and the Bantam was finally completed and ready to go exactly one day before it had to be delivered to the army. Component suppliers were told that they would be allowed one hour each to road test the vehicle. Then it had to be delivered.
Teddy Roosevelt Jr. didn’t live to see the end of the war. He was the son of former President Theodore Roosevelt and the cousin of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Teddy went in with the first wave of troops on D-day despite being so crippled by arthritis he required a cane. This photo was taken shortly after the landing, mere weeks before he died of a heart attack.
13 Imagine this: Rather than shipping it in an enclosed trailer, the Bantam prototype was driven to the army’s test center at Camp Holabird, Maryland, from Butler, in western Pennsylvania. And this was in an era before major highways! It was a close call; the company met the army’s delivery deadline with only 15 minutes to spare.
So vital was the contract that the vehicle was driven by designer Karl Probst and Bantam president Frank Fenn. They started out slow to break in the engine, but they soon realized they weren’t going to make it in time unless they poured on the juice, so they began driving flat out across Pennsylvania.
14 Army Major Herbert Lawes, who had driven every military vehicle tested in the prior 20 years, test drove the first Bantam Jeep as soon as it was delivered to the army base. He declared, “This vehicle is going to be absolutely outstanding. I believe this unit will make history.”
15 After thorough testing by the army at the Maryland proving grounds, up and down many hills and through mud, sand, and muck, the military staff requested that the 69 additional vehicles ordered be fitted with engines of at least 40 hp. This forced Bantam to drop its own engine in favor of a Hercules-built four, which raised its costs for the vehicle and forced it to beef up the chassis, transmission, axles, and more.
The next series of Bantam Jeep vehicles were the BRC-60 pilot production vehicles, of which 69 were produced. The front fender is squared off and the body side is different from the Bantam Pilot Model.
16 Even though Bantam won the initial contract, the army asked for construction of competitive vehicles from Willys-Overland and Ford Motor Company because it worried greatly about Bantam’s ability to produce the volume of vehicles that might be needed. Bantam was, after all, just about the smallest automaker in America, and it was teetering on the verge of bankruptcy.
17 The Willys prototype was called the Quad; the Ford prototype was dubbed the Pygmy. They looked similar to the Bantam, and photos of each are often misidentified.
The army felt that the Ford Pygmy was better constructed and finished than the Willys Quad and the Bantam vehicle. However, with just 46 hp on tap from its ancient Ford tractor engine, it was clearly underpowered. The Willys had 60 hp and performed well but weighed a whopping 2,520 pounds, which was too far over the army’s weight requirement to be accepted.
The Ford GP proposal was well built but underpowered and did not perform as well as the Willys or even the Bantam.
The little Bantam, with just 40 hp available, had the lowest overall weight, and thus performed very well. Because of that, the Bantam remained a strong contender for the main contract for 15,000 vehicles. However, army officers still worried about Bantam’s ability to deliver large volumes of vehicles in an emergency.
The first Jeep proposal by Willys was the 1941 Quad. Reportedly two were built, but neither has survived, though at least one was still around in the mid-1950s.
18 When the army expressed its disappointment with the Willys Quad’s weight, Willys-Overland management realized it needed to have its engineers redesign the prototype to reduce weight or it would certainly lose the big contract. They came up with a new model called the Willys MA that weighed a few ounces less than the army’s revised weight goal of 2,150 pounds.
The simplest way to reduce the weight would have been to install a lighter engine, but that would have eliminated Willys’ one big advantage: power. So instead of doing that, the weight reduction was accomplished by completely redesigning the body and chassis, cutting many pounds in the process.
Engineers also cut the length of screws and bolts used in assembly, used smaller fasteners where possible, and specified higher-strength lower-weight steel in the frame and body panels. Barney Roos even weighed the paint used on each vehicle, deciding (according to legend) that one coat would have to do.
The redesigned vehicle made the weight requirement, though one officer joked that if dust had settled on the Willys it would have gone over the limit. With its potent Go-Devil engine in the lighter chassis, Willys easily outshone both Ford and Bantam and won the contract.
The Willys MA was an improvement over the Quad, and 1,555 were produced for the army. However, the MA was significantly over the weight limit imposed by the military, so Willys’ engineers set to work reducing its weight.
19 Despite having invented the Jeep, Bantam Motors was given contracts for fewer than 2,800 units in all. After that, it was locked out of further orders, not even being allowed to be one of the backup, or supplemental, suppliers, as Ford was. The company was given contracts to assemble military trailers instead. After the war, Bantam did not return to building automobiles.
This Ford GP is undergoing tests at Fort Hood, Texas.
20 Okay, so the big question that everyone asks is this: Where did the Jeep name come from? Over the years, I must have been asked this question a couple of dozen times. The fact is that people can’t seem to agree on it. One thing that I can verify is that the Jeep name existed years before the well-known vehicle first appeared, though it wasn’t capitalized. The name came about as a slurring by soldiers of the initials GP, which is military speak for a “General Purpose” vehicle. The Jeep name had been around for years, mostly in military circles. In the 1930s, a motorized military tractor, nicknamed jeep, was used to haul big guns, along with various other military trucks and vehicles. There was even a small military plane nick-named Jeep.
21 The only civilian use of the Jeep name prior to World War II that I’ve been able to find was for a fictional creature named “Eugene the Jeep” that appeared for a time in the popular cartoon strip “Popeye.” Eugene the Jeep was a mysterious animal with magical abilities, including being able to get out of any situation and to go through any obstacle. Eugene usually proved to be invaluable to Popeye and Olive Oyl, often leading them on fantastic adventures and getting them out of dangerous situations.
Initially, Willys produced its Jeep MAs alongside its passenger cars, as seen here, but by mid-January 1942 only Jeep vehicles were in production.
22 So how did the Jeep name come to be associated with Willys-Overland? In February 1941, Willys-Overland’s public relations people showed off the company’s new MB military scout car (the successor to the Willys MA) to a group of reporters. Journalist Katharine Hillyer was driven
