before that, they had to solve a problem: the combustion engine and water don’t go together. The Jeep had an internal combustion engine and could only reach the shore by water. The solution? It has to become waterproof.
They provided the exhaust and air hoses, coated all the electronic connectors and buttons with what is known as AWC, or asbestos waterproofing, and used wires, adhesive tapes and impregnated rubber tubes. If the job was done well, the jeep could run in water up to one metre deep for up to six minutes.
The Jeep was truly remarkable, and because it was, its imitators were close on its heels. Toyota AK made a duplicate of a Jeep confiscated in the Philippines for the Japanese Imperial Army. After the war, they called it the Toyota BJ and later the Land Cruiser, after which it was simply a Jeep, until they were forced to change the name because of copyright infringement.
The British didn’t make their Landrover until 1947, but Russian engineers were already ordered to build a lightweight reconnaissance car similar to the Jeep during the war. They got about 50,000 of these from the Americans because, under the Lend-Lease decree of 11 March 1941, the US President could help the Allies, such as Britain, the Soviet Union or China, with arms and other war supplies at any time, without expecting payment.
But this was not an expression of generosity. This aid meant that America’s interests were being looked after by another country and that Americans did not have to get deeper into the war or fight in other theatres.
By the end of the war, the Americans had built 660,703 Jeeps, but more than half of them had gone to the Allies. Willys built about 362,000 of them, or one every 80 seconds, as they say today. Ford made about 67,000 fewer. Willys continued production until 1981, when the army terminated the contract because it was attracted by the bigger and more powerful Humvees.
Today, only photographs remind us of a time when statesmen, from US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to Britain’s Queen Elizabeth, and generals such as Dwight D. Eisenhower and Douglas MacArthur, visited soldiers in jeeps. George S. Patton’s jeep was fitted with two brass horns to announce his arrival and a large red leather seat to make him more comfortable.
Jeep’s spoilt little brother
But neither was it comfortable to drive a car that symbolises romance and freedom, but also tragedy – the Lincoln Continental convertible, twenty years younger than the Jeep, but from the same father, since Ford built it fifty-five years ago.
The SS-100-X limousine in which US President John F. Kennedy and his wife Jackie drove slowly through the streets of Dallas on 22 September 1963 was modified to meet the requirements of the security services, but then modified at the President’s request. This is how it arrived at the scene of the assassination and this is how it arrived at the Henry Ford Museum.
John F. Kennedy’s life ended in a convertible at a time when, in America, a car with a retractable top symbolised the free spirit and the belief that one could achieve anything one set his mind to.
Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis believed that they would finally be able to breathe at the top of their lungs and break the shackles of everyday burdens when they sat in a blue 1966 Ford Thunderbird or T-bird in 1991’s Thelma and Louise. Instead of a journey towards self-fulfilment, they found themselves on the run from the police and ending up in the abyss, together with a sporty and sophisticated car, the first version of which Ford had already sent to market in 1954 to beat rival Chevrolet and its Corvette.
They were in a hurry. It was started in February 1953, completed in October 1954, and they were crossing their fingers that at least 10,000 new owners would take pity on it for not much money. Soon, supply could no longer keep up with demand and the convertible was developed intermittently for many years.
“The 2002 Thunderbird aims to capture the romanticism of the original and be forward-looking at the same time,” announced who knows which upgrade to the car that has become one of America’s most treasured classics. “This is not a car to be driven fast. It’s a car where the stress evaporates when you put the top down, crank up the Beatles or the Beach Boys, take a long, scenic drive and go back to a time when pleasures were much simpler than they are today,” they assured potential buyers, hoping to restore it to its former glory. This time they failed.
Just as the American Ben P. Ellrbeck, who conceived the first supposedly practical retractable car roof in 1922, was unable to realise his idea all those years ago. Production never took off, but manufacturers began to find a middle way between open cars, as they all were at first, and closed cars, which they slowly turned into until they completely overtook open cars. They lost market share, but not their appeal to those who could not resist their adventurous, daring and sporty spirit.
Prince William and his wife Kate set off towards a bright future in an Aston Martin convertible. Too romantic? While convertibles are most often associated with boldness and freedom, they are also often associated with romance.
The 1948 Ford deluxe is memorable for fans of the musical film Grease, in which Olivia Newton John and John Travolta portrayed a teenage couple falling in love in the late 1950s, or the golden days of American convertibles, when people just couldn’t resist them and sales rose steadily after World War II.
The sixties were also optimistic, but the first traces of doubts about the wisdom of spending so much money on a car that was not at all practical were beginning to appear on the horizon. When the oil crises hit drivers hard in the 1970s, it was clear that times were not good for indifferent pleasures. One by one, American manufacturers stopped making convertibles. Cadillac, confident in its destiny, predicted this year that its 1976 Eldorado would be the last convertible to be built in America.
Convertibles are not extinct. It took a long time, but the dark clouds finally parted and time brought new hope for a car for which the first automatic retractable roof was invented by Georges Paulin, a Parisian dentist of Jewish origin. But his convertible did not last long at Peugeot. After a year, they realised that the technical problems were simply too much, so in 1936 they switched from automatics to a manually lowered roof.
On 14 September 1927, as she sat in her rented convertible, the flamboyant dancer Isadora Duncan, adorned and warmed by a long rainbow scarf wrapped tightly around her neck as she strolled through the streets of Paris in the evening, wanted to get to her hotel as quickly as possible.
The driver took off. He did not detect anything special. For example, that the end of her scarf was caught in the rear wheel. Or that his passenger was no longer resting in the back seat of his car and was being dragged along the road, hanging by her scarf.
When he noticed something was wrong, she was dead. So were five women out of eleven who had similar unplanned shawl-sucking accidents. There were so many such accidents that doctors called it Isadora Duncan Syndrome. Fortunately, Dustin Hoffman escaped without a scratch when he “skated” in his father’s 1948 Buick in the 1988 film Rain Man.
It was an American film and it was an American producer, but by then the days of loyalty were slowly running out. By 1979, nine out of ten Americans had bought a car from a domestic manufacturer; by 2004, 60% owned a European or Asian car.
Today, the legendary Jeep, the great pride of the Americans, is also made by Europeans, specifically Italians. After the civilian jeep, which was launched with great success in 1946, came under the wing of Chrysler, it is now in the hands of Fiat.
