spun off as the General Products Division, then in 1971 was renamed AM General Corporation. AM General is still in business as a privately owned company and is headquartered in South Bend, Indiana, the old hometown of Studebaker’s military business. AM General’s best-known product today is the military Humvee, which comes in many variations.
118 Want to have a laugh? Watch the otherwise outstanding war movie Patton, starring George C. Scott. Although mostly accurate, you quickly notice that some of the World War II Jeeps are actually postwar models that were repainted Olive Drab. The producers probably hoped you wouldn’t notice.
119 Popular Science magazine came up with 1,001 possible peacetime jobs for the Jeep. Having had to come up with 1,001 facts about Jeep for this book, my sympathy goes out to them!
120 Despite claims of “Surplus Jeeps Selling for As Little As $25,” the actual selling prices of most surplus Jeeps averaged $400 to $600, according to an article written by US Army Lieutenant Colonel Manuel Conley. The key words in any selling headline is “As Little As,” because the ones that sold for that amount (assuming any actually were, which I doubt) were probably only good for scrap.
121 I almost forgot the 2007 military Jeep J-8. It’s easy to not know what a J-8 is because they were only produced in Egypt by a joint-venture company known as Arab American Vehicles (AAV). Originally set up in conjunction with American Motors, AAV produced the Wrangler and the prior-generation Cherokee for Middle East markets. Its original purpose was mainly to produce military vehicles for the Egyptian army. Originally it assembled the CJ-6, but it expanded in later years to other models, including a brawny version of the Jeep Wrangler TJL series (long wheelbase) called the J-8 (aka J8 MILSPEC). The neat thing about them is that they offered unique models such as an ambulance, pickup, and extended-wheelbase two-door.
Chapter 2
Willys and Kaiser Jeep Wagons, Pickups, Forward Controls, and FJs
Legend and Lore
122 When it came time to begin designing new civilian vehicles for the postwar era, Willys had neither a design office nor any staff to do the work; just a few men in the engineering department who had some experience in design. Because of this, industrial designer Brooks Stevens from Wisconsin was given the job of creating the designs for the postwar lineup, although he got it almost by accident. He’d written a magazine article presenting ideas for postwar Jeep-based civilian vehicles, and by chance Willys-Overland’s vice president of engineering Barney Roos saw the article. Roos had been worrying about finding a designer, and it was clear that the war would be over soon, so he contacted Stevens and, after an interview, put him on retainer to design new vehicles for Willys-Overland.
The first all-steel station wagon from an American producer was the 1946 Willys Jeep station wagon. Designer Brooks Stevens was instructed to keep the body lines flat and shallow. The steel sides were painted to resemble wood.
123 Prior to the war, Willys hadn’t produced the bodies for its American automobiles; it had purchased them from an outside supplier to save the cost of tooling and body-making machinery. Because of that, there wasn’t an easy way for the company to go back into production when the war ended. Ford and General Motors owned their own body-building companies, so they got back into production fairly quickly. But in Willys’ case, the independent companies that produced automobile bodies weren’t interested in working for such a small firm when they could easily get more lucrative contracts from bigger automakers.
This forced Willys to abandon the traditional passenger car business in favor of building something, anything, that it could produce on its own. For the time being, that would have to be the ex-military Jeep.
124 Willys management realized that the company couldn’t survive for very long by building only the small Jeeps, so they put Brooks Stevens to work designing a series of new, larger vehicles. The first of the “senior” Jeep vehicles to be put into production was the Willys Jeep station wagon, introduced for 1946. The Willys wagon was quickly followed by the Willys Jeep Panel Truck, which was a station wagon with steel sides rather than windows and with a regular monotone paint job rather than the faux wood scheme used on the station wagons.
This Willys wagon is on the assembly line in Toledo, Ohio. This appears to be the body-drop section of the plant.
125 People are often surprised to learn that all of the 1946 Willys Jeep station wagons and panel trucks are two-wheel drive only. Folks naturally assume that anything called a Jeep must have four-wheel drive. Nope. Willys management realized that, at that time, the market for four-wheel-drive vehicles was much smaller than the market for conventional cars, and they did their best to convince people that the Willys Station Wagon was simply a family car with utilitarian styling.
126 The third new senior Jeep model to be introduced was the Willys Jeep pickup truck, which was offered initially as a 1/2-ton model with two-wheel drive, or as a 1-ton four-wheel-drive model. Each of these trucks were powered by the Go-Devil fourbanger engine.
127 At first, Willys tried to emphasize the Willys-Overland company name for the wagons, rather than the Jeep brand. This was partly because it wanted to maintain Willys as a viable brand name in the event that it reentered the passenger car market (which management certainly planned to do as soon as it was possible). And this was partly because at the time the company felt that the public would only accept the Willys Universal (aka CJ-series) as a “real” Jeep. However, in time, the immense popularity of the Jeep brand convinced Willys to refer to its senior vehicles as Willys Jeep station wagons and trucks, which it did successfully.
These new Jeep vehicles are coming off the assembly line and ready to be driven to a storage lot.
128 Have you ever wondered why the postwar senior Jeep vehicles look the way they do? It wasn’t by accident; designer Brooks Stevens was instructed to keep the body lines flat and shallow, with no complex curves or deep-drawing shapes. The president of Willys-Overland at the time told him to design body panels that could be stamped out in a refrigerator factory because there was no other steel pressing equipment available.
129 Although many enthusiasts consider the Willys postwar station wagon to be a truck, the company usually referred to it as a passenger car. It was hard for management not to compete in the traditional car market. After all, the company had once been the number-three automaker in the world. Management wanted to keep a toe in the passenger car business at any cost, realizing it would help them when they were finally able to add passenger cars to the product line.
130 Many enthusiasts and historians believe that Willys came up with the idea of putting four-wheel drive in its station wagon all by itself, but that’s not the case. During 1948, the US Army asked Willys management if they could design, engineer, and build such a vehicle. The military was even then looking for more four-wheel-drive vehicles for various jobs that the MB couldn’t perform. In response, Willys engineers produced a prototype four-wheel-drive wagon for the army.
Although it doesn’t appear that the army thought enough of it to ask for more (in other words, offer a production contract), Willys felt the concept was a good one and rushed it into production for 1949. It gave the company and its dealers another product to sell, something that had no real competition.
