Why German Generals Called the American Jeep the Best Weapon of World War II D
Late autumn, 1943. Somewhere in the United States, inside a plain government workshop with hard fluorescent light overhead, a small tan vehicle sat on concrete blocks. It had crossed an ocean to get there. It had been captured in the North African desert, hoisted into the hold of a merchant ship, unloaded on an American dock, and driven under military escort to this quiet room where a group of army engineers stood around it with clipboards and calipers.
They’d never seen one up close before. It was painted the pale color of dry sand. Its front sloped downward to a single curved fender. Its engine sat in the rear and breathed through air alone. Its seats were, of all things, comfortable, elegant even. The kind of seats you might find in a small European touring car of the late 1930s.
This was a Volkswagen Type 82, a Kübelwagen, a staff car designed by none other than Porsche himself in Stuttgart for the officers of the German Wehrmacht. The Americans had wanted one for a very long time. Now they had one and they intended to take it apart. They measured every bolt. They timed it on grades.
They ran it through sand pits and shallow water crossings. And they compared it hour after hour against the plain, square, painfully simple little four-wheel drive truck their own soldiers had taken to calling the Jeep. When the verdict was finally written down, it appeared inside a restricted War Department Intelligence Handbook printed on the 15th of March, 1945. Technical Manual E-30-451.
The handbook on German military forces. Fewer than a thousand copies were ever circulated. The wording was direct. The Volkswagen, the German equivalent of the American Jeep, is inferior in every way except in the comfort of its seating accommodations. Inferior in every way. But here is the strange part of the story.
The part that does not appear anywhere inside that handbook. The part the engineers in that workshop could not quite explain. At the very same moment American army engineers were writing that on paper, German soldiers were fighting to keep captured Jeeps for themselves. Wehrmacht units in North Africa were repainting them with black crosses.
They were pressing them into service so often that German vehicle inventories had to be officially amended to include them. A Waffen SS Lieutenant Colonel named Otto Skorzeny, still more than a year away from his role in Hitler’s last great offensive of the war, was already assembling files on how to acquire more of them.
A vehicle that propaganda had once mocked in print as a toy car for an unserious nation was the same vehicle that German junior officers in the field, in the mud, in the desert, were quietly stealing whenever they could. Two truths in the same army at the same time. On paper, the Jeep was crude.
In practice, the Germans could not get enough of them. At the very hour those American engineers were writing their verdict on the Kubelwagen, 6,000 mi away in the shattered farmland south of Cassino, an American medic was lifting a wounded corporal onto the hood of his Jeep. The vehicle was streaked with blood.
It had been hit twice that morning by mortar fragments. It was still running. It would carry the corporal 3 mi to the battalion aid station, and it would save his life. That was the Jeep, not the drawing on the page. The one in the field to understand how a quarter-ton truck designed in a single long weekend by a freelance engineer in a nearly empty Pennsylvania drafting room became by Dwight Eisenhower’s own post-war account one one of the four pieces of equipment most vital to the Allied victory, we have to go back 4 years. To a hot stretch of American countryside in the summer of 1939, and to a problem the United States Army had been quietly losing for almost a hundred years. The problem was mud. August 1939. Around the town of Plattsburgh in northern New York state, the United States First Army held a set of peacetime maneuvers that the newspapers of the day called the largest in American history. 52,000 men took part. There were mock attacks, simulated
artillery barrages, columns of infantry sweeping through farmland at dawn, and along every dirt road inside the exercise area, there were long lines of horses and motorcycles trying to do what the United States Army had been trying to do since the 1860s, move men and messages and small weapons across broken ground faster than any enemy could react. It was not working.
The horses were too slow. They ate too much. They spooked under noise. The motorcycles fell over in the mud, broke their right eyes legs on hillsides, and could not carry two men up a moderate slope with any dignity. The Model T Ford, which the Army had used as a staff car since the Great War, was a road vehicle.
Take it off the pavement and drop it into a plowed field, and it became a tractor without traction. One officer watched all of this with a carefully concealed alarm. His name was George Catlett Marshall. He was 58 years old, a graduate of the Virginia Military Institute, a veteran of the Great War in France, a man who had seen with his own eyes what mud did to columns of American infantry in 1918.
For years he had been pushing quietly for a small, fast, four-wheel drive scout vehicle, something a young officer could throw across a broken field to carry an order to a company commander who did not yet know his flank was collapsing. He had been ignored. Congress had no money for such things.
The peacetime Army had no appetite for change. Then, on the 1st of September, 1939, two things happened in the same 24 hours. Germany invaded Poland and George Marshall took the oath of office as the new Chief of Staff of the United States Army. Whatever he was going to do about the mobility problem, he was going to have to do it now, not next year, not not next budget cycle.
