Got dads Willy’s jeep running after 53 years

[LittleRedFisherman]

Even in the early 90 I’d go to school in a 79 dodge with a gun rack with my moss berg always in it.  Never gave it a thought neither did the school.   Just part of life in rural Arkansas back then 

[rps]

In the 2010's a Eureka Springs shop teacher was called on the carpet and a letter put in his file for having a shotgun on his gun rack in his pickup.

Of course, his principal was the type that would need a sledge hammer to drive a ten penny nail into her posterior.  

[Quillback]

11 hours ago, LittleRedFisherman said:

Wow surprised they let that one slide.   My grandfather worked in a jeep moter pool in ww2.  Soon as he got back to the farm he had to get one 

I did not think of it at the time, but I wish I would've checked some of those Army jeeps out to see how old they were.  Front windshield folded down across the hood, I believe, if I remember correctly, that the started was a button on the floor that you stomped on.  

I wasn't in a combat arms unit, but at the time, those folks had jeeps with recoilless rifles mounted on them. 

[Terrierman]

Recoilless rifle was one of the weapons in my MOS.  Never fired one after training and losing hearing.  They are incredibly loud.

[tjm]

4 hours ago, Quillback said:

how old they were. 

I'm not sure the military had any made after the war, the design was originally Bantam's and the Army brought in Willys and Ford to help produce enough of them for us to use and to give all our allies as many  as they could use, so with multiple manufacturers and post war Willys trying to claim credit for all of it including the design; the facts get a little murky. But perhaps the Army units would have been produced 1940-45. I believe Russia got ~60000 of them during the war and I was told that there several hundred (he may have said  thousand) of them brand new still pallets on a Pacific island as late as 1971, by a shipmate who had spent a year standing  guard over them. I saw a new one being unpacked about '85-6 that was a WW2 surplus buy. Of course the military being the military they may have continued to buy more even while selling off new unused stock. 

[LittleRedFisherman]

4 hours ago, Quillback said:

I did not think of it at the time, but I wish I would've checked some of those Army jeeps out to see how old they were.  Front windshield folded down across the hood, I believe, if I remember correctly, that the started was a button on the floor that you stomped on.  

I wasn't in a combat arms unit, but at the time, those folks had jeeps with recoilless rifles mounted on them. 

It’s was probably an mb38. They used them for years 

[Quillback]

21 hours ago, tjm said:

I'm not sure the military had any made after the war, the design was originally Bantam's and the Army brought in Willys and Ford to help produce enough of them for us to use and to give all our allies as many  as they could use, so with multiple manufacturers and post war Willys trying to claim credit for all of it including the design; the facts get a little murky. But perhaps the Army units would have been produced 1940-45. I believe Russia got ~60000 of them during the war and I was told that there several hundred (he may have said  thousand) of them brand new still pallets on a Pacific island as late as 1971, by a shipmate who had spent a year standing  guard over them. I saw a new one being unpacked about '85-6 that was a WW2 surplus buy. Of course the military being the military they may have continued to buy more even while selling off new unused stock. 

Something similar I was reading about as far as all the stuff that was manufactured during WWII, was carrier airplanes for the Navy.

By the last year of the war they were manufacturing more planes than the Navy could use.  They had a supply chain established where they would ship them out on small carriers or cargo ships and then fly them onto the fleet carriers.  Even though the Japanese were clearly defeated at the time, the Navy were worried some disaster might happen where they'd lose a bunch of planes, so they kept that pipeline going just in case.  So, with so many planes coming in, instead of maintaining or repairing existing planes, they'd either dump the older planes into the ocean off the carriers or fly them off to an island where they were eventually crushed by bulldozers and then buried.

Same thing with pilot training, we were training so many pilots that they had to start dragging out the training cycle to slow down the pilot pipeline.

 

[tjm]

I imagine a lot of that kind of stuff was contracted for prior to the war's end and if the contract was for 1,000,000 widgets and if with war over there was no need for widgets, the contracts still got filled and delivered. It's why lots of  surplus was still available into the '80s. We would have hard time doing that kind of supply work today.