Paul Bruno and "The Original Jeeps"

to have you on the show. Oh, great to be here, Robert. And I'm looking forward to talking early history with you. Well, Paul, I'm not going to embarrass you, but the fact of the matter is, you're kind of recognized as the preeminent expert on the history and the origin of the Jeep. You have dug deep. And in fact, your recent book, just out 10, 20, 20, is called The Original Jeeps commemorating the birth of an icon. Nineteen forty to nineteen

forty one. Congratulations on that. But this isn't your first Jeep rodeo either. Your other book called The First Jeep was published in twenty fourteen. So I get the feeling that there's something that somebody needs to know about this particular vehicle. You're going to have the answer, the name of the show, Cars that Matter. We talk about cars

that the kind of change the automotive landscape. But as I got into your book, I learned that the car we're going to talk about today really probably helped to change the course of history more than any vehicle ever made. Model T Fords, Volkswagen Beetles. I don't care because the Jeep, as we call the various iterations of them, that car that was born in 1940 was instrumental in helping to win World War Two. Without it and the heroes who

use them, the world would be goosestepping today. And that's not an understatement. I think it's difficult for younger generations to really imagine what was at stake back then. You go back to nineteen forty four, I think of my dad. He was nineteen years old, blown off the deck of an aircraft carrier in the late Gulf, which was the largest naval battle in human history. Later on, when the

American forces occupied Japan, he was there. The only thing he had that really kind of a lifeline for survival was a forty five automatic without any live ammo in it and a jeep. So that's a great way to talk about a car that really, really made an impact. What got you interested in these things? Well, it all started back in nineteen ninety nine I believe or not. So I've been at this for 20 years and at that time I was beginning to write screenplays. Believe it

or