Now, 11 months passed. France fell in 6 weeks. Belgium collapsed. The British Expeditionary Force was scraped off the beach at Dunkirk. Panzer divisions were rolling across Europe at speeds no general staff in the world would believe possible. And in Washington, a stack of paper began moving through the Army’s Quartermaster Corps.
On the 11th of July, 1942 weeks after the French surrender, the Corps sent an identical set of specifications to 135 American automobile manufacturers. The terms were severe to the point of cruelty. The Army wanted a four-wheel drive vehicle, empty weight no more than 1,300 lb, payload 660 lb, wheelbase no more than 72.
5 in, an engine producing at least 85 ft lb of torque, enough to pull a small trailer up a steep grade with a soldier at the wheel, a fold-down windshield, a rear bench for three soldiers and a machine gun, a top speed of 50 mph on a road, a crawl speed of three. Bids were due in 11 days.
A working prototype was due in 49. Of the 135 companies that received the specifications, nearly all of them did the same thing. They read the deadline. They They laughed. And they threw the document in the trash. Only two companies answered. The first was Willys-Overland Motors of Toledo, Ohio, a serious manufacturer, good engineers, slim on cash.
The second answer came from a small industrial town in western Pennsylvania named Butler, from a company called the American Bantam Car Company. Bantam built tiny European-style economy cars nobody was buying. It was so close to bankruptcy that its entire engineering staff had already been laid off. Its drafting room was almost empty.
The Ford Motor Company would join the competition later after the Army specifically invited them in. But at that moment, on the day the bids opened, the country’s answer to the mobility problem of the Second World War rested on the shoulders of a nearly bankrupt company with no engineers, no money, and 11 days.
What Bantam did have was a telephone number. The number belonged to a man in Detroit. His name was Karl Knight Probst. He was 56 years old, the son of a country doctor from Point Pleasant, West Virginia. He had been designing automobiles in in one form or another since the earliest years of the century. He was at that particular moment between jobs.
He was short on cash. He had no reason to to say yes to a doomed contract from a company that could not pay him. The president of Bantam called him. Probst said no. Bantam pleaded. Probst said no again. And then a third man entered the story. A Danish-born industrialist named William Knudsen, recently recruited straight from the presidency of General Motors to take charge of all army procurement.
Knudsen was not a man accustomed to hearing no. He picked up the telephone. He called Karl Probst himself. And he told the freelance engineer in that low measured voice he used in board meetings that the country needed him. Probst got in his car and drove east. He arrived at Bantam’s headquarters in Butler, Pennsylvania on the 17th of July 1940.
He walked into the nearly empty drafting room. He rolled up his sleeves and he sat down at a drawing table with less than a week to design from a blank sheet of paper a vehicle nobody had ever built before. He worked through Wednesday night. He worked through all of Thursday. By the afternoon of Friday, the 19th of July, he had finished the basic layout drawings for what would within 12 months be called the Jeep.
That evening, he did something almost human. He took Friday night off. He went to the movies on Saturday and Sunday. He came back to the drafting table and finalized the cost calculations and the supplier lists. On Monday morning, the 22nd of July, he and the Bantam plant manager loaded the documents into a car and drove them south to the Quartermaster Corps testing center at Camp Holabird on the southeastern edge of Baltimore, Maryland.
Karl Probst had laid out the basic design in two days. He had finished the the bid package in five. He was 56 years old. He was working for a company that could not afford to pay him. He was drawing on parts pulled from Continental engines and Spicer transfer cases and Warner gearboxes and modified Studebaker axles.
None of the individual pieces were original. What was original was the way he had stitched them together into a single small tool that could go anywhere, carry anything, and be built at industrial scale by ordinary Americans. He did not know it yet, but he had just designed the vehicle that a decade of American generals had failed to describe.
He also did not know that his own drawings were about to be taken away from him. That would come next, the 23rd of September, 1940. Two months and one day after Karl Probst first sat down at that drafting table in Butler, Pennsylvania, a small vehicle rolled out of the Bantam factory that morning. It was rough. It was unpainted in places.
It smelled of new oil and cut steel, and it was, by any honest measurement, the first Jeep ever built. Bantam did not have the money to ship it, so they drove it 250 miles from Butler, Pennsylvania, southeast across the Alleghenies and down through Maryland to the Quartermaster Corps testing center at Camp Holabird.
On the edge of Baltimore, the prototype ran the whole way under its own power on the roads of 1940, gravel in stretches, packed asphalt in others. The plant manager sat behind the wheel. The engineer rode beside him. Neither man slept much the night before. They pulled through gate at Camp Holabird 30 minutes before the deadline.
30 minutes, the army took the vehicle. The army ran it through the most punishing testing program the Quartermaster Corps had ever devised for a wheeled vehicle. It went across sand. It went through water. It climbed grades that had broken the axles of other prototypes. It came back scarred and dented and still running, and the army declared, in writing, that the Bantam design was the best of the three candidates.
