General Dwight Eisenhower in a jeep in Normandy, summer 1944. The lieutenant general in the backseat appears to be Omar Bradley. Black and white image of three soldiers in a jeep with a soldier in the foreground engaging them in conversation.
2 March 2021
Jeep is a brand of sports utility vehicles currently owned by the Chrysler Corporation, and the brand has its origin in a quarter-ton, light truck used by the U.S. and Allied militaries during World War II. But the origin of the name Jeep causes confusion among some, although the origin is clear for those who delve into the vehicle’s history.
While the light truck is the most famous jeep, it is by no means the first thing to bear that name. In its early years, jeep was applied to all sorts of vehicles, aircraft, and odd devices. It even had a short life as a slang term for slow-witted person.
The name comes from a character in E. C. Segar’s comic strip Thimble Theater; the strip is better known for its lead character Popeye the Sailor. The character, Eugene the Jeep, is a dog-like creature of mysterious origin and possessing supernatural abilities. His name comes from only sound he emits, “jeep.” Eugene the Jeep is first mentioned in the strip on 16 March 1936 with a notice that he is on his way. But readers get the first look at him on 1 April 1936 when Olive Oyl opens the shipping crate in which he had arrived.
Thimble Theater comic strip from 1 April 1936, featuring Popeye, Olive Oyl, and family watch Eugene the Jeep come out of his shipping crate; Eugene is a spotted quadruped who utters the sound “jeep”
Almost immediately, jeep was applied to vehicles and devices that are exceptional, operate mysteriously, or are just odd. One of the first to do so was barnstormer Art Chester who dubbed one of his racing planes the Jeep. A photo of Chester in his aircraft appears in the 1936 publication Flying for 1937 with the caption:
BEHOLD THE JEEP!
Art Chester and his special Menasco-powered racer.
Multiple U. S. Army Air Corps aircraft of the late 1930s were nicknamed Jeep, including the famed B-17 Flying Fortress bomber. The Air Corps News Letter of 1 January 1938 included this note from Langley Field, Virginia:
A few interesting facts regarding the “Flying Fortresses” may here be recorded. The first B-17 was delivered at Seattle, Wash., on March 1, 1937, and the twelfth and last B-17 on July 26, 1937.
Since delivery of the first article, the “Jeeps”* have flown 679,000 miles, or over 27 times around the world, or the equivalent of 141 1/2 full twenty-four hour days in the air.
The note on the nickname reads:
*Note: We enter here a mild protest against the application by the Langley Field Correspondent of the term “Jeeps” to the B-17’s. Firstly, that term is not befitting an airplane of this type. Why not let the term “Flying Fortress” suffice? Secondly, the autogyro has prior claim to the appellation of “Jeeps;” so let us be consistent.
The nickname for the autogiro is documented in the Air Corps News Letter on 15 June 1938 in a poem written about the aircraft by one of its mechanics:
A ride in a Jeep on a hot summer day,
Is like a mint julep, or so they say,
The fan on the top is to keep you cool,
Now doesn’t that make you warm people drool.
For those unfamiliar with them, an autogiro resembles a helicopter, although unlike a helicopter the overhead rotor is unpowered and thrust is provided by a standard airplane engine. Because they require air flowing across the rotor to generate lift, autogiros are not capable of vertical take-off or hovering unless there is a strong headwind.
Aircraft were not the only jeeps. Devices to shoot them down were also so dubbed. One of Eugene the Jeep’s abilities was prognostication, and range finders on anti-aircraft guns were also called jeeps. From Science Digest of June 1940:
The predictor is so called because it predicts the planes’ position so as to allow for the distance covered between the time of firing and the explosions of the shells several seconds later. Service men call it the “Jeep.”
Jeep was not just applied to strange things; it was also applied to strange people, particularly those of low intelligence, or simply the inexperienced. From a story in the Saturday Evening Post of 16 July 1938:
The Broadway store of the McCutcheon drug chain is the patsy of the bunch. Sounds as if it ought to be the cream, but all you get is late hours and no tips. After eleven at night, the place is full of cheap horse players and chiselers and show people out of a job and queer ones. The supervisor always ships the worst of the boys there—the ones like Greg, the good workers that get in wrong by jawing at a customer, and also the jeeps, which is what we call fellows who try hard, but are naturally slow
And with U. S. entry into World War II in the offing, new recruits into the Army were also dubbed jeeps. From William Baumer’s 1941 book He’s in the Army Now, meant to show civilians what life in the military would be like:
Up the road the new soldiers march in a long straggling line. Some try to keep step, and finding that even with cooperation from others it is not easy, give it up and with heads down cross the highway. A dust-colored truck passes the column and its cargo of soldiers yell, "Hey, Jeep.” Then in a chorus there is the repeated cry, “Jeep! Jeep! Oh, Jeep!"
