What German Officers Said About the American Jeep That Their Industry Could Never Match D
It was the first week of September 1944 on a narrow paved road outside the town of Mons in southern Belgium and a Wehrmacht major named Heinrich von Dietz stood next to his disabled Kubelwagen at the edge of a ditch and watched for the fourth time in less than half an hour an American Jeep climb out of the same ditch on the opposite shoulder of the road.
The ditch was perhaps a meter and a half deep with a near vertical inner wall of wet clay and von Dietz had spent the previous afternoon attempting with the help of his driver and two infantrymen pressed into service from a passing supply column to extract his own staff car from a softer section of the same ditch into which he had reversed at speed during a misjudged maneuver in the dark.
The Kubelwagen, the four-wheeled open-topped command car built on a Volkswagen chassis that the German army had used as its primary light military vehicle since 1939 had not climbed out. It had spun its rear wheels. It had broken its rear axle. It had been in the end towed to a divisional motor pool by a Hanomag half-track that had passed by chance on its way to the front and von Dietz had been left waiting on the shoulder for the better part of a day for any kind of transport that would carry him to his new posting at the headquarters of the Fifth Panzer Army farther north. The Americans had captured the road late that morning. Von Dietz, by the standards of an officer of the greater German Wehrmacht in September of 1944, had been treated with reasonable courtesy. He had been disarmed, searched, told to
sit on the bank of the ditch, and informed that an American military police escort would arrive to take him to a prisoner cage at some point in the next few hours. He had sat. He had watched the American column move past, and he had counted with the slow professional attention of a German staff officer who was beginning to understand that the war he had fought for 5 years was ending in ways that no one in his army had prepared for, the number of American jeeps that passed him on the road.
He counted between approximately 11:00 in the morning and 3:00 in the afternoon, slightly more than 400 jeeps. Some were driven by single soldiers carrying dispatches. Some carried four men with their personal weapons. Some pulled trailers full of mortar ammunition. Some had pedestal-mounted machine guns and crews of three or four.
Some were ambulances with the Red Cross painted on white panels above the rear axle and stretchers projecting from the back. Some were command vehicles with maps spread across the hoods and field telephones running cables out of the back. Some were laying telephone wire from spools mounted on the rear, paying out cable along the shoulder of the road as they moved.
He watched the jeeps cross the ditch where it ran across a side road at speeds that struck him as physically impossible for a vehicle of that size. The jeeps did not slow down. They did not approach the ditch at a careful angle. They drove into the ditch at 30 or 40 km/h, climbed the far wall, and emerged on the other side without losing momentum.
He watched a single jeep driven by a soldier who appeared to be no more than 19 years old descend the ditch wall, traverse the bottom, climb the opposite wall, and accelerate down the side road at the same rate of speed he himself had been unable the previous afternoon to achieve in reverse on flat pavement with three men pushing his own car.
He thought sitting on the bank with his back against the trunk of a poplar tree that the war had been decided not by armies but by vehicles and that the vehicle that had decided it was not the heavy tank or the medium or any of the weapons that the pre-war German General Staff had spent the 1930s studying but the small open-topped four-wheel drive utility vehicle weighing approximately 1200 kg and producing approximately 60 horsepower that the Americans had managed in some way that he did not yet understand to manufacture in such quantities that they could afford to drive it into ditches at speed and across plowed fields and up the embankments of railway lines and through forests and to lose perhaps 10 or 15% of them across the campaign to attrition and breakdowns and combat damage without the
loss being in any way visible in the volume of Jeeps that continued to move forward on every road in front of him. He was looking sitting on that bank in September of 1944 at one of the four pieces of equipment that General Dwight Eisenhower would later identify in conversations with the journalists who interviewed him after the war as the four tools that had won the Allied victory in Europe.
The four tools in Eisenhower’s listing were the bulldozer, the two and a half ton truck, the C-47 transport aircraft, and the Jeep. The list is interesting on its face for what it omits. the list omits the M1 Garand rifle, the proximity fuse, the Sherman tank, the B-17 bomber, and the radar set, and every other weapon that the conventional histories of the war place at the center of the American military effort.
The list consists entirely of vehicles. The list consists, more precisely, of vehicles whose primary function was not to kill enemy soldiers, but to move American soldiers and supplies. Eisenhower’s choice, which has sometimes been treated as eccentric by military historians, who would have preferred a list more weighted toward conventional weapons, reflected his 30 years of professional thinking about the nature of industrial war.