Then the Army did something Karl Probst had not seen coming. They handed his drawings to Willys and to Ford. The argument was contractual. The blueprints, the Army said, now belong to the government. Bantam was too small, too poor, too fragile to produce vehicles in the quantities the war would demand.
The war would demand hundreds of thousands. Bantam could not build hundreds of thousands. So the design, the layout, the specifications, all of it would go to the two large manufacturers who could. Karl Probst was furious. There was nothing he could do. The vehicle he had drawn in five days was taken out of his hands and delivered to competitors who had not been in the room when it was born.
That was the first quiet cruelty of the Jeep’s story and it would not be the last. Willys and Ford did what large companies do when they are given a working design. They improved it. At Willys Overland in Toledo, Ohio, the engineering vice president was a man named Delmar G. Roos. Everyone called him Barney.
He had come to Willys from Studebaker. He was not a young man and he had spent the better part of two years modernizing an old Whippet four-cylinder engine into something worth putting into a military vehicle. He called the engine the Go-Devil. He put it on a dynamometer. He ran it flat out.
He ran it at full load at maximum revolutions for 100 consecutive hours. The engine he had started with, the old Whippet, had failed at 22 hours. The Go-Devil ran for 100 and did not break 60 horsepower. Reliable to the point of stubbornness. The kind of small engine a soldier could tear apart with a wrench, a hammer, and a basic understanding of internal combustion and put back together in the field with pieces salvaged from the vehicle next to him.
It was quite simply the best small military engine in the world. The Army looked at the Go-Devil and made a decision. Willys would use it and Ford would use it, too. The Army was not going to let two competing engines into the same supply chain for the same vehicle. Ford, in turn, contributed something the Jeep is still recognized by 85 years later, the stamped steel grill with vertical slats, nine of them, clean, utilitarian, instantly readable across a crowded motor pool.
It has been the face of the Jeep ever since. By July of 1941, five months before Pearl Harbor, the design had been standardized. Willys built the vehicle under the designation model MB. Ford built the exact same vehicle with parts interchangeable down to the last bolt under the designation GPW. The W stood for Willys because Ford was now producing in its own factories a Willys licensed design.
There is a footnote to this that ought to matter more than it does. In 1948, three years after the war ended, the Federal Trade Commission of the United States government issued a formal ruling. The original design honors of the Jeep, the commission said, belonged to neither Willys nor Ford. They belonged to the American Bantam Car Company.
By then, it was already too late. Between 1941 and 1945, Willys produced roughly 362,000 Jeeps. Ford produced roughly 280,000. Bantam, the company that had actually invented the vehicle, built 2,675 of them before being shoved aside. They spent the rest of the war building the small quarter-ton trailers the Jeeps towed behind them, about 74,000 of those.
They never built another passenger car after the war ended. They declared bankruptcy in 1950. Six years later, they were absorbed by Armco Steel and disappeared from American industrial history. At the peak of production at the Willys plant in Toledo, one complete Jeep rolled off the line every 80 seconds.
Every 80 seconds, the unit cost on the first Willys contract in 1941 was $738. Now, the vehicle went to war. By the summer of 1942, the Jeep had been fighting in a small way for several months, mostly as a scout car and a staff car and a wire-laying vehicle in the North African theater. It was useful. It was reliable. The men who drove it liked it, but nobody in Washington or London or Berlin had yet understood what it could really do.
Nobody, that is, except a 26-year-old Scottish officer in Cairo who was walking with a limp. His name was David Stirling. He was a Scots Guards officer. He had attended Trinity College, Cambridge before being sent down for an accumulation of student transgressions his tutors could no longer overlook.
He was tall, quiet, faintly awkward in company. He had been recently recovering from injuries he had sustained in an experimental parachute jump that had nearly killed him. The parachute had failed to open properly. He had walked with a stick for months afterward. He had, against significant institutional resistance, convinced Middle East headquarters in Cairo that small teams of trained soldiers attacking German airfields at night by surprise could destroy more aircraft on the ground than the entire Royal Air Force could destroy in the air. His unit was called the Special Air Service. In the early months, the SAS had relied on another irregular formation, the Long Range Desert Group, to drive them across hundreds of miles of empty desert to their targets. The SAS troopers called it, half affectionately, the Libyan Desert Taxi Service. Heavy Chevrolet trucks driven by men who knew the sand seas the way other men knew their own gardens. The Chevrolets would drop the
SAS a few miles from the target. The SAS would walk in on foot. They would plant explosives, small pineapple-shaped charges perfected by an SAS officer named Jock Lewes, for igniting the fuel tanks of parked aircraft. They would walk back out. It worked, but it was slow.
And as the summer of 1942 wore on, German airfield security tightened. The The walks in became longer. The walks out became more dangerous. Men were being caught in the early summer of that year. David Stirling was handed a small consignment of jeeps, the first to reach the SAS. He looked at them and he saw something the men who had designed them had not quite seen.
