Jeep vehicles helped the Allies win World War II

Before there were Frazer automobiles in 1946, there were “Frazer jeeps,” military vehicles manufactured by Willys-Overland in Toledo, Ohio, that “fought in” World War II. 

Joseph W. Frazer, who was in charge of production at Willys-Overland in the years leading up to the United States’ involvement in the global conflict, answered the call from the Army Quartermaster Corps in 1940.

 

The Army needed a manufacturer of “general purpose” military vehicles for the war effort. The government issued specifications for “a light, motorized, four-wheel drive, go-anywhere vehicle to support infantry and cavalry troops.” 

Essentially, these vehicles needed to be “faithful as a dog, strong as a mule, as agile as a goat and …capable of carrying twice what it was designed for…and still keep going” – in the words of legendary war correspondent Ernie Pyle.

 

Only two companies responded to the bid request – American Bantam of Butler, Pa., and Willys-Overland Motors of Toledo, Ohio. 

American Bantam Car Company (formerly American Austin Car Company) had been resurrected from bankruptcy in 1935) by Roy Evans, a former salesman for Austin. The Army awarded the contract to Evans, who was to build 70 vehicles for testing. They were called “Blitz Buggies” and later “BRCs” (Bantam Reconnaissance Cars). 

By July of 1941, “it was clear that American Bantam couldn’t cope with contractual obligations,” so the Army asked Willys-Overland to also engage in producing the vehicles. 

Frazer called them “jeeps,” taken from the company’s version of a “G.P.” – short for “General Purpose” military utility vehicle. 

When Japan bombed Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, the United States was dragged into World War II, and the Army immediately needed more equipment and men. 

To move jeeps to the troops as fast as possible, the U.S. military increased its order to Willys-Overland and then gave Ford contracts to build thousands of vehicles that mirrored the Willys-Overland jeep model. 

Over the next few years, both companies were producing jeeps at a rate of “one every 90 seconds” during the war. 

Lt. Col. Darrin Haas of the Tennessee National Guard, writing for Citizen-Soldier Magazine, said that during the war years, Willys-Overland built 359,874 jeeps while Ford produced 285,660. 

Bantam contributed 2,676 of its vehicles for the war effort, with most serving British and Russian forces. “The Army threw the little company a bone with a contract to build the trailers that hauled equipment behind jeeps,” Haas reported.

 

“Soldiers raved about the jeeps and their versatility on the battlefield. Jeeps delivered troops and supplies and also served as a weapons platform,” Haas said. “Chaplains celebrated communion on the flat hood and officers used it to brief battle plans or stand atop it to address their troops. The engine manifold was often used to heat C-ration cans, and if a little water was drained from the radiator, it could be used for hot water to shave.” 

Haas added: “Jeeps were also modified to plow snow; operate in the desert; function as an ambulance, tractor or firetruck; lay telephone cable; and operate as a generator. Indeed, if given the right wheels, the jeep could be reconfigured as a small railroad engine. Jeeps were small enough to be loaded on aircraft and even fit in gliders for the D-Day invasion. They were customized to provide any need.” 

Army Gen. George C. Marshall said: “Jeep was America’s greatest contribution to modern warfare.”

 

Army Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe, said, in effect, that “we could not have won World War II without the jeep.”

 

Dr. Manuel “Mickey” Conley of Fayetteville, N.C., who served as an Army lieutenant colonel, once added: “Versatile, reliable and virtually indestructible, this magic motor vehicle bounced to glory as one of World War II’s most enduring legends.” 

One jeep that was assigned to the Marine Corps in the South Pacific received a Purple Heart (the military decoration awarded to those wounded or killed while serving with the U.S. military). The vehicle was fondly known as “Old Faithful.” 

Built by Willys-Overland, “Old Faithful” was the first Marine Corps jeep to land on Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands on Aug. 7, 1942, near Lunga Point. 

In October 1942, “Old Faithful,” received two shrapnel wounds (holes in its windshield) while being shelled by a Japanese battleship.

 

Volume 27 of the Army Ordnance in 1944 reported that the jeep also was one of the first vehicles involved in the invasion of the island of Bougainville, where it served as the command car for military brass, logging more than 11,000 miles through jungle terrain as a command car.

