| More than 400,000 Dodge trucks were built for our war machine and our allies in the years 1941 - 45. All came from the Mound Road plant opened in 1938. This record brought plant manager L.J. Purdy a promotion before the war's end to vice-president of Dodge in charge of all truck activity. Design, manufacture, supply and maintenance were the joint enterprise of Engineering, the Dodge Division, Fargo, the Chrysler Parts Corporation and Pekin Wood Products Co. of West Helena, Arkansas, a wholly owned Chrysler subsidiary which supplied the truck plant with forty car loads of export boxing weekly. Most of the more than three billion dollars of Chrysler war contracts called for things strange to automobile makers. Trucks were the Corporation's normal business, and it had been selling a few to the Government since 1931; was one of the two major sources of the army 1-1/2 ton 4-wheel drive truck of the late 30's, first military vehicle to approach quantity production. As late as 1937, however, the whole army fleet was only 11,600 vehicles and most were no more than commercial trucks in uniform. We were close to war before there began to be machines designed for war rather than peacetime transport somewhat strengthened for rougher going. Though a 1919 American infantry division was equipped with only 135 motor vehicles of 3,500 total horsepower against 2,537 of 400,000 horsepower for a WW2 Motorized division, the AEF ( American Expeditionary Force) had used 121 different makes of American and European trucks and cars, creating a maddening parts problem. To remedy this, the army had designed during the first war a standardized service truck. Right in theory, it could be produced only after long delays in tooling up , tooling which dipped deeply into the already taxed tool and die capacity of the country, so only a few hundred had been made when the war ended. Product of the cast-iron age , the design was outmoded and forgotten. The army knew that in the next war, whenever it should come, troops must move by motor and across country , avoiding roads liable to shelling and bombing, and that commercial trucks built for economical use on the highways would not meet such a test. It must design multi-wheel drive trucks both for supply and tactical uses and make sure of fast , large-scale production when needed , For lack of money, nothing came of this foresight. The first faint step toward a new vehicle type of military characteristics in any but the heaviest trucks was delayed until Hitler attacked Poland in 1939. This was the half-ton 4-wheel drive light truck. When the army asked for bids on 3,461 of these, Dodge captured the lot as low bidder. In normal manufacturing, materials never are ordered until a design is approved, pilot models built and tested searchingly, a natural precaution, but Dodge obliged itself for several million dollars worth of materials long before the army finished its testing and approved the pilot models; actually had 672 of them on wheels before final approval came. The Corporation took this chance as a public service. In November 1939, shortly after letting this contract , the army had ordered large-scale mechanized manouvers in the spring, first of their kind. There could be no manouvers without these trucks and the army would not get them in time unless Dodge should better the contract delivery dates by sixty days, which it was to do. The Corporation spent heavily in added costs to insure that every vehicle was present and accounted for when the Fourth corps area manouvers began in Georgia in April, 1940, as a curtain raiser to the war games between the Fourth and Eight Corps in Lousianna in May. The army's getting of thousands of trucks was one thing; the army's learnig how to use them was another. Railway express and the telephone company are the biggest commercial fleet operators, one with some 15,000, the other with about 12,000 vehicles, but theirs has been a gradual growth over a quarter of a century . Their trucks are operated from fixed points in settled areas where service always is to be had. The doubling of a commercial fleet from 200 to 400 trucks is a big move, preceeded by much planning and training . Suddenly the army was obliged to expand its fleet a hundred times and with little time for even the first necessities of planning and training for use and maintenance. For their mere driving each vehicle would need at least one man, specially trained in the tricks and hazards of off-road travel. For their maintenance, half a million mechanics would be needed. R.I. Biggers, president of Fargo, the Chrysler division which sells and services Corporation made cars and trucks in commercial fleet corporations , and deals with the army, visited Fort Sam Houston at San Antonio in the late Winter of 1939-40 and found that major army post swamped with the huge task of unloading and servicing the several thousand new trucks already delivered there. In the past the army usually had looked to dealers for such service. At Fort Benning , Georgia, the