They were not transport, they were a weapon system. He stripped them down. He cut off the windshields. He removed the bumpers. He removed anything that reflected moonlight and onto the front and the rear of each jeep, he bolted a pair of Vickers K aircraft machine guns, four guns per vehicle, fed by drum magazines of 60 or 96 rounds, capable, when firing together, of putting somewhere between 950 and 1,000 rounds a minute into a stationary target.
He filled the back of each jeep with jerrycans of fuel and water, ammunition, loose bombs, rations for a week. On the night of the 26th of July, 1942, 18 of these modified jeeps assembled at a forward hideout at a place called Bir el Quseir on the northern edge of the Qattara Depression. David Stirling was in personal command.
Their target was a Luftwaffe airfield called Sidi Haneish. This was where the German Junkers 52 transports were staging, the three-engine transports that were flying fuel and ammunition to Rommel’s Panzers in the Western Desert. The jeeps drove onto the field in two columns, a V formation, headlights off, navigating by the stars under the direction of an LRDG navigator named Mike Sadler, a man whose sense of direction in the deep desert was so accurate his own comrades believed it was supernatural. Stirling raised a green flare pistol. it into the night sky. At that moment, all 18 jeeps opened fire simultaneously. 72 Vickers guns firing together in formation, moving down the length of the airfield at 15 mph, the tracer light was so bright the men who were there described it in later years as looking like daylight. In roughly 15 minutes, according to the SAS’s own after-action report filed at the time and now held in the British National Archives at Kew under the
reference WO 218, they destroyed or damaged around 37 Axis aircraft on the ground. The report includes the Junkers 52 transports. The fuel that would have flown to Rommel 3 days later did not fly. One man was killed on the field itself, Lance Bombardier John Robson. He was 21 years old.
The next morning, as the surviving Jeeps were withdrawing across the open desert, German Stuka dive bombers caught the French SAS detachment in the open. A young French paratrooper officer named Andre Zirnheld was killed in that attack. He is remembered today in France as one of the first martyrs of the French airborne tradition.
The remaining Jeeps split into small groups and reached their hideout in ones and twos over the following days. In the 15 months between the summer of 1942 and January of 1943, when David Stirling was captured by the Germans while sleeping in a Tunisian wadi, the Special Air Service claimed the destruction of more than 250 Axis aircraft on the ground in North Africa.
That is the regiment’s own count in the regiment’s own records. It was not independently verified from a German loss ledgers, but at the time and to the officers who were reading the reports in Cairo, the number was staggering. The German press eventually gave David Stirling a nickname, The Phantom Major. The name has been repeated in books for 80 years, and it is usually attributed in one form or another to Rommel himself.
Recent scholarship by the historian Gavin Mortimer suggests something quieter and more accurate. The nickname was probably coined by British war correspondents in Cairo and picked up by the German propaganda machine afterward. Stirling himself was passed up the German chain of prisoner of war custody as to his capture. He kept escaping.
They kept moving him. He ended up in August of 1944 in Colditz Castle in Eastern Germany, the fortress reserved for the Allied prisoners the Germans considered incorrigible. He remained there until liberation while all of this was happening in the sand of North Africa. On the other side of the war, the German armor was fighting a very different kind of transportation problem.
Germany had entered the war in 1939 with roughly 750,000 horses on its rolls. By the opening of the Soviet campaign in June of 1941, that number had grown to about 750,000. By February of 1945, with German factories failing under Allied strategic bombing, the Wehrmacht was using roughly 1,200,000 horses to move its supplies, its wounded, its artillery, and its infantry.
Across the entire war, the German army employed something like 2,750,000 horses, more than it had used in the First World War. The image most Americans carried of the German army, then and now, is the image of the Panzer division. The image of steel and fuel and thunder, of Blitzkrieg crashing across borders in a mechanized storm.
That image was true for a very small percentage of the German force. The percentage that reached the front line first on the first day, behind that mechanized spearhead, the bulk of the German army marched the way Caesar’s army had marched on its own feet with a horse pulling the wagon behind it.
The American army of 1944 did not have that problem. The American army of 1944 had Jeeps. And in the hands of American soldiers, the Jeep began to do something that nobody in the Willys plant in Toledo, and nobody in the Ford plant in Dearborn, and certainly nobody in the German High Command had quite anticipated.
The soldiers began, without permission from anyone, to redesign it. They welded steel brackets to the rear of Jeeps in the field so that two men on stretchers could be carried out of the line lying flat with a third stretcher lashed across the hood if the casualty count was heavy. This modification was never designed in an engineering office.
