Willys Overland
Officially it was known by the US Army as the Truck, ¼ Ton, 4X4. Unofficially, and to the entire world, it was and is known as the Jeep. When the army decided in the late 1930s that it needed a light four wheel drive general purpose vehicle it fell back on World War 1 experience to identify what it did and did not want in the new model. After evaluating several off-the-shelf models, as it were, produced by American and British manufacturers, the Army created a list of specifications for the new vehicle which it delivered to over 100 American manufacturers in the summer of 1940. The Army demanded a prototype in 49 days, and 70 complete vehicles for evaluation in 75 days.
The procurement requirements were strenuous, but the technical requirements were even more daunting. Most manufacturers, convinced that the United States would stay out of the war then underway in Europe, declined to shift attention from the consumer market to a limited Army contract. Only two, Willys-Overland and American Bantam submitted bids; they were later joined by Ford. Bantam won the initial contract but proved unable to deliver the required evaluation models in time, and both Ford and Willys-Overland won contracts to build similar vehicles. Eventually the best features of all three vehicles were combined into one design, with both Ford and Willys-Overland building the vehicles.
The little car was an immediate hit with the troops to which it was assigned, able to go almost anywhere, across any terrain, reliably and with relative speed. Willys-Overland arranged a press day with a Jeep climbing the steps of the Capitol in Washington, but the military didn’t need any hard sell. The Jeep was universally popular and served on all fronts where the Americans fought during the war and some in which they didn’t. More than 50,000 were used by the Soviet army on the Eastern front, where its reliability in all types of weather and road conditions led the Soviets to reverse engineer their own version.
Throughout the war Jeeps were used as reconnaissance vehicles, transportation for officers and personnel, ambulances, assault vehicles, radio cars, command vehicles, and virtually every other type of wheeled transport. By war’s end they were a recognizable symbol of the United States Army, even without their distinctive olive drab paint and circled white star.
More than 600,000 of the little cars were produced by Ford and Willys-Overland over the course of the war. After the war Willys-Overland continued to produce Jeeps for the military and for civilian sales. The CJ designation for today’s vehicles is short for Civilian Jeep. But Jeep itself is not a slurring of the initials GP, for General Purpose vehicle, as is commonly believed. The Jeep got its name from the GIs who loved it from the first, naming it for Eugene the Jeep, a character in the popular Popeye cartoons who could do just about anything.