The line of men recognize the recruit tag. One of the soldiers with the column yells reassuringly, “They were probably jeeps themselves last week. Never mind them. You won't be a jeep for long.”
And Kendall and Viney’s 1941 Dictionary of Army and Navy Slang has the adjective jeepy:
Jeep . . . . reconnaissance truck, also known as a jitterbug.
Jeepville . . . . recruit center. In some camps a jeep is a rookie.
he’s jeepy . . . . not quite all there.
As you can see, that glossary also uses jeep to refer to the light truck, and 1941 is the year that the familiar vehicle gets the nickname. But it’s not the first U. S. Army vehicle to be so nicknamed. Tanks were also called jeeps, as seen in this 31 July 1938 New York Times article:
Take a ride in one of the tanks and you’ll see why the men of the brigade call them hell buggies, wombats, jeep wagons or man-killers. They are literally man-killers. Not only do these nine-and-one-half-ton monsters jerk and jar and vibrate, shaking all who ride them from nose to crupper; not only do their rubber, steel-blocked tracks, running over idlers and bogeys, clang and clatter; not do their 250-horsepower engines roar a deafening din; not only do wind and dust and twigs and leaves strike at your head, whip at your eyes—but the tanks do kill.
And this brief mention in the November 1940 Builder’s Review uses jeep to refer to a large truck pulling a trailer:
The “Jeep”, new 5-ton military tractor, can climb a 40-per-cent grade, ford a stream 40 inches deep and turn on a 20-foot radius.
The nickname jeep for the familiar light truck entered into the public consciousness on 20 February 1941 when a publicity stunt featured a Senator and a Representative driving a jeep up the steps of the U.S. Capitol. An Associated Press photo of the event was published in newspapers nationwide. The one in the New York Daily News was accompanied by this text:
JEEP CREEPS
—Up Capitol StepsCONGRESSIONAL ROUGH RIDERS
Undaunted, Senator James M. Mead takes chances and drives one of the Army’s new light trucks, known as “Jeep” up Capitol steps in demonstration. With him is Representative J. Parnell Thomas. Sergeants in back seat seem confident of outcome.
The nickname stuck, and the ubiquity of the quarter-ton vehicle—some 640,000 were produced during the war, serving in most of the Allied armies—drove the other senses of jeep out of the vocabulary.
It’s commonly thought that jeep is a pronunciation of the initials GP which were printed on the quarter-ton trucks, thought by many to stand for general purpose. Some of the jeeps manufactured during the war did bear those initials, but that explanation is incorrect on several counts. First, the G was a Ford Motor Company factory designation for a government vehicle, and the P was code for an 80-inch wheelbase. Second, as we have seen, jeep was a common slang term for vehicles of all sorts well before the familiar quarter-ton trucks entered into production. But it’s easy to see how such a false explanation could arise. A soldier learning that it was called a jeep and then seeing the initials GP on it, might very well assume the two were connected and conjecture that the initials stood for general purpose.
Sources:
Baldwin, Hanson W. “It’s ‘Jine the Cavalry!’: and Ride a Hell Buggy.” New York Times Magazine, 31 July 1938, 5.. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
Barry, Jerome. “The Jeep.” The Saturday Evening Post, 16 July 1938, 16. EBSCOhost Academic Search Ultimate.
Baumer, William H. “‘Jeep’ Life at the Reception Center.” He’s in the Army Now. New York: Robert M. McBride, 1941, 11. HathTrust Digital Archive.
Builder’s Review, November 1940, 51. HathTrust Digital Archive.
Daily News (New York), 20 February 1941, 30. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
“The Giro.” Air Corps News Letter, 21.12, 15 June 1938, 9. HathTrust Digital Archive.
Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2021, s.v. jeep, n.1.
Kendall, Park and Johnny Viney. A Dictionary of Army and Navy Slang. New York: M.S. Mill, 1941. HathTrust Digital Archive.
Mingos, Howard. Photo caption. Flying for 1937. New York: Aeronautical Chamber of Commerce, 1936, 106.
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. jeep, n.
Peck, James L. H. “Defense Against Air Attack.” Science Digest, 7.6, June 1940, 6. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
“Performances of B-17’s Evoke Enthusiasm.” Air Corps News Letter, 21.1, 1 January 1938, 7. HathTrust Digital Archive.
Image credits: U.S. Army Signal Corps, 1944, public domain image; E. C. Segar, King Features Syndicate, 1 April 1936. Fair use of a copyrighted image to illustrate a point under discussion.