It was designed by battalion medics working with acetylene torches and salvaged bar stock, and it moved wounded American soldiers off the Normandy hedgerows and out of the Ardennes forests to aid stations where doctors could still save them. They welded vertical steel angle irons to the front bumpers of Jeeps in the summer of 1944, after the Germans began stringing wire at neck height across the sunken lanes of France to catch drivers and passengers who stood up too fast in a moving vehicle. The angle irons caught the wire before it caught the men. The soldiers lived. They laid steel rails across the floor of Jeeps in France and Italy so that the vehicles could run on captured European railway lines when the roads were mined. They mounted heavy Browning 50-caliber machine guns on pintle mounts in the back so that a Jeep could give covering fire during a reconnaissance withdrawal. They fitted winches on the front. They rigged canvas as ambulances. They welded frames to carry radio sets and reels of telephone
wire and boxes of blood plasma on the volcanic ash of Iwo Jima. In February of 1945, the heavy American trucks sank to their axles and could not move. The Jeeps sank, too, but they were light enough and there were enough Marines around them that six or eight men could lift a Jeep free of the ash by the body mounted hand grips and carry a wounded Marine off the beach in the same vehicle.
On the Ledo Road in northern Burma in the China-Burma-India Theater, Jeeps carried medical supplies eyes up jungle trails that British engineers had already declared impassable in monsoon. None of these modifications were authorized. None of them were designed by the manufacturer. They were designed by American sergeants and corporals and privates standing in the mud thinking about the problem in front of them and reaching for the nearest welding torch.
The The was simple enough to be modified by anyone, rugged enough to survive the modification, and small enough to be picked up and put right side up when the modification went wrong. This is the part of the story that the Wehrmacht of 1943 was not built to understand. The Wehrmacht had built the finest small staff car in the world, the Kübelwagen, a beautifully engineered vehicle, precise, comfortable, designed from above by men with doctorates in a Stuttgart office.
It came off the assembly line finished. It was not meant to be improved by the soldier who drove it. That soldier was not a designer. That soldier was a user. The American Army did not think that way. The American Army had grown up in a country where a farm boy in Kansas had in his father’s barn taken apart the family Model T Ford and turned it before he was 17 into a stump puller, or a hay rake, or a portable generator, or a snow plow.
The relationship between the American soldier and his equipment was a relationship the Wehrmacht simply did not have. The Jeep was the perfect vehicle for that relationship, and so the vehicle spread. Airborne divisions figured out how to fit Jeeps inside Airspeed Horsa gliders and General Aircraft Hamilcar gliders and American Waco CG-4 gliders.
Ground crews removed the windshields, the bumper ends, the handgrips, any tools not strictly required. The lightened Jeep was lashed with steel cables to the wooden floor of the glider. When the glider crash-landed in a field in Normandy or Holland or across the Rhine, the ropes were cut and the Jeep drove off.
At the Battle of Arnhem in September of 1944, British paratroopers of the 1st Airborne Division used Jeeps landed by glider to tow six-pounder anti-tank guns into the streets and hold the bridge for as long as they held it at Operation Varsity. On the 24th of March, 1945, the airborne assault across the Rhine, more than 200 Jeeps came in by glider with the American 194th Glider Infantry Regiment alone.
The Jeeps were not parachute drop. The technology to drop a vehicle of that weight under canopy did not yet exist in the Second World War. The men jumped. The Jeeps came in on wings. A war correspondent named Ernie Pyle wrote in Jeeps from North Africa to Sicily to Italy to France. He was a small, quiet, middle-aged man from Indiana who wrote in a plain, unadorned prose about ordinary American soldiers.
Millions of Americans read him in their morning newspapers. He was in 1943 probably the most trusted voice in American war reporting. On the 4th of June, 1943, in a dispatch from North Africa, later collected in his book Here Is Your War, Ernie Pyle wrote a paragraph about the Jeep that has never been improved on by anyone.
And the Jeep, good lord, I don’t think we could continue the war without the Jeep. It does everything. It goes everywhere. It is as faithful as a dog, as strong as a mule, and as agile as a goat. It constantly carries twice what it was designed for and still keeps on going. Ernie Pyle was killed by Japanese machine gun fire on the small island of Ie Shima in the Ryukyus on the 18th of April, 1945. He was 44 years old.
He had a Jeep parked nearby. By that spring, the Jeep was everywhere. General George Patton rode Jeeps across France. General Dwight Eisenhower was photographed in a Jeep by Signal Corps photographers on the Normandy beaches. Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery of the British Army used a Jeep alongside his Humber staff car in the field.
Brigadier General Theodore Roosevelt Jr., the eldest son of the former president of the United States, went ashore on Utah Beach on the 6th of June, 1944, as the only general officer to land with the first wave. He was 56 years old. He had a heart condition. He walked with a cane because of arthritis from an old wound.