commanding and supply officers appealed to Biggers for all aid in getting tham spare parts for their new trucks. At that moment the Fourth corps was readying itself for thirty days of field manouvers in South Georgia after which it was to proceed overland 750 miles to mid Lousianna, there to meet in strenuous war games in the wild Sabine river country with the Eight corps. Problems of maintenance and spare parts had multiplied to dismaying proportions. Mr Biggers caught a train for Detroit and when Mr Keller had heard his report , Chrysler's pesident ordered six car loads of parts shipped to Dallas and Atlanta to reinforce Chrysler's own parts depots there as a first move. A second was to send out two huge trailer trucks loaded with parts to follow the armies. These trucks violated the laod and length limits of every state through which they would pass, but waivers were secured from each. Five Fargo sevice engineers were assigned to each army. A.J.Plant, Fargo service manager ( later a Colonel in the army ) and R.B. Christiansen , his assistant, organized their men into Fourth and Eitgth corps teams and went about learning the army's prolems in the field at first hand, and advising and aiding the army in maintenance and personell training. Preventive maintenance schedules were drawn up for the corps orders. At Fargo's suggestion, ratings were given drivers and mechanics as a recognition and added incentive. Armies that had moved at 2-1/2 miles per hour in the past were being stepped up to an average of 15 miles per hour, scrambling both tactics and supply problems and creating a new one of motor maintenance. Officers well schooled in the limitations of men and horses had to learn that, motors too, had their limitations. The Cavalry took loving care of its horses, knowing that if the horse didn't go, the soldier didn't go. The men were trained to care for their mounts before themselves, and this care was supervised knowingly, by officers, who knew horses even better than did the men. When Stable-Call sounded on the bugle, everyone but the cooks and clearks turned out. But with trucks only one man in a dozen was a driver and only he had the responsibility of his" mount". The High Command understood the problem and went to work on it firmly. " To develop for officers of higher rank an appreciation of the cababilities, limitations and maintenance of motor vehicles and functions of motor transport personell.....Maintenance is a function of command ". So read an army directive. Before long, when a new division was about to be activated, the war department was putting one star generals into coveralls and sending them into grease pits at motor bases as students; and the draft now was bringing in tens of thousands of motor-wise civilians. Preventative maintenance became as accepted a part of army life as kitchen police or the PX. Top authority welcomed all aid from the automotive industry and leaned heavily upon this aid for a time. From 1934 through 1939, Fargo had been getting acquainted with the army through calls made at ninety-three posts by a Service Manager and a few assistants. When this job had grown beyond them by 1940, nine central service engineers borrowed for that Spring's manouvers became the nucleas of a new army Service and Training section, later supplemented by Fargo's army field liason section. These service engineers lived with the army from 1940 to VJ day, followed their customers overseas to Africa, Italy, France, Germany, and in the Pacific from Guadalcanal to Okinawa. Among many duties, they conducted automotive schools for officers and men until the army was prepared to take over this task. |
| The Dodge half-ton 4-wheel drive truck of 1939 had been designed to carry at least an 8 man squad, their weapons and the greater quantity of ammunition demanded by automatic guns. Many thousands of troops were trained on this and later versions of the truck and it saw service in the early days from North Africa to Iceland, from Hawaii to Australia. When war came, competitive bidding ended. Washington froze designs and sources in order to minimize the parts problem. Dodge would keep the half-ton truck business automatically. But on reports from Fargo service engineers in the field, the Engineering and Dodge divisions were convinced that they could produce a more ideal military vehicle, without complicating the army's parts troubles. Though the army then recognized no type between the half-ton and the 1 1/2 ton trucks, and had ruled against new sizes , it adopted this new Dodge 3/4 ton truck in three basic models, the weapons carrier, the command and reconnaisance car and the ambulance, on its showing of power, ground clearance, high floatation, ruggedness and simplicity of maintenance. Though not as long as the half-ton, its greater width and ingenious use of the space over the wheels for troop seats, gave it its 3/4 ton load rating. The shorter length and greater compactness called for much ingenuity of design, yet with all its added advantages the 