In November 1938, the German War Ministry handed Colonel Adolf von Schell a list and a mission. The list contained 114 types of trucks and 52 types of cars, all in military service at the same time, each requiring its own spare parts, trained mechanics, and filing systems. Schell was ordered to cut the list down. The plan he delivered four months later retained just 19 trucks and 30 cars, and it went into effect on January 1, 1940.
Companies that did not conform were shut down. Two motorcycle manufacturers, one in Chemnitz and another in Bohemia, ceased to exist under the plan a year and a half later. On the other side of the Atlantic, an army with no such plan and no legal authority to dictate what any car company could build sent specifications to 135 American firms and gave them 11 days to respond. The vehicle that resulted from that request was assembled 626,000 times according to a single design.
Any part from any one of those vehicles would fit any other on any battlefield, regardless of which factory assembled it. Germany implemented its standardization plan first, but Germany ended the war operating more than 100 vehicle types anyway. By the summer of 1944, Wehrmacht soldiers in northern France were being photographed sitting in captured American quarter-ton trucks, smiling and pointing at the white star for the camera. The German army had started building toward its own solution four years before Schell received his list.
The standard vehicle program of 1934 aimed to give the Wehrmacht three classes of chassis: light, medium, and heavy. All were to have four-wheel drive, independent suspension at every wheel, and were to be made from domestic raw materials as required by the Four Year Plan. The lightest class was intended to perform the same work that the Jeep would later do. Steyr delivered the first light vehicles in 1936.
The medium class followed a year later, and the heavy class arrived the year after that. Over its lifetime, the program produced roughly 60,000 vehicles across the three classes, plus about 13,000 six-wheeled trucks. It was a serious piece of military engineering, drawn up before anyone in Detroit had begun thinking about the problem. From the first drawing, however, it demanded more than the industry tasked with building it could provide.
The light vehicle weighed 3,900 pounds empty. That was its weight with nothing in it—no crew, no fuel, no equipment. The American vehicle that performed the same job later weighed 2,300 pounds, and a large part of that difference lay in the German specifications themselves, which required four-wheel steering. No single company could build the light vehicle in the required numbers, so the task was assigned to three firms at once, each with the same blueprints.
Each then distributed the manufacturing of its components among its own suppliers, and each installed an engine from its own civilian lineup. Steyr, Hanomag, and the Eisenach factories produced light vehicles that matched on the outside and differed completely on the inside. The program’s goal had been to simplify supply. It ended up relying on three types of steering, three engines, and a set of blueprints that no one actually followed.
The three classes never covered demand either. Throughout the entire rearmament period, the German army had to source about 60 percent of its vehicle needs outside the program. Officially, these were called supplementary vehicles, a polite name for a fleet no one had chosen. None of this would have mattered much if the vehicles themselves had been accepted.
In 1942, the army asked its units what they thought of the light off-road vehicle, the one built to be the German Jeep, and 90 percent of them answered that it was unfit for wartime service. The medium class was rejected by 80 percent. The complaints were consistent: weight, fuel consumption, cracked frames, and suspension failures under the vehicle’s own bulk. A simplified version without four-wheel steering had appeared two years earlier, but it was not enough.
Production of the heavy class ended in 1941. The light class ended production in that same year the survey was taken, and the medium class a year after that. So the Wehrmacht fought its war with a car designed by Ferdinand Porsche around the Volkswagen. At the request of the ordnance officer in January, four years before that survey, the army wanted the vehicle to full specifications, including four soldiers at a weight under 2,100 pounds, making the vehicle itself weigh little more than half that.
Porsche delivered a prototype within a month. Pre-production vehicles entered Poland with the invasion in September. They came back with two demands against them, so they were equipped with geared hubs at the wheels that raised the chassis off the ground and let the vehicle crawl at walking speed alongside infantry. The Kübelwagen weighed 1,600 pounds empty, one-third lighter than the American quarter-ton truck, and it ran on two-wheel drive.
In winter trials against several four-wheel-drive vehicles, it outperformed them all, partly because its flat underbody let it slide over snow and sand like a sled rather than dig into it. Fifty thousand four hundred thirty-five vehicles came off the line. Their bodies were pressed in Berlin by a company owned by Americans. Here is the detail that spoils the tidy version of the story.
A four-wheel-drive version of the Kübelwagen did exist. Six prototypes were built and driven. They outperformed the standard vehicle, but the army rejected them because the extra drive system was costly, added weight, and consumed too much fuel. Instead, that chassis went to the Schwimmwagen amphibian, of which the Germans built more than 15,000, out-producing the American amphibious Jeep.
A four-wheel-drive command version was produced in fewer than 700 units and went to senior officers who could get almost anywhere with them. When British engineers at Humber disassembled a captured Kübelwagen in 1943, their report found no special genius in it beyond a few details and advised British industry not to regard it as a first-rate modern design. American military manuals on German forces, printed in March 1945, described it as inferior in almost every respect except seat comfort. Both reports assessed the design.
Neither team was asked how many vehicles were coming off the production lines. The jeep that the Americans built ended the war as the vehicle the enemy could not replicate. But the American side of this story starts from a worse position than the German one. At the end of World War I, American forces overseas were running 216 makes and models of motor vehicles with nowhere near enough to keep them operational.