He commanded the beach in the opening hours of D-Day from beside a battered Jeep he had personally named Rough Rider, after his father’s volunteer cavalry regiment in the Spanish-American War. Five weeks later, on the 12th of July, 1944, near the French village of Méautis, Theodore Roosevelt Jr.
died in his tent of a heart attack. He was preparing for bed. He had received orders that afternoon promoting him to division command. He never knew. His Jeep was still parked outside. Approximately 50,000 Jeeps were shipped to the Soviet Union under Lend-Lease. Russian officers called them the Willys, using it as a common noun.
They drove them all the way to Berlin. The tally of tasks the Jeep performed in the Second World War is longer than any single book has ever managed to list. It carried orders. It carried ammunition. It carried wounded men. It carried generals. It carried privates. It carried food, medicine, radios, rifles, machine guns, mortars, and on more than one occasion, a case of whiskey some captain had liberated from a German officer’s mess.
And on the other side of the line, in the winter of 1944, the Germans were preparing to build their most ambitious operation of the war around it. The 22nd of October, 1944. East Prussia. Deep inside a compound of concrete bunkers and pine trees called the Wolf’s Schanz. The Wolf’s Lair. Adolf Hitler had less than seven months left to live.
He did not know it yet, but the men closest to him could see it in his face. The tremor in his left hand had grown worse. He walked stooped now. He was 55 years old, and he looked 20 years older. On the October afternoon, he summoned to his headquarters a tall, heavily scarred Waffen-SS officer named Otto Skorzeny.
Skorzeny held the rank of SS-Obersturmbannführer der Reserve. He was 36 years old. He was Austrian by birth, an engineer by training, and by 1944, he was the single most famous commando in the German armed forces. He had earned that fame the year before. In September of 1943, a small force of German paratroopers had landed by a on top of a mountain in central Italy called the Gran Sasso, at a small hotel called the Campo Imperatore, and had rescued Benito Mussolini from the Italian government that had arrested him. The raid was audacious. It was cinematic. It was perfect propaganda. The German newsreels gave the credit to Otto Skorzeny. The operation had actually been planned and led on the ground by a Luftwaffe paratrooper officer named Harald Mors. Mors had commanded the assault battalion. Mors had directed the glider landings. Mors walked into the hotel with the first team. Skorzeny came along as the senior SS liaison. He entered the hotel with
the first team, but the operation itself, the planning, the glider landings, the paratroop assault, was Harald Mors’s from beginning to end. But when the newsreel cameras rolled at the airfield afterward, it was Skorzeny standing beside Mussolini in the propaganda photographs. It was Skorzeny who received the Knight’s Cross from Hitler personally.
It was Skorzeny’s name that ran in every newspaper from Berlin to Tokyo. Harald Mors received a decoration and returned to his unit. Otto Skorzeny became a legend. That is the man Hitler summoned on the 22nd of October, 1944. Not the man who had actually planned the Mussolini raid. The man who had received the propaganda credit for it.
Hitler had a new mission, and he needed a legend to command it. The mission was called Operation Greif, Griffin. It was the deception element of Hitler’s last great gamble of the war, the offensive we now call the Battle of the Bulge. Hitler wanted Skorzeny to assemble a special brigade of English-speaking German soldiers, dress them in captured American uniforms, equip them with captured American weapons and captured American vehicles, and send them through the American lines in the opening hours of the Ardennes attack. Their job was to seize bridges over the Meuse River before the Americans could destroy them, to cut telephone lines, to turn road signs the wrong way, to redirect American traffic, to create in the American rear a paralytic confusion. Skorzeny took the assignment. He went back to his office. He wrote out his shopping list. He needed 15 captured tanks of any type, 20 armored cars, 20 self-propelled guns, 100 American jeeps,
40 motorcycles, 120 American trucks. He needed something else, too. He needed men who could speak American English with an American accent. Not textbook English. Not schoolroom English. The kind of English a corporal from Ohio speaks to another corporal from Ohio when he does not know anyone is listening.
The shopping list went up the chain. What what came back was less than he had asked for. He had been promised 20 Sherman tanks. He received about two, of which only one was actually running. He received four scout cars. He received about 30 American jeeps. He received roughly 15 American trucks. The rest, he was told, he would have to make up by painting German vehicles olive drab and stenciling white American stars on their doors.
He interviewed 2,500 German volunteers looking for fluent American English speakers. He found 10 who spoke perfect idiomatic American English, 10 men out of 2,500. Another 30 or 40 spoke good English without slang. The rest were marginal. Some were terrible. In his post-war memoir, Skorzeny himself admitted that the result was, in his own word, terrifying.
But notice what he did with what he had. He did not use the German Kübelwagens his own factories were producing by the tens of thousands. He did not use his own army’s staff cars. He used the captured American jeeps because he and his men understood exactly what the SAS had understood in the desert 2 years earlier, and what David Stirling had understood the moment he first laid eyes on one.
An American military police officer at a checkpoint on a cold December morning in the Ardennes Forest would wave a jeep through without thinking. He would stop a German staff car. He would stop a truck. He would not stop a jeep. The jeep was invisible because the jeep was ordinary. It was the vehicle every American unit had.