 “Old Faithful” was retired after 18 months of active service by an official Marine Corps’ order on Dec. 22, 1943. The citation stated that “this jeep’s motor, which has never been overhauled, purrs as smoothly today as it did” upon arrival in the Pacific. 

Back in the United States, “Old Faithful” was re-purposed to make special appearances to support the War Bonds effort. 

The “oldest surviving original jeep” from the World War II era is named “Gramps.” It was built in 1940 by American Bantam Car Company of Butler, Pa.

 

In 2020, the Senator John Heinz History Center in Pittsburgh, Pa., an affiliate of the Smithsonian Institution, held a big 80th birthday bash for “Gramps.” Give it an asterisk, however. 

“Gramps” wasn’t really a jeep. It was a “Blitz Buggy,” built by Bantam and delivered on Nov. 29, 1940. 

What “resonates eternal” about “jeep, the vehicle,” are the words attributed to Army Pvt. Jesse Wolf, who wrote this poem while fighting in Belgium during World War II:

 

When the war was at its hottest

And the going got too steep,

One pal that I could count on

Was the mighty little Jeep.

 

Through beachhead hell, through fire,

Our metal mounts would leap;

With strictly GI courage,

I won’t forget the Jeep.

 

And now the war is over.

The one thing I will keep

For farm and field and hunting –

That’s my buddy, Willy Jeep.

 

 

Jeep stories just keep on coming… 

Jeep is an acronym, according to veterans who served in World War II. It was a term for the new spunky, go-anywhere, do-anything military vehicle. 

Soldiers said the vehicle’s stripped-down simplicity was so austere, its name – jeep – stood for “just enough essential parts.” 

Indeed, the small four-wheel drive buggy was also described as a “sardine can on wheels.” 

There has always been a lot of “curiosity” about how the word “jeep” came to be…and then when and how “jeep” became “Jeep.” 

As a publicity stunt, U.S. Sen. James M. Mead, D-New York, was put behind the wheel to demonstrate the buggy’s impressive off-road capabilities. U.S. Rep. J. Parnell Thomas, R-New Jersey, rode shotgun.

 

With photographers’ flash bulbs popping, Sen. Mead drove the vehicle up the granite steps outside the U.S. Capitol. 

Reporter Katharine Hillyer asked Willys-Overland’s chief test driver Irving “Red” Hausmann: “What is that thing?” Hausmann replied: “It’s a jeep.” 

The photo appearing in The Washington Daily News on Feb. 21, 1941, bore the caption: “Jeep Creeps Up Capitol Steps.” This was the event that set the word “jeep” in the minds of a nation. 

Hausmann recalled that he had heard soldiers at the Army’s Camp Holabird motor transport training center in Baltimore, Md., refer to the protype as a “jeep.” That’s probably true. 

“Jeep is an old Army ‘grease monkey term’ used by shop mechanics in referring to any new motor vehicle received for a test,” said Army Maj. E. P. Hogan, who wrote a history of the development of the jeep for the Army’s Quartermaster Review in 1941. 

Hogan opted to call the vehicle a “bug.” Others preferred “peep.” 

Willys-Overland Motors fell in love with the name “Jeep” and filed for a trademark in 1943, but the filing was contested. 

“Not surprisingly, that drew the ire of management at the American Bantam Company who, having arguably laid much of the groundwork in 1940-41 that led to the Willys jeep, felt Bantam deserved recognition for its pioneering efforts,” said Alex Kefford, an automotive writer based in Bicester, Oxfordshire, England. 

“Equally maligned, however, was another player, one whose claim to the ‘Jeep’ name is often overlooked by history,” he said. 

That company was Minneapolis-Moline (M-M), a tractor and farm implement machinery producer based in Hopkins, Minn.

 

In 1940, M-M began developing four-wheel drive versions of its tractors for the Army. 

Sgt. James T. O’Brien of the Minnesota National Guard was responsible for testing M-M’s UTX “prime mover” reconnaissance vehicles at Camp Ripley. 

He sent a communique to the company stating: “One evening in a gathering of enlisted men, it was suggested that a short descriptive name be found for these vehicles, such names as “alligators” and “swamp rabbits.” 