He had concluded, by the time he made the list, that wars between industrial powers were decided by the movement of material more than by the destruction of material, and that the vehicles that moved the material were therefore more strategically consequential than the weapons that destroyed it. He had concluded, in particular, that the small American utility vehicle, universally known as the Jeep, had altered the conduct of small unit war in ways that the pre-war military establishments of every other nation had failed to anticipate, and, by the closing months of the war, were unable to match. The story of how the Jeep came to exist is, like the story of the M1 Garand and the story of the proximity P fuse, a story that turns on a small institutional decision made by a small group of people in the late 1930s,
and that ends with a piece of equipment that no other nation in the world could produce in comparable quantity. The decision was made in the spring of 1940 by a quartermaster officer at the US Army’s Infantry Board at Fort Benning, Georgia, named Major Robert G. Howie, who had been working since 1937 on the problem of replacing the Army’s existing fleet of motorcycles and sidecars with a four-wheeled vehicle small enough to be useful in forward areas.
Howie had built, with the help of an Army mechanic named Master Sergeant Melvin Wiley, a prototype that he called the Howie machine gun carrier, a low-slung, lightweight platform that mounted a machine gun on the front and seated two soldiers lying prone behind it.
The prototype had been demonstrated in 1937 and 1938 and had been judged by Infantry Board observers to be promising but inadequate with poor visibility, awkward handling, and a tendency to overturn on rough terrain. Howie continued the work. By the summer of 1940, with the war in Europe escalating and the United States beginning its first peacetime mobilization, the Army issued a formal solicitation for the design of a quarter-ton 4×4 reconnaissance and utility vehicle.
The solicitation was sent to 135 American automobile manufacturers in June of 1940. The deadline for prototype delivery was September 23rd, 1940, a window of approximately 75 days from the issuance of the request to the delivery of a working vehicle. The window was deliberately short. The Army wanted to identify firms capable of moving quickly under wartime conditions.
Of the 135 firms that received the solicitation, three responded. Two of the three responses came from Ford and Willys-Overland, both of which acknowledged that they could not meet the prototype deadline, but requested an extension. The third response came from a small, nearly bankrupt automaker in Butler, Pennsylvania, called the American Bantam Car Company, which had been producing licensed copies of small British Austin economy cars since 1929, and which was, by the summer of 1940, manufacturing fewer than 100 vehicles per month, and operating at a substantial annual loss. Bantam had no engineering department of any consequence. Its president, Frank Fenn, was a former insurance executive who had taken over the company in 1937 in an attempt to keep it operating until
the economic recovery he believed was coming. Bantam responded to the Army solicitation because the company needed, urgently, any contract that could keep it from closing. Fenn hired, as a freelance design consultant, a Detroit engineer named Karl Probst, who had previously worked at Hudson and at Chevrolet, and who was, in the summer of 1940, between jobs.
Probst arrived at Bantam’s plant in Butler on July 17th, 1940. He sat down in an office with no formal contract and no advance payment, and began to sketch the vehicle that would become the Jeep. He worked, by his own later account, for 18 hours a day across the following five days. He delivered a complete set of working drawings on July 22nd, 1940.
The Bantam BRC 40 prototype was built across the following six weeks by a team of approximately 20 Bantam mechanics, using components that included a Continental Y4112 engine of approximately 45 horsepower, a Spicer transfer case and front axle assembly that gave the vehicle four-wheel drive, and a custom fabricated steel body of stamped panels and welded subframes.
The prototype was driven from Butler, Pennsylvania to the Army testing grounds at Camp Holabird in Baltimore on September 23rd, 1940. The exact deadline specified in the solicitation, arriving approximately 30 minutes before the cutoff. It passed initial inspection. It entered formal testing. It performed across the testing program of the following 6 weeks beyond every specification the Army had set.
The Bantam design was the basis for everything that followed. The Army, however, judged that Bantam itself was too small a firm to produce the vehicle in the quantities the war would require. And the design was transferred with some in additional engineering refinement to Willys-Overland and to Ford, both of which produced Jeeps in parallel throughout the war on essentially identical specifications.
The vehicle was redesignated the Willys MB and the Ford GPW. With the two manufacturers production being functionally interchangeable down to the level of replacement parts. American Bantam, which had originated the design, received a small follow-on contract to produce Jeep trailers and was bought out by other manufacturers shortly after the war.
Karl Probst, the consulting engineer who had designed the prototype across 5 days in July of 1940, received a single payment of approximately $2,000 for his work and no royalty on any of the more than 640,000 Jeeps that were eventually produced. He continued to consult on various automotive projects for the rest of his career.
He died in 1963. He was not in the public consciousness of the country whose army his vehicle had transported. A particularly famous man. Willys-Overland produced approximately 360,000 Jeeps during the war. Ford produced approximately 280,000. The combined output exceeded the entire wartime production of light military vehicles by every other belligerent nation on earth.