It was the vehicle every American soldier recognized. On the 16th of December, 1944, Operation Greif went intactly. It was a failure. Skorzeny’s brigade never reached the Meuse bridges. His commandos were rounded up in ones and twos over the following days. But psychologically, it was one of the most successful deception operations of the entire war.
American sentries across the entire Ardennes front began stopping every jeep they did not personally recognize. They demanded answers to baseball questions. They asked for the names of state capitals. They asked who won the World Series last year and who was Mickey Mouse’s girlfriend and what the middle name of Betty Grable was.
General Omar Bradley, the commander of the 12th Army Group, later wrote in his own post-war memoir that he was briefly detained by his own military police because he correctly answered that the capital of Illinois was Springfield. The military policeman who had stopped him thought the capital was Chicago.
General Dwight Eisenhower, the supreme Allied Commander, was told by his own intelligence officers that Skorzeny’s commandos might be trying to assassinate him. For several days over Christmas of 1944, the man commanding all Allied forces in Europe was effectively confined inside his own headquarters at Versailles.
A handful of German commandos in stolen American jeeps came closer to paralyzing the Allied chain of command than entire German panzer divisions did in the same offensive. 18 of Skorzeny’s commandos were captured wearing American uniforms. Under the laws of war, they could be shot. The first three, Manfred Pernass, Gunter Billing, and Wilhelm Schmidt, were tried by an American military tribunal at a small Belgian town called Henri-Chapelle on the 21st of December, about 1944.
Two days later, on the 23rd of December, they were taken from their cells before dawn and executed by an American firing squad. Most of the remaining captured commandos were executed at Henri-Chappelle in two further batches before the end of the month. They were young men. Some of them were teenagers.
They died a very long way from home in American uniforms they had never wanted to wear for a Reich that had less than 5 months left to live. Otto Skorzeny himself survived the war. He surrendered to American forces in May of 1945. He was tried before an American military tribunal at Dachau between the 18th of August and the 9th of September, 1947, on charges of improper use of American uniforms in combat.
He and nine of his officers were acquitted. The acquittal came in part on the testimony of a former British Special Operations Executive Agent, a man who had run Allied Irregular Operations in Occupied Europe, who confirmed under oath that Allied Special Forces had themselves considered wearing German uniforms in certain operations.
Skorzeny lived another 20 years. He died of cancer in Madrid in July of 1975, still writing memoirs about the war he had lost. The captured American Jeep had been the operational center of his most ambitious mission. Now the war was over and in 1945, the United States Army began a project that no other army in history had ever attempted on quite this scale.
The army had captured most of the surviving senior officers of the German army, generals, field marshals, core commanders, chiefs of staff, men who had planned the campaigns in Poland and France and the Soviet Union and North Africa. The army wanted to know what those men had thought in real time of the war they had just fought.
The army wanted the German professional judgment on paper before the memories faded. The project was called the Foreign Military Studies Series. It ran mostly out of two facilities in the German state of Hesse, one at Allendorf, one at Neustadt. He was supervised on the American side by a colonel named Harold Potter.
On the German side, the chief editor was Franz Halder, the former chief of the general staff of the army, the man who had helped plan the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. The project produced approximately 2,500 manuscripts. Some short, some hundreds of pages long, they now sit in the National Archives at College Park, Maryland, indexed under the reference numbers of what historians call the ETI and T and MS series.
They are the largest single body of senior German military analysis of the Second World War that exists anywhere in the world. In those manuscripts, the German generals were asked about American artillery. They were asked about the Sherman tank. They were asked, most of all, why they had lost. They blamed Hitler. They blamed the weather.
They blamed the strategic bombing. They blamed the Russians. They blamed the intelligence services. They blamed each other. They rarely named the Jeep directly. They did not have to. They named the consequences of it over and over again in monograph after monograph. They wrote about the speed at which American units could shift weight from one sector of the front to another.
They wrote about the depth at which American reconnaissance has had penetrated their own lines before undetected. They wrote about the rate at which American casualties had been evacuated from the front, treated at field hospitals, and in many cases returned to combat within weeks. They wrote about the constant pressure the American forward elements maintained on their own exhausted lines because American supply never stopped reaching those forward elements.
They wrote about the fact that when they broke an American position on Monday, by Wednesday there was a fresh American position 2 miles behind it, dug in with wire strung, and with three Jeeps parked behind the line waiting to move. Every one of those things came down in the end to a small four-wheel drive truck that moved everything an American battalion needed at a speed no German equivalent could match.
The Wehrmacht of 1944 could not do those things. It was still an army that used 1,200,000 horses. It was still an army in which the bulk of the infantry marched on foot behind horse-drawn supply columns. When an American battalion broke through a German position, the American follow-up arrived by wheeled vehicle. The German follow-up, if it arrived at all, arrived on foot hours or days later.
