Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, March 12, 1993 TAG: 9303120622
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-9 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: PAXTON DAVIS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
TALES OF TORQUE
THERE IS THE Jeep and there is the jeep, and never the twain shall meet. They may intersect; they may run in parallel or even overlap; but they are different things.The Jeep is a contemporary vehicle. It comes, like all autos since the T-model Ford, in a variety of styles, sizes and colors, and it generally costs a lot of money both to buy and keep gassed.
The jeep, on the other hand, is a romantic symbol of different times, different challenges, different attitudes. It cost relatively little to make, nothing to operate - at least under the original conditions of its operation - and lasted, evoking a spirit of adventure, almost forever.
It was, for my generation, the stuff that dreams are made of. Some of us have been dreaming about it for half a century, and to a few it's a nightmare. But nothing better symbolizes the times in which it was born and first flourished.
I am put in mind of all this by a spate of letters in the January issue of Smithsonian magazine, which printed them in response to a piece there last November. Since I have not seen the original I cannot comment on it, but I can guess. It provoked a cascade of detailed memories from members of my generation.
The jeep, I add here (though anyone who doesn't know it must have been born last week), is a product of World War II and the United States Army's need for a small, extremely mobile and unbelievably tough vehicle that could go almost anywhere, on almost any surface, and carry both men and small equipment, not to mention casualties, in and out of combat areas.
The thing was so good at what it did that it was soon doing more: Before the war was over in 1945, it had become almost everyone's favorite service vehicle, useful alike in the sand and the mud, able at climbing steep hills on nonexistent roads, the all-purpose combination of car and small truck that had neither looks nor dignity and couldn't have cared less.
One letter-writer to Smithsonian recalled an Australian adventurer who'd seen an amphibious jeep in India, decided against all reason to make one himself and thereafter set out to cross the world in it. He came close, too, reaching India before the jeep gave up the ghost.
Another Smithsonian correspondent remembered that an ingenious GI, understandably miffed at the way the Japanese strung wire across a road to behead American soldiers driving with the windshield down, invented a piece of angle iron that stood as a bar to clip the wire before it clipped the driver.
There was also a memory of Bill Mauldin's famous cartoon in which Willie or Joe prepared to shoot his jeep, like a lame horse, when it finally broke down for good. Another oldtimer remembered a jeep used on an aircraft carrier to retract an obstinate catapult; when the jeep failed to clear the area in time, the catapult flung it, driver and passenger included, a quarter of a mile into the briny, where it sunk. No one aboard was hurt.
I drove a jeep of my own, so to speak, for quite a while in the Army, and own a Jeep today, which I treasure above most possessions. But I cannot bring myself to believe that the contemporary version could perform all the feats of its noble ancestor.
The memory of the jeep I cling to most avidly is of the railway the Army operated between Myitkyina and Bhamo, in upper Burma, in late 1944 and early 1945.
Japanese strafing had destroyed the engine and most of the cars of the real railway. The Army, demonstrating the mechanical cunning so typical of that era, rebuilt what track required it, then removed the axles from a jeep, built new, wider ones, fitted them out with naked wheel rims and set them onto the restored track. The jeep proved an able engine, and it was nothing to put together a string of cars for it to pull.
I was there the day Lord Louis Mountbatten, Allied commander for that area, flew in, crisp in his freshly laundered khakis, to view the wonder. The expression on his face was appreciative, but it also told me he knew the British Empire faced imminent decline.
Paxton Davis is a Roanoke Times & World-News columnist.