“I brought forth the name ‘Jeep’ as a result of reading ‘Popeye the Sailor Man’ (comics), in which ‘Eugene the Jeep’ appears as a character,” O’Brien wrote. Like “Eugene the Jeep,” the M-M vehicles “would go where you would least expect them to go.”

 

“This name was unanimously accepted, and ‘Jeep’ was painted on the vehicles.” 

Just FYI: Popeye started out as a civilian mariner, but as of 1937, Popeye was firmly in the Coast Guard. He joined the Navy in 1941, donning “the distinctive white crackerjack uniform.”

Evidence shows ‘lost colonists’ moved to inland regions

Some historians believe that after North Carolina’s “lost colonists” abandoned Roanoke Island, a group of the English people may have journeyed a good distance inland in the late 1580s. 

One theory is that they traveled west through the Albemarle Sound to join the Algonquian-speaking Chowanoac (Choanoke) tribe that lived along both banks of the Chowan River.

 

“At the time of Sir Walter Raleigh’s colonization efforts at Roanoke Island, the Chowanoac were probably the most powerful of the Carolina Algonquians,” commented historian Philip S. McMullan Jr. 

Writing for PBS North Carolina in 2020, Frank Graff reported that the First Colony Foundation discovered “compelling evidence that settlers from the English colony lived at a site along Salmon Creek, near the Chowan River in Bertie County, for several years.” 

Excavations at two locations near Merry Hill found “ceramic pieces that archaeologists identified as Elizabethan artifacts used during the time the colonists were settling on the coast,” Graff wrote. 

A foundation spokesperson said: “We all agree that this is not the major relocation site of the Lost Colony, but a satellite site.” 

Another faction of the original colonists apparently traveled across the Pamlico Sound and up the Pamlico River to settle in the Chocowinity area of Beaufort County. 

About 1,100 people live in Chocowinity today, and about half of them have surnames associated with the English colonists, researchers point out. 

The prevailing “Lost Colony” story is that the first English colonists were taken under the wing of the Croatoans – Manteo’s people – and became united as a village at Hatteras Island. It is here that English and Native American cultures first merged, McMullan said. 

Hamilton McMillan (1837-1916) was a popular North Carolina legislator who believed that the Lumbee tribe of Native Americans in Robeson County descended from the Croatoans. This theory has some “soft spots.”

 

For one, it’s a long, long way from Roanoke Island near the Virginia border to Robeson County, which abuts South Carolina. Traveling by water, it’s a tricky journey. 

Historian David Stick (1919-2009) of Kitty Hawk gently questioned how the Croatoans could have “connected” with Lumbees.

 

“Though it’s possible that some of (the Croatoans) ended up in Robeson County, it is more probable that their destination was the Chowan River area,” Stick said. The Lumbees are more directly related to the Cheraw, Cherokee and Tuscarora tribe, he said. 

Dr. David Beers Quinn (1909-2002) was an Irish historian who theorized that the colonists moved north toward Chesapeake Bay, seeking to build a settlement near Lynnhaven, Va.

 

Most likely, Dr. Quinn suggested, the Englishmen were killed by native warriors under the command of Chief Powhatan, who “was the supreme ruler of most of the indigenous tribes in the Chesapeake Bay region.” 

Zebulon B. Vance, who represented North Carolina in the U.S. Senate in 1884, was the first to attempt to commemorate the Roanoke Island colony as a “national treasure.” He introduced a bill in Congress to fund the acquisition of a small tract at the site for the placement of a monument to Raleigh’s colonists. 

The bill died in committee, likely due to the concerns of Kansas Senator John J. Ingalls, a native of Massachusetts, who believed any emphasis on Roanoke Island “would detract from the attention paid to Plymouth Rock,” settled by the Pilgrims in 1620. 

In 1935, this marker was erected on Roanoke Island, one of the very first installed as part of the North Carolina's new state highway historic marker program.

In 1941, the National Park Service established the Fort Raleigh National Historic Site at Roanoke Island, and it is administered today under the umbrella of Cape Hatteras National Seashore.

Did some or all ‘Lost Colonists’ go to the ‘other Croatoan?’

What really happened to the “Lost Colonists” from Roanoke Island, N.C.? 

When the colonial governor John White returned from England in 1590 to look for 117 colonists, he found the fort was deserted and the village erased. The settlers left him a “message” carved in wood that their destination was “CROATOAN.”

 

White knew that Croatoan was the homeplace of the native Manteo, who was so friendly and helpful to the colonists. But White never journeyed the 50 or so miles to Croatoan (Hatteras) to check on things in 1590. 

High winds and stormy weather in the Pamlico Sound as well as a cranky sea captain were to blame. The pilot sailed the ship out to sea and back to England. 

More than a century had passed before John Lawson, the English explorer, surveyor and author, visited Croatoan around 1701 to interview the “Hatteras natives.” They shared that several of their ancestors were white.

 

Lawson wrote that the natives “could talk in a book (read), as we do. The truth of which is confirmed by gray eyes being found frequently amongst these Indians.” 

Philip S. McMullan Jr., a historian from Hertford, N.C., observed that Croatoan “was very exposed” to the sea and did not offer much protection from invasion by Spanish sailors. 

Additionally, McMullan said, “These sandy banks could not feed a large group of colonists. Most of the colonists are more likely to have gone to a safer place with potential for feeding the colony.”

 

Another clue uncovered by historians throughout the years is White’s acknowledgement that the colonial leaders had discussed the desirability of moving “50 miles into the maine,” as in “mainland.” 

Apparently, White didn’t consider or even know about the “other place” named “Croatoan.” 

Philip Howard, an Ocracoke historian, cited an article published in The Virginian-Pilot in 1960. It revealed that “Croatoan” also referred to a region on the mainland west of Roanoke Island.

 

The way to get to this Croatoan from Roanoke Island was to sail north through “the narrows” into the Albemarle Sound and travel to the west around Durant Island, then go south, up the Alligator River. 

Proceed to Milltail Creek. Located about 10 miles up Milltail Creek in the middle of the deep woods was a village named Beechland. 

Marshall Layton Twiford (1876-1963) told The Virginian-Pilot that about everybody in Beechland had kinfolk who came from the Roanoke Island colony.

 

Mary Wood Long (1919-98) of Rock Hill, S.C., performed for many summers as Queen Elizabeth in Paul Green’s outdoor drama, “The Lost Colony.” She did a lot of research about Beechland. 

Long said that “the settlers found a grove of beech trees on a sandy ridge…approximately 11 feet above sea level…near an exceptional juniper swamp bearing giants of the forest comparable to the redwood forests of the West.”

 

“The land was rich in game; deer and bear were the most prevalent of the large animals, but smaller game such as raccoon, opossum, squirrel, rabbit, muskrat, mink and otters could be found. Wild turkeys were in the trees, and waterfowl and migratory birds crossed the mainland in season,” Long wrote. 

“Fish could be taken in the small streams and lakes as well as in the nearby (Alligator) river and sounds. Oysters, shrimp and clams were close at hand, in Long Shoal Bay” in the Pamlico Sound. 

“Wild berry vines were trained over fences, and swamp shrubs were planted as hedgerows, as in England. Bees filled the sweet gum trees.” 

Life in Beechland was good. 

“These settlers were inaccessible by choice; and research provided no records of their birth, death, marriage or property ownership,” Long said. 

McMullan said Long reviewed oral history reports from Beechland descendants. “She learned that they raised livestock, hunted, fished, cut juniper trees and made shingles” – without ever being discovered by tax collectors or census takers. 

McMullan also cited reports from Judge Charles Harry Whedbee (1911-90) of Greenville, who wrote about “a tribe of fair-skinned, blue-eyed Indians” at Beechland. 

Whedbee was the first to publish the story of a burial ground and the cypress coffins that were unearthed accidentally by bulldozers in the 1950s, according to McMullan. 

“The coffins were made in a form that can he best described as two canoes,” facing each other, Whedbee wrote.

Long said that “Beechland came to depend on stout boats of their own making for contact with the outside world.” They built up a brisk trade – bartering their cypress shingles, barrel staves and farm produce in the West Indies, sailing to Barbados, Jamaica and the Bahamas. 

She said: “They sailed home with sugar, salt, flour, coffee, cloth, rum and anything that would add to a more comfortable life at Beechland.” 

Howard said: “For many generations, Beechland flourished. At long last, tradition says, there came a day when the people paid little heed to spiritual things.”