The officer in charge of the Holabird depot reported in 1935 that 360 models then in army service required nearly a million spare parts that no one could control. Congress had made matters worse by law. Every additional purchase was subject to open bidding, and the army had to accept the lowest bids that met specifications, which nearly always meant choosing a different factory. This was the army that in the summer of 1940 invented the quarter-ton class out of nothing and wrote its specifications: an empty weight of 1,300 pounds, a payload of up to one-third ton, a wheelbase of 75 inches later extended to 80, a track width of no more than 47 inches, four-wheel drive, three seats, a foldable windshield, 49 days from award to a prototype, and 75 days to produce 70 more.
Two companies responded. One, American Bantam Car of Butler, Pennsylvania, submitted a complete set of engineering drawings. The company’s chief engineer brought in an independent Detroit designer named Karl Probst, who initially refused the work, then agreed to do it without pay at the army’s request. He finished the full drawings in two days.
The completed vehicle arrived at the testing ground at Camp Holabird at 4:30 on the afternoon of September 23, half an hour before the deadline. The War Department then took those drawings and handed them to Ford and Willys on the grounds that the government owned every design submitted in a competition. Bantam did not go to war because of that decision. It was a harsh act against a company that had done nothing wrong.
What followed was four years of absolute power exercised over private corporations. An army with no legal control over its industry somehow got better results from Detroit than a dictatorship in Stuttgart could get from its own manufacturers. In January 1941, the supply committee recommended that the quarter-ton vehicle become identical across all manufacturers. In July, the War Department selected one of them, Willys, for its engine power, price, and lower design, then ordered the winner to incorporate the best features of Ford and Bantam.
In October, with the winning factory unable to keep up, Ford was ordered to build 30,000 vehicles according to its competitor’s drawings, specifications, and engine. Ford instead offered to expand and improve its own engine. The government refused. No licensing fees went to the design’s owner from Ford or the government.
Ford re-equipped its plants at a cost of $4 million and finished its first vehicle on January 2, 1942. The supply officers did not stop there. They ordered Ford to spread the work across several factories instead of concentrating it, so the vehicles were shipped from three coasts. Ford built them in Dearborn, Louisville, Dallas, Chester, Richmond, and for four months in Edgewater.
The bodies came from one outside supplier, the wheels from another, the axles from a third. From January 1944, both factories used the same body built by the same company in Indiana. Dallas and Louisville ended the war within 400 vehicles of each other. Nothing in that sequence was clever engineering.
Every part of it was a procurement office dictating to major companies what to build, whose designs to use, and which of their competitors’ parts to install. Germany, which had allowed its industry since 1933 to build only the trucks approved by the German army, never did this with cars. Schell’s plan reduced the list of types. It never once required two competitors to build the same machine down to the smallest screw.
By the summer of the Normandy campaign, an American infantry regiment had about 145 of them. Enough of the enemy had seen them that a belief took hold in the German army that every soldier on the other side had been issued one. That belief had a price, and the bill came due in the Ardennes. In late October 1944, Otto Skorzeny was given six weeks to form a brigade that would cross the front disguised in enemy uniform and drive enemy vehicles.
He requested 20 Sherman tanks and received two, only one of which was operational according to his account. He requested 247 Jeeps. He received about 30 of them. The reason is worth considering.
The combat units that captured Jeeps refused to hand them over to Skorzeny or anyone else, and recovery detachments went out and seized 15 more. The rest of the brigade moved with Panthers and assault guns covered in sheet metal and olive paint, which Skorzeny admitted would fool only the youngest American soldiers seeing them from a distance at night. The command teams that did get Jeeps fell victim to arithmetic. American crews rode two per Jeep and regulations forbade more than three, while the German teams packed in four.
One of them asked for fuel. There are two matters in this story that cannot be confirmed. The claim that German generals admired the Jeep more than anything else in the enemy arsenal comes from Hugh Cole, the military historian who interviewed them after the surrender. But it circulates as a single sentence from an interview rather than a written text, and the original interrogation transcript has never surfaced.
Meanwhile, the Foreign Equipment volumes of the Ordnance Office included a section for motor vehicles kept as loose-leaf pages with printed instructions to insert each new arrival in the index to verify completeness. It is not known whether the quarter-ton vehicle was ever entered there. The company that designed the vehicle in two days built 2,605 of them and then spent the rest of the war making trailers to be towed behind other people’s vehicles. In 1948, the Federal Trade Commission agreed that the idea had come from Bantam and ordered Willys to stop claiming it had created the vehicle.
Bantam was bankrupt by 1950. Willys was granted the trademark the same year. A supply lieutenant named Hogan said this in the fall of 1941 while the dispute was still raging: “No individual or manufacturer can claim credit for the design, which leaves the whole thing in a curious position. ” The vehicle that no country, company, or individual could claim to have invented was the one the other side could not copy, and the reason was never the machine itself.
It had come together in a procurement office no one mentions, keeping a classification that had not existed 18 months earlier, telling three companies which of their competitors’ bolts would be used in it. There is not a single German document that proposes anything of the sort. No German figure ever emerged showing how many American vehicles their army eventually drove. Two governments made the same plan four years apart, and only one of them was able to carry it out.
The proof is not in a battle. It is in the spare parts list.