planes, all guns blazing. After one complete circle of the airfield they attacked planes parked on the perimeter; then they roared away into the comparative safety of the desert. The score: twenty-five planes destroyed, and a dozen damaged. The attacking force: seventy-five men and eighteen jeeps.

As the war progressed the jeep’s versatility seemed endless. Fitted out with stretchers, it became a frontline ambulance. A jeep plus a radio was a mobile command post. Jeeps hauled planes to dispersal bunkers. Soldiers raced them uphill, as in a famous cartoon by Bill Mauldin, to get hot radiator water for shaving. In the Philippines a jeep equipped with flanged wheels pulled a fifty-two-ton railroad supply train for nineteen miles at twenty miles an hour. When Patton’s armored divisions raced across France the lead vehicle, out in front of the foremost tanks, was often as not a jeep.

One of the permanent items of wartime mythology is the odyssey of two reporters, Daniel DeLuce and Darrell Berrigan, who drove their jeeps 1,300 miles out of Burma into India after the Japanese capture of Mandalay. On their arrival in Imphal, it was pointed out to them that there must be some mistake, since there were no roads in the area they had crossed. “Sh-h! Not so loud,” the Chicago Daily News quoted one of them as saying. “Our jeep hasn’t found out about roads yet, and we don’t want to spoil it.”

All things considered, it is not surprising that the jeep attained a unique place in the affection and confidence of the men who used it. What is surprising, and gives a special flavor to the jeep legend, is the intensely personal quality of the feelings it aroused. There is even a story of a corporal, found sitting in the charred wreckage of a jeep that had been shelled, who refused to be comforted by assurances that he would get a replacement, “But you don’t understand,” he said, between sobs, “I loved this one.”

The jeep was a vehicle for the young. At least you had to be limber and resilient to get in and out. or to survive many miles of jeep-borne travel. (The contortions required to climb into a jeep, for tight-skirted WACs and WAVEs, were a source of never-failing interest to admiring GIs.) There were only two ways to sit in a jeep, either bolt upright or slouched down to the middle of the backbone, and after a few hours neither was particularly comfortable. But jeeps were treated like treasured possessions, nonetheless. You couldn’t lock a jeep, since it had a small ignition switch in place of a key, and so you either had to chain it up or remove the distributor head. Enterprising jeep thieves were likely to carry spare distributor heads of their own.

The heart of the jeep was its engine, and the man who made that heart tick was the late Delmar G. Roos, known to automotive

engineers as Barney. Barney Roos had designed a 100-mile-an-hour Locomobile staff car in World War i. Later he became chief engineer for Fierce-Arrow, Marmon—where he designed the Marmon Straight 8—and Studebaker. When he came to Willys early in 1938 he was shown a four-cylinder engine that was being used in a Willys light car, and given the job of improving it.

What Barney Roos wanted was an engine that could develop (15 horsepower at 4,400 r.p.m. and run for 150 hours without failure. What he started with was an engine that developed 48 horsepower at 3,400 r.p.m., and could run continuously for only two to four hours. (For comparison, a 1939–40 Ford developed 60 horsepower at 3,500 r.p.m.) It used oil excessively, its bearings wore out fast, the water pump and cylinder head leaked, it shook loose its starter, and it had a congenital pre-ignition knock.

It took Barney Roos two years to perfect his engine, by a whole complex of revisions that included closer tolerances, tougher alloys, aluminum pistons, and a flywheel reduced in weight from fifty-seven to thirty-one pounds. He had also heard, by the time the job was done, that the Army was interested in a light vehicle. A homemade product called the “belly-Hopper,” a low springless platform on nine-inch airplane wheels, had in fact been built by Colonel Robert G. Howie and Master Sergeant Melvin C. Wiley. “It looked,” Roos said, “like a diving board on wheels.” It was too light for really rough terrain. It had to be transported from point to point by truck. It had virtually no ground clearance. But it was easy to conceal—and, above everything else, it had the power to stimulate the imagination.

Roos described his own ideas for a low-silhouette vehicle to Major General Walter G. Short, later to have the misfortune of commanding at Pearl Harbor. The Army had appointed a technical committee, which had tested small cars made by the American Bantam Company and arrived at specifications for a military vehicle. These called for four-wheel drive and a low speed of three miles an hour. Top weight was to be 1,000 pounds with a Goo-pound pay load. The first seventy vehicles were to be delivered within seventy-five days. Bids were requested of 135 manufacturers, but only two of them were interested, Bantam and Willys.

The Bantam response must have been one of the fastest on record. Plans and a bid were submitted in less than a week, and the first pilot model was completed in forty-nine days. Willys had asked for an extension of the contract time, and had been refused. Barney Roos knew the weight limit was impossible for his engine, but he also knew no similar engine was available that could match his for endurance and performance. He wanted to show the Army what Willys could do. Prodded, the Quartermaster Corps invited Willys to develop a model at its own expense and agreed to test it.