Philip Howard

 

In the 1830s, the story goes: “Preacher Charles Mann went to Beechland to see for himself the life of the people. He noticed the absence of the Bible and heard no one speak of the love of God or the salvation of the soul. Preacher Mann warned the people that if they did not turn to the ways of God, the devil would take them.” 

McMullen said that some time after the clergyman’s visit, “a terrible plague they called the ‘Black Tongue’ appeared.” Most likely, it was brought into the community from the Bahamas. 

“The people were stricken, and many died. The settlement was decimated, and the people remembered the preacher and his warnings. By 1850, only Trimmergin Sanderlin’s family remained.” 

Tramasquecock was a Native American village on the opposite side of the Alligator River, roughly in the vicinity of Buck Ridge and Gum Neck. It is believed that some of the colonists went there, too, because of the abundance of the sassafras trees.

 

Sassafras was highly valuable, because “Europeans believed sassafras cured syphilis,” stated Scott Huler of Raleigh, an author and journalist. 

Huler said Frederick Lawson Willard (1940-2017), who founded the Lost Colony Center for Science and Research, believed the harvesting of sassafras was the “primary motivator for Sir Walter Raleigh of England to build a colony in the New World.”

 

McMullen said that in 1602 “Raleigh chartered Samuel Mace to look for the colonists and to gather sassafras and other valuable goods for sale in England.” 

Mace did not find the colonists, but he returned with a boatload of sassafras, which made a fortune for Sir Walter Raleigh.

Shopping carts were first rolled out at Piggly Wiggly

In 1936, a Piggly Wiggly grocery store owner in Oklahoma City invented the shopping cart. The contraption was initially termed a “roll’er basket.” 

Sylvan Goldman came up with the idea for the shopping cart while observing his customers lugging their groceries around his store in hand-held baskets.

 

“People had a tendency to stop shopping when the baskets became too full or too heavy,” he said. 

Goldman and Fred Young, a mechanically inclined maintenance employee, started tinkering. The duo developed a cart with wheels that supported two baskets. By golly, customers could double their shopping pleasure. 

Goldman placed an advertisement in the Oklahoma City newspapers, showing a woman exhausted by the weight of her shopping basket. “It’s new – it’s sensational. No more baskets to carry,” the ad said, referring to the new shopping cart. Ta-Da. 

But the launch turned out to be a flop. Customers didn’t want to use the new invention. Men thought they would appear “weak” using the carts; women thought the basket carts were unfashionable, “like pushing a baby buggy around in the store.”

 

Goldman hired male and female models of differing ages to push the rolling carts around in his store, pretending to be shopping. It worked. Soon, the carts were a big hit. 

By the end of 1937, Goldman established a separate company to manufacture carts for the Piggly Wiggly and Humpty Dumpty stores that he owned in Oklahoma City as well as other supermarket chains.

 

It was reported that by 1940, many companies were on a seven-year waiting list for the new shopping carts. (Goldman’s shopping cart production business evolved into Unarco Industries LLC, based in Wagoner, Okla.) 

It was also during 1940 that a shopping cart graced the cover of the Saturday Evening Post.

 

“The winds of change began to blow through supermarkets as the layout of aisles were changed, along with the design of the checkout counter,” commented a grocery industry spokesperson. “Supermarkets were totally revamped to accommodate shopping carts.” 

In 1946, Orla Watson, a machine shop owner in Kansas City, Mo., noticed the huge space taken up by shopping carts in front of stores. He invented carts could be fitted into one another, or nested, for compact storage.

 

Rohin Dhar of Priceonomics, based in San Francisco, said: “Few inventions have so profoundly shaped consumer habits. With the exception of the automobile, the shopping cart is the most commonly used ‘vehicle’ in the world. Some 25 million grace grocery stores across the United States alone.” 

He said the shopping cart “has played a major role in enriching the forces of capitalism, increasing our buying output – and for its role, it was dubbed the ‘greatest development in the history of merchandising.’” 

In a contemporary world, Sissi Cao of Observer Media in New York City identified Stephan Schambach of Germany as the “inventor of online shopping carts.”

 

“In the mid-1990s, during the height of Silicon Valley’s first dot-com boom, Schambach built the first e-commerce software, called ‘Intershop Online.’ It was the backbone of all shopping websites,” Cao wrote. 