The closest German equivalent, the Volkswagen Type 82 Kübelwagen that von Deetz had been driving when he reversed into the ditch outside Mons, was produced in approximately 50,000 units across the entire war. Less than 1/12 of the American Jeep output. The Kübelwagen was a competent vehicle. It was light, simple, reliable, and easy to maintain.
It was also rear-wheel drive only with no four-wheel drive option and its off-road performance was, in consequence, substantially inferior to that of the Jeep. The German army developed in 1942 and 1943 a four-wheel drive amphibious variant called the Schwimmwagen, of which approximately 15,000 were produced. The Schwimmwagen was an impressive piece of engineering but was always in chronic short supply and was reserved for specialized units.
The bulk of the German army’s light vehicle requirement was met by the Kübelwagen, by horses, and by bicycles with the last two categories together, accounting for far more transportation tonnage at the divisional level than all motorized vehicles combined. The Wehrmacht, on the eve of the invasion of the Soviet Union in June of 1941, possessed approximately 600,000 horses against approximately 500,000 motor vehicles of all types.
By 1944, after 3 years of attrition on the Eastern Front, the ratio had shifted further toward animal transport. The German army that von Ditfurth served, the army whose general staff in the 1930s had imagined itself the most modern military force on Earth, had been progressively de-horse-mechanized across the war by the simple inability of German industry to replace motor vehicle losses.
While the American army, which had entered the war with a comparable horse-to-truck ratio in some of its pre-war formations, had completed its mechanization in 1942 and had been producing motor vehicles in such quantity ever since that no battlefield loss rate could exceed the production rate. The Jeep, within this broader pattern, was the small visible end of the same industrial reality that produced the Red Ball Express and the deep tank penicillin fermentation and the proximity fuse.
The Jeep was not a particularly sophisticated piece of engineering. The Jeep was, by the engineering standards of the German automotive industry, a fairly straightforward four-wheel drive light utility vehicle of conventional construction. What the Jeep represented was not technical superiority, but the application of mass production at a scale that no other nation could replicate.
The Willys and Ford production lines at Toledo, Ohio and Dearborn, Michigan produced Jeeps at a peak combined rate of approximately one vehicle every three minutes across 24-hour shifts. The German Volkswagen plant at Fallersleben produced Kübelwagens at a peak rate of perhaps one vehicle every 15 minutes across a single 12- hour shift.
The aggregate production over the course of the war was the product of those rates multiplied by the days of operation and the product was an asymmetry that no German tactical adaptation could overcome. The American infantry battalion in 1944 was issued by table of organization and equipment approximately 23 Jeeps.
The German infantry battalion was issued on paper approximately three Kübelwagens and in practice often fewer with the difference made up by horses, bicycles, and foot movement. The American battalion commander could drive forward to his forward companies in a Jeep, hold a brief conference, and drive back to his command post within an hour.
The German battalion commander in many divisions by 1944 walked or rode a bicycle. The American forward observer could be driven to a forward observation post in a Jeep with his radio, his binoculars, and a spare driver in 15 minutes. The German forward observer walked, often with his radio operator carrying the radio behind him, and his establishment of communication with the battalion could take an hour or more from the moment of the request to the moment of the first round downrange.
The American medical evacuation system used Jeep-mounted stretcher racks to bring wounded men from forward aid posts to the battalion aid station in a matter of minutes. The German medical evacuation system on those same battlefields used horse-drawn ambulances, bicycle mounted stretcher carriers, and infantrymen carrying wounded comrades on their backs with evacuation times that ran an order of magnitude longer than the American figures.
The Jeep in this sense was not a single vehicle, but a system. The small visible end of a transportation network that operated at speeds and scales that the German army could not match. And that translated at every level from the squad to the field army into faster decisions, faster movements, faster medical care, faster supply, and a slow continuous compounding tactical advantage that no individual German engagement could decisively reverse.
The Jeep also reshaped the experience of the war for the American soldier in less measurable ways. But by every soldier’s account, which was significant. The American infantryman of 1944 expected to be transported. He expected, when his unit moved more than a few kilometers, that trucks would arrive to carry his squad to its new position.
He expected that the wounded would be evacuated by vehicle, that supplies would arrive by vehicle, and that his commanders would visit his position by vehicle. He marched often on foot. American infantry foot marches during the war ranged from a few kilometers to occasional forced marches of 40 or 50 kilometers in a day.
But the expectation was that motor transport was the norm, and that foot movement was the exception. The German infantryman of 1944 expected conversely, that he would walk. He expected in most divisions that he would walk to the front, walk between positions, walk during withdrawals, and walk during attacks.
He expected that horses would carry the heavy weapons and the supplies and the wounded. And that motor vehicles, when available, would be reserved for officers and special purposes. The experiential gap, multiplied across millions of soldiers and thousands of operational days, produced effects on fatigue, on morale, on combat readiness at the moment of contact, and on the sustained ability of the two armies to maintain operational tempo.
