sinielsen:
Here is a little story about the Willys MB and the Ford GPW Jeeps. Back in the fall of 1982, my wife and I had been married only a few months and were living in our first apartment. With winter drawing on, two fellows who had a business across the road offered to let me keep my motorcycle in one of their buildings for winter. They had a WWII Jeep they used to plow the snow on the business property. It was a Jeep that had been fitted with a home-made cab made of plywood, and had a hydraulic plow lift on the front. It had been brush-painted with Rustoleum red primer paint and looked like a beat up Jeep. One evening, with snow in the forecast, the two fellows called my wife asking if I was home from work. When I walked into the apartment, my wife said the fellows had called to say they could not get their old Jeep started, snow coming, and would I come by and take a look and see what was wrong. I got over to their place and quickly determined the Jeep engine had no compression, and only by putting some heavy gear lube in the spark plug holes could we get the engine to have any compression. Nothing to do but remove the cylinder head and see what was going on in that engine. We got the head removed, and found each cylinder had very heavy wear, with a ridge you could damned near fall off of. I could wiggle the pistons with my fingers in the cylinder bores. I told the fellows to pull the engine out of the Jeep as it looked like the cylinder would need to be rebored and oversized pistons fitted. With that, I went home to my bride.
They pulled the engine the next day, and called me at work to tell me as much. I said I'd be by that evening to mike things up and see what we were dealing with. I did not need any micrometers or my Starrett cylinder bore gauge (a dial indicator device for checking cylinders for roundness and taper) to tell how worn things were.
I said the block had to go to an automotive machine shop and to send along the crankshaft and con rods as the crank journals miked a bit out of round and had already been ground undersized once.
When the block and parts came back from the automotive machine shop, my wife and I started re-assembling the Jeep engine. Wife had never seen this sort of work done, and as a new bride, was wanting to be with her husband on weekends, since I worked all week. We got the engine back together, and I noticed the ring gear teeth on the flywheel had the corners fairly chewed up. I took the flywheel to work at the hydroelectric powerplant construction site where we had an oxyacetylene torch and rosebud. I heated the ring gear and it popped off the flywheel. I then flipped the ring gear around so the un-worn corners of the gear teeth would meet the starter pinion. As I worked on the flywheel, I saw the "Ford oval" logo. OK, I figured it was a Ford engine in a Willys MB Jeep.
When I got back to working on the engine, I found a rebuild tag on the block from the Mechanicsburg Army Depot in Pennsylvania. It had a rebuild date back in the 1950's. It gave the rebuild specs and this is where things got more interesting. Seems the Army had bored the block to 0.010" over. They had apparently put that engine back together with pistons that were not the oversize pistons, but did use an oversize ring set. That poor Jeep engine had run for maybe 30 years with that condition. The Army tag also indicated the crank had been ground undersized, but made no mention of playing "mix and match" with Willys and Ford parts. The block was Willys, as was the rest of the Jeep. The crank and flywheel both had the Ford "oval" logo on them.
N.B. Naegle:
I agree that the generation who served in the US Military in WWII and backed things up at home were the finest generation. I am the son of parents who were of that generation, Dad being a WWII vet and Mom having worked in the Office of War Information. I am sitting here at the computer having come from the funeral of one our congregants. He was about 95 years old, and a veteran of the US Army Air Corps. An amazing man in so many ways, and a real pillar of not only our congregation but the community. The local American Legion Post did the military honors, and we all stood at the graveside despite a series of thunderstorms.
My own father used to tell me bits and pieces about his time in the US Army in Europe during WWII. As you note, our military was made up of people who came from all walks of life. Having survived the Great Depression and much else, this generation was used to improvising, working with what was at hand, and doing whatever it took to get a job done. Dad spoke a good high German, so he got called upon to translate and interface with local officials in areas that had been conquered by the Allies, and also conversed with some of the German soldiers. A little story of my father's kind of sums up why our military was more adaptable. Dad said he was talking to some captured German officers (Dad was a private), and the captured officers were offered US Army rations. The German officers response was to tell Dad that they expected "officer's rations" rather than the same rations the enlisted men ate. Dad set them straight. He let them know that in the US Army, everyone at the same rations in the combat areas.
I think the US is a wonderful country where people are a lot less rigid in their views and thinking than a lot of other places. Having worked amongst oldtime German immigrant machinists and worked overseas, I see a difference in how we think and act. We tend to be a lot less restrained or formal for want of a better way to put it. As a result, whether on the home front or in the military, our people were unafraid to "think outside the box" (as it is currently called) rather than "go by the book". If it meant hanging a Jeep by the wire rope of its winch to work on it, it was a quick and easy way to do repairs on the underside of the Jeep. Not by the book or what a person might learn in mechanics' school, but in the field where the name of the game was to get the Jeep back into action, it worked fine.
