There was no one better than Ernie Pyle at giving voice to the front-line soldiers serving in the Second World War. His keen observations and matter-of-fact descriptions of the realities of war put millions of Americans back home in the foxholes along with their boys.
So perhaps there’s no one better than Pyle, who was cut down by a Japanese machine gun at age 44 just four months before the war’s end, to describe how important the jeep was to the Allied victory.
“I don’t think we could continue the war without the jeep,” the famous war correspondent wrote in a 1943 newspaper column. “It does everything. It goes everywhere. It’s 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.”
Indeed, the jeep far exceeded expectations. When officials laid out the specifications for a lightweight, low-profile, four-wheel-drive vehicle that could traverse rutted battlefields, they envisioned it as a scout car that could carry light supplies.
“What they were looking for was something to replace the horse and the motorcycle, but it did so much more than that,” said Randy Withrow, the founder and director of the U.S. Veterans Memorial Museum in Huntsville, Ala.
The jeep could tow anti-tank guns, be mounted with light or heavy machine guns, or be turned into an ambulance. jeeps were used as command cars and to ferry airmen to their planes. Jeeps could even be equipped with rail wheels to pull box cars.
“It was just incredible the uses they did put to it,” Mr. Withrow said.
The vehicles would serve in every theater of operation in World War II. Jeeps pulled transport duty in Australia and crawled through snow in Alaska. They landed at Omaha Beach on D-Day and traversed the Burma road.
“To quote Eisenhower, ‘it was indispensable,’ ” said John Haas, a military history specialist at the Ohio History Connection. “They even used them on aircraft carriers to pull planes around.”
By the end of the war, Ford had built 278,000 jeeps. Toledo-based Willys-Overland, which had won the main contract, built 368,000. No other vehicle was produced in such numbers.
“It was the ubiquitous vehicle of the American Army in World War II,” said Peter Mansoor, a professor and military historian at the Ohio State University.
In 1953, the U.S. Army’s Quartermaster Corps published a book that recorded the organization’s experiences during WWII. Among the topics it discussed was the “instantaneous and sensational” success of the jeep.
“So versatile did it prove that its uses multiplied in a fashion never even dreamed of by its creators,” the book said, noting the jeep was on par with the B-17 Flying Fortress bomber and the Sherman tank.
Though Mr. Mansoor said it’s a stretch to suggest the jeep was key to winning the war, there’s no question it was a crucial tool for the Allies.
“It was easy to drive, it was fairly easy to maintain, it was rugged, and it was nearly indestructible,” he said.
Mr. Mansoor said the only American vehicle to rival and possibly exceed the jeep’s importance was the 2.5-ton cargo truck commonly known as the deuce-and-a-half. The six-wheel-drive trucks both moved troops and kept them supplied as they advanced across Europe.
But it was the jeep, not the deuce-and-a-half, that soldiers loved.
Bill Mauldin, an infantryman who became famous for his cartoons, featured the jeep in many of his panels. In one panel, a cavalry soldier shields his eyes as he prepares to put down his broken jeep the way you might do a horse with a broken leg. Panels like that show just how troops felt about their jeeps.
“It isn’t a figment of historical imagination,” Mr. Mansoor said. “It really was loved at the time, too.”
Contact Tyrel Linkhorn at tlinkhorn@theblade.com or 419-724-6134.
First Published August 7, 2016, 4:00 a.m.