3/4 ton truck was 80% interchangeable in service parts with the half -ton job. Mounf Road became the sole source of this new truck type, of which it built 255,000 for the Government and our allies, much its largest wartime item. They saw service on every front and in every major engagement; were, as one divisional commander expressed it . " The wprk horse of the front lines". By 1942 the rifle squad had been increased from eight men to twelve men and a larger truck of the same characteristics was needed for its transport. general Courtney H. Hodges, then chief of Infantry , asked if such a truck could be manufactured from parts and units already in army use. The Corporations answere was to engineer a 1 1/2 ton truck with 6 wheel drive taht was 96% interchangeable in service parts with the 3/4 ton 4X4 ; was in fact virtually the same truck plus a third axle and two more wheels. mound Road builtt 43, 278 of these in 1943, 1944 and 1945. The number was not as great as expected, the army having cut truck orders toward the end of 1942 and slashed them one third more across the board in February, 1944 . Lack of steel, rubber and shipping space and the failure of the Axis to threaten our own shores influenced the cuts. The slack at Mound road was taken up in part y resumption of the manufacture of badly needed commercial trucks a year before germany surrendered. In the original overseas unit pack only the wheels and windshield were removed in boxing the truck. When the U-boat menace was at its worst, Mound Road was ordered overnight to change to a twin pack calling for virtual dissasembly, though almost doubling the vehicle capacity of a ship. The problem at Mound Road was one of space and labour supply . Working around the clock with three shifts , the boxing plant still was hopelessly inadequate and the workers on the disassembly lines tripped over one another until a new building, approved by the army but delayed by priorities, could be built. All makers returned to the unit pack in May, 1944 when the submarine theat was past, it enabling the army to put trucks together faster on the overseas assembly lines. Truck spare parts orders jumped 500% by volume in the fall of 1942 and this demand continued so huge that the Chrysler Part Corporation was blown out of its Highland Park home. All service and Lend-Lease parts shipments were packed and sent from the John R. plant , a former Studebaker factory , with Marysville and leased properties in Detroit as base warehouses. With every 100 vehicles went 460 wooden boxes of concurrent spare parts, all elaborately protected against rust by new techniques developed for the army by the industry. The motor and afew other assemblies excepted, no box weighed more or exeeded a size one man could carry. Of the parts in ant given box, one carton of each variety was packed in each layer. The boxes had hinged lids; lift a lid and any desired part was at hand in the top layer. Each carton was identified on all six sides. The 460 boxes could be set up in numerical order on a bench and operate instantly as a working parts depot. Each pack contained a 267-page double indexed directory whereby a soldier who didn't know a connecting rod bushing from a valve tappet could, at a glance, find what he had been sent for. Utterly unprecendented conditions of shipment, storage and use drove Ordnace and the industry to creating an almost new science of protective packing. In amphibious operations, cargo was dumped overboard in the surf at times. When ships ut to sea on the outward voyage the cargo was hosed down with salt water to minimise fire risk in the event of bombing or torpedo attack. Decl loads were exposed to salt wave and spary, and all ships carried maximum deck loads until the U-boats were beaten. Once ashore, the cargo might be abandonded by fully-loaded troops or under -fed natives if the boxes were too heavy or buly. PArts were left in open storage for weeks in humis jungles, sand blown deserts or artic ice. Supply needs were unpredictable. There once was a great surplus of truck rear axles in North Africa at the same moment that a grave shortage existed in the South Pacific. No planning or intuition could have forseen the peculiar circumstances . Land mines were blowing up the front ends of trucks in Africa allowing rear axles to accumulate. In the South Pacific jungles Jap snipers were so nasty that troop carrying trucks were delieratly overloaded in order to make fewer trips necessary;lives were being saveda t the expense of rear axles. The multi drive truck was our armies greatest single advantage over the enemy in ground fighting, General George C. Marshall, Cheif of Staff, has testified. " Our trucks had difficulties in the moutains of Tunisia and Italy," but once ashore in France, our divisions had a mobility that completely outclassed the Germans. |
| MOBILIZED By Wesley W. Stout Chrysler Corporation, 1949 |
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| n.b. This article appeared in the VMVC newsletter February 1987 |