That gap was structural. It was not a gap the German army could close in the winter of 1944, no matter how brilliant its generals or how skilled its junior officers. The generals in the foreign military studies manuscripts understood this. They wrote around it. They gestured toward it. They almost said it. They never quite named the vehicle, but their behavior on the battlefield had already said it for them 3 years earlier in the sand of North Africa.
They had captured Jeeps. They had painted crosses on them. They had put them in German inventories. Otto Skorzeny had built his most ambitious operation of the war around them. They knew what the Jeep was. In 1948, 3 years after the war ended, Dwight Eisenhower published his memoir of the war in Europe.
He called it Crusade in Europe. It was, at the time, one of the most anticipated books in American publishing history. Millions of copies were sold. It made him a wealthy man for the first time in his life. Two years later, he became president of Columbia University. Four years after that, he became president of the United States.
Buried in the middle of that memoir was a single paragraph that has been quoted by every serious historian of American mechanization ever since. “Four other pieces of equipment,” Eisenhower wrote, “that most senior officers came to regard as among the most vital to our success in Africa and Europe were the bulldozer, the Jeep, the two and a half-ton truck, and the C-47 airplane, curiously enough, he added, “None of these is designed for combat.
None of them was designed for combat. The most consequential equipment of the American war in Europe, by the assessment of the man who had commanded the entire Allied effort, was not the equipment that fired the bullets. It was the equipment that put the men with the bullets where the bullets needed to be.
” Karl Knight Probst, the freelance engineer who had drawn the Jeep at a drafting table in Butler, Pennsylvania, in five days in the summer of 1940, did not become famous. He did not become wealthy. He did not receive a medal of freedom. He did not testify before Congress. He returned to freelance engineering after the war.
He worked on other projects. He watched quietly as the vehicle he had drawn became the most produced military wheeled vehicle in American history. He watched as the Federal Trade Commission ruled in 1948 that the original design honors belonged to American Bantam. He watched as American Bantam, the company that had believed in his drawings, went bankrupt in 1950.
He watched as it was absorbed by Armco Steel in 1956 and vanished from the industrial record. Karl Probst died in August of 1963 at his home in Dayton, Ohio. He was 79 years old. The cause was cancer. He had been fighting it quietly for some time. His obituary in the Dayton newspaper was short. It mentioned the Jeep.
It did not mention that he was the man who had drawn it. Most of the 647,000 Jeeps built during the war have been scrapped, melted down, rebuilt into stoves and refrigerators and skyscraper girders. The surviving ones, a few thousand of them, are collector’s items now, sold at auction for tens of thousands of dollars to men whose fathers or grandfathers might have driven one out of a landing craft at Salerno or Cherbourg or Manila Bay or Iwo Jima.
The men who drove them are almost all gone now. If you’re watching this and your father drove a Jeep in the Second World War, or your uncle, or your grandfather, or a man you loved, you already know that the men who came home did not usually talk about it. They talked about the mud. They talked about the cold.
They talked about the coffee that was never hot. They rarely talked about what they had done. And they almost never talked about the small four-wheel drive truck that had carried them, or their wounded friends, or their orders from one impossible place to the next. But when they saw a Jeep later in life, in a parade or at a county fair, or at a Veterans Day observance, something happened in their faces.
Something quiet. Something recognizable to their wives and their children, if not to anyone else. They remembered. The Wehrmacht never named the Jeep in its post-war analysis. It did not have to. In the summer of 1942, in the sand of North Africa, German soldiers had already answered the question with their hands.
They had captured Jeeps and repainted them with black crosses. They had put them in their own inventories. They had built commando operations around them. In the winter of 1944, one of their most famous officers chose to sit in Jeep over his own army staff car, because it would pass through an American checkpoint unremarked.
Every every step of the way, from Egypt to the Ardennes, the Germans had voted with their steering wheels. The Jeep never won a battle. It allowed every other American thing to win battles. It carried the orders that shifted the reserves. It carried the wire that connected the artillery to the forward observers. It carried the wounded men who lived to fight another day.
It carried the generals who saw the terrain and the privates who held it. None of it was designed for combat. All of it was decisive. Karl Probst is buried in Dayton, Ohio. His grave is not visited often. The company he saved with his drawings does not exist anymore. The army he served did not remember him well.
The vehicle he drew in five days in the summer of 1940 at a nearly empty drafting table in a nearly bankrupt company in Butler, Pennsylvania is still on the road somewhere in America tonight in a garage, in a barn, in a museum, under a canvas top behind a farmhouse in Nebraska waiting for a grandson to pull the cover off it on a Sunday morning and turn the ignition and hear the Go-Devil cough once and catch and settle into that steady, patient, unhurried idle it has been settling into for 85 years.
That is the monument. The men are almost all gone, but the monument is still on the road.