Supposedly, the German military was quite impressed by captured US Jeeps. As the story goes, the German high command or some Nazi bigwigs had joked that they wanted to send Henry Ford a letter requesting a few thousand GPW's be built for the German military. The letter supposedly said the Germans had full confidence that they would be victorious over the USA, and would "pick the GPW's up when they got to Detroit". Probably just one of those stories you hear and discount, but our Jeeps and GPW's did have the advantage of being 4 x 4's while the German military equivalent, the "Kubelwagen" (bucket wagon) was 4 x 2 and not quite so rugged and forgiving as the Jeeps.
I agree that degree of engineering development and quality of the German military equipment was initially often of a higher caliber (pardon the pun) than what the US was producing and using. This adherence to tighter tolerances and closer fits apparently came back to bite the German military on the Russian Front. As I read somewhere along the line, the German government had dismissed the Soviet built arms and equipment as crude. They had the advantage until the Russian winter took over. As I read, the temperature kept dropping and one morning, it had dropped to the point that a combination of close fits on working parts of artillery and other mechanisms coupled with the lubricant thickening at that low temperature made a lot of the artillery pieces and much else unworkable. It was then that what the Germans dismissed as sloppy workmanship suddenly showed its advantage as the Russians kept right on with their artillery and equipment working in that extreme cold.
In working on the WWII era Jeeps (to use the generic term), I was always impressed by the combinations of simplicity, ruggedness, and at the same time, engineering excellence in some areas. The WWII era Jeep front ends used a constant velocity joint called a "Rzeppa (sp ?) " joint. A pre=war Czech invention. These CV joints were fully enclosed in spherical shrouding with felt seals. Later civilian Jeeps use a simple open U joint at each front wheel spindle. Similarly, the WWII Jeeps had a full floating or "timken" type rear end so parts from front and rear ends would interchange. The WWII Jeep was the right combination of simplicity, ruggedness and good design for what it was. I would not want to drive a WWII era Jeep in today's traffic, nor would it keep up with today's highway speeds. It was a vehicle designed and built for one purpose with one design philosophy and it did well at it. The civilian Jeep vehicles that have evolved, other than being 4 x 4's and having the name, have little else in common with the original Jeeps. Gussied up, fancy and hardly the kind of vehicle you'd take over rough country and bang around with.
The Willys Jeep design endured for longer than Willys (who folded into Kaiser and then American Motors around 1962-64 I think). In 1981, I went on a job in the backwoods of Paraguay. At the sawmill camp where I was to work, they had a Jeep. When I saw it, I did a bit of a double take. It was a new CJ-5 that had all the features of my 1961 Willys, down to the battery box cover up on the cowling, and it had one vacuum operated windshield wiper on the driver's side and the hand-cranked wiper on the passenger side. It also had the old two-lever transfer case and the three speed manual transmission. Even the instrument cluster (made in the US by AC Delco, IIRC) was the same- speedometer with the fuel, engine oil pressure, coolant temperature and charging ammeter ringing the speedometer dial all in one unit.
The cover plate was on the driver's side floor pan for accessing the master brake cylinder, meaning this Jeep still had the old "single circuit" brake system. What was needling me was the Jeep looked almost new.
When this Jeep was started up, it did not sound at all like a Willys with the "Hurricane 4"- the F head (intake over exhaust valve) version of the "Go Devil" (the flathead 4 cylinder engine used by the military jeeps). I asked to look under the hood before we started on our way. I saw an overhead cam 4 cylinder engine and the camshaft cover was "Ford Blue". I recognized a Pinto engine. I looked on the firewall for a maker's tag and saw: "Ford do Brasil". Apparently, Ford of Brazil had bought the old Willys CJ5 design properties and maybe bought some of the tooling. What they were producing as of 1981 for sale in Brazil and the surrounding countries was a dead wringer for a 1950's- maybe 1964 CJ5, with the only differences being the Ford Pinto engine and the lack of the Willys name on it.
We knocked the hell out of that Jeep on the 2 rut backroads of Paraguay. On one occasion, a fellow from the sawmill camp invited everyone in our camp to a wedding in his village. We got there in the Jeep. We took off the windshield and people rode on the hood, front and rear bumpers, cargo deck, and hanging off the sides on the boarding steps.
Sometimes, in weaker moments, I think I ought to get myself either an original Willys 4 x 4 pickup or an original CJ 5, before American Motors and Chrysler and all the other late comers changed them from a utility vehicle to the present forms. Then, the reality of taking on another project and having to maintain another vehicle takes hold and I return to reality.