The American soldier arrived at the firefight relatively fresh, having been driven within the past hour to within walking distance of his position. The German soldier arrived at the firefight in many engagements of the late war after having walked for hours or days. The gap was the Jeep, the truck behind the Jeep, and the entire transportation system behind the truck.
The vehicle that Von Beetz watched on that September afternoon outside Mons was a particular vehicle. It was a Willys MB, serial number recorded in no surviving document, driven by a private first class of the US First Infantry Division, whose name has not been preserved. It passed his ditch at approximately 2:15 in the afternoon, carrying three soldiers and a pedestal mounted .
30 caliber machine gun towing a quarter-ton trailer loaded with mortar ammunition. It crossed the side road at approximately 30 km/h without slowing. It disappeared up the road toward Mons. And within 10 minutes another Jeep had passed in its place. And within 20 minutes, another. And the column did not, in any visible sense, end.
Von Dietz was eventually taken into custody by an American military police detachment at approximately 4:30 that afternoon. Processed through a divisional prisoner cage. Transferred over the following weeks to a transit camp at Antwerp. Transferred again to a holding facility in England. And shipped across the Atlantic in November of 1944 to a prisoner of war camp at Aliceville, Alabama.
He worked across the remainder of the war on a series of agricultural and forestry details, including a road building project on a county road outside Tuscaloosa. On which he was assigned to a work party operating under the supervision of an elderly American foreman who used, as his personal transportation between the various work sites, a war surplus Willys MB Jeep that had been damaged in stateside training and sold off as scrap by the army.
The foreman drove the Jeep, Von Dietz wrote in a 1969 letter to a former comrade preserved in the Aliceville prisoner correspondence collection at the University of Alabama, with the easy proprietary affection of a man for an object that was familiar and unremarkable and utterly reliable. The foreman did not, when he drove the Jeep, treat it as a piece of military equipment. He treated it as a tool.
The same way an American farmer treated a tractor or a pickup truck. An everyday machine that did not require special handling or extraordinary care. That started in cold weather. That climbed every hill the rural Alabama countryside could present. That hauled lumber and tools and the foreman himself and his two grandsons on Sunday afternoon fishing trips to a creek several miles from the road.
The foreman, von Dietz, wrote had paid for the Jeep at the Army surplus auction the sum of $75. The Jeep was, in the foreman’s hands, a casual piece of post-war American agricultural equipment. It was also, in von Dietz’s recognition, the same vehicle that had defeated him on the road outside Mons in September of 1944. He returned to Germany in 1946.
He resumed civilian life, working initially as a clerk in the postal service of the British occupation zone, and eventually rising across the following two decades to a middle management position in the West German Federal Post Office. He lived in a small town outside Hanover for the rest of his life.
He owned, beginning in 1956, a Volkswagen Beetle, the post-war civilian variant of the same chassis that had underlain the Kübelwagen he had reversed into the ditch in 1944. He drove the Beetle for nearly 30 years, replacing it only in 1985, two years before his death from a stroke at the age of 78.
He wrote, in a brief unpublished memoir for his children dated 1980, that he had spent the war assuming, with the rest of the German officer corps, that mechanized warfare was a matter of tanks and aircraft and heavy industrial production, and that he had learned, slowly across the campaign of 1944, that mechanized warfare was actually a matter of the small ordinary vehicles that moved soldiers and food and orders and wounded men from one place to another at the small ordinary scales of squad and platoon and company and that the army that could produce the small ordinary vehicles in quantities sufficient to mechanize itself to the level of the individual squad would defeat any army that could not no matter how many tanks and aircraft the other army possessed and no matter how brilliantly the other army handled them
in the tactical engagements that the conventional histories would later record as the war’s decisive battles. He had spent five years he wrote fighting a war that he and his colleagues believed was being decided by the heavy weapons that the German general staff had spent the 1930s designing. He had ended the war understanding that it had been decided in some fundamental way that took him most of the war and all of his captivity to perceive clearly by a four-wheel-drive utility vehicle weighing 1,200 kg that a freelance engineer named Karl Probst had sketched in five days in a small office in Butler, Pennsylvania in the summer of 1940 working for a nearly bankrupt small car manufacturer that did not survive the post-war economic transition paid $2,000
for the design work never receiving any royalty on the 640,000 vehicles that were eventually built from his drawings and that the army that had adopted the vehicle had produced it in such quantity that an American county road foreman in rural Alabama in 1945 could buy one at a surplus auction for $75 and use it for the rest of his working life as a casual agricultural runabout.
The asymmetry von Deetz wrote had been the entire war compressed into a single ordinary object that he had spent the war underestimating and that he had ended his life still struggling more than 30 years later fully to comprehend.
