Jeeps in a Box

Just to follow the theme a bit more. Seventy five years later, we just cannot appreciate how involved the US was in the war effort toward the end of WWII. A striking picture I saw several years ago showed a B-29 graveyard on Tinian or Saipan. The summary was that it was more economical to fly in a new airplane from Boeing than to maintain a supply and logistics trail to ship big parts of airplanes across the Pacific to repair a damaged or failed airplane.

How does that play into Jeeps in a box? From reading other forums, it appears many of the Toledo Jeeps were boxed in Toledo and never fully assembled until they got to the end users. An Ordnance Depot in England could, reportedly, uncrate and assemble a Jeep in about 45 minutes. By mid to late 1944 and 1945, there were more Jeeps around England than we could use.

By VE Day, the problem had to be addressed. Shipping them back, crated or uncrated was too expensive – and besides we didn’t need all of those Jeeps back home. Leaving them in England had two considerations. From a safety standpoint, they were left hand drive – incompatible with long established British traffic patterns.

Economically, dumping thousands of US made Jeeps into the British auto market would have had a terrible impact on the British auto industry which had to make a transition from wartime to civilian production. Cheap surplus American vehicles would have been a mortal blow to recovery of the English auto industry.

They couldn’t come home and they couldn’t stay in England. So, the simple and quick solution to the problem was a barge ride out into the North Sea or English Channel, and the vehicles went to sleep with the fishes.

We find this hard to believe today, but there was so much excess war material that surplus aircraft were sold for pennies on the dollar and scrappers would recover their purchase cost by salvaging the 100-octane Avgas and retailing it as “Ethyl”, at 14-cents a gallon!