“While online shopping was already changing the entire economy, the coronavirus pandemic put the transition into hyperdrive,” she said. 

According to Frans Van De Schootbrugge of Publicis Sapient, a digital consulting group headquartered in Boston, Mass., “online shopping volumes have more than doubled for grocery retailers in the wake of COVID-19.” 

“In order for grocers to remain competitive, investment in reshaping the business and embracing a digital-first mindset now is critical to owning a share of the market.”

Tracking down origin of ‘Piggly Wiggly’ is an adventure

How did Piggly Wiggly get its name? Nobody ever got a straight answer from the company founder Clarence Saunders, but he sure had fun with it. 

According to journalist Ralph Schwartz, Saunders prepared a newspaper advertisement to run a few days before the grand opening of the first Piggly Wiggly store in 1916 in Memphis, Tenn. 

The ad copy read: “Piggly Wiggly... ain’t that a funny name? The fellow that got up that name must have a screw loose somewheres.”

Saunders would later comment: “It took me two hours to find a name that was ridiculous enough” to be talked about, laughed at, remembered…and loved. 

Memphis historian Mike Freeman offered clues in other conversations involving Saunders that the name came “from out of chaos” and was “plucked from originality.” 

Freeman, in his book “Clarence Saunders and the Founding of Piggly Wiggly,” published in 2011, speculated that Saunders may have been inspired by the old nursery rhyme “Higgledy Piggledy, my fat hen; she lays eggs for gentlemen.”

 

Or perhaps the name was related to “Uncle Wiggily’s Adventures,” a series of children’s stories by Howard R. Garis that premiered in 1910. Saunders may have read these books with his three children (born between 1903 and 1912). 

Uncle Wiggily Longears is the main character, an engaging elderly rabbit, who is lame from rheumatism. Wherever he goes, he always relies on “his candy-striped walking cane.”

 

There’s no question, Clarence Saunders found a name so unique it would stick in your head, Freeman wrote. 

And “Mr. Pig,” Piggly Wiggly’s mascot – a faithful, ever-smiling anthropomorphic pig with the small butcher’s hat – has been there right along since the very beginning, said Al Hunter, a freelance writer.

 

“Porky Pig,” the famous animated character in the Warner Bros. “Looney Tunes” and “Merrie Melodies” series of cartoons, was the first character created by the studio in 1935. “Hence, Mr. Pig came first,” Hunter asserted. “Mr. Pig is the original.” 

(For a few years, Porky was romantically inclined toward “Petunia Pig,” who came along in 1937, but their relationship faded away.)

 

Another famous animated member of the swine family, of course, is “Miss Piggy,” the Muppet character with the big hair. She debuted for Jim Henson in 1976 and “has been notable for her temperamental diva superstar personality.”

 

Mr. Pig made his first appearance in a television advertising campaign for Piggly Wiggly in 1998, and he was noticeably thinner, promoting a healthy lifestyle. 

Now in 2022, Piggly Wiggly LLC exists as an affiliate of C&S Wholesale Grocers, Inc., headquartered in Keene, N.H. 

Today, there are more than 530 Piggly Wiggly independently owned and operated stores serving communities in 17 states, including the entire Southeast. Alabama has the most stores – 103. 

Piggly Wiggly also has a strong presence in eastern North Carolina with 34 stores in these locations: Ahoskie, Ayden, Beaufort, Broadway, Burgaw, Farmville, Goldsboro, Greenville, Jacksonville, Kinston (5), Leland, Manteo, Maysville, Mount Olive, Nashville, New Bern (2), Oriental, Pinetops, Plymouth, Richlands, Riegelwood, Rocky Mount (2), Sanford, Swansboro, Wallace, Warsaw, Washington, and Wilson. 

Piggly Wiggly North Carolina LLC, which owns and operates many of stores in the state, was selected as the “Retailer of the Year” in 2019 by the North Carolina Retail Merchants Association (NCRMA). 

“In the aftermath of Hurricane Florence, Piggly Wiggly owners delivered medicine by helicopter to Burgaw (in Pender County), which had become an island, and there was no way in or out,” said NCRMA President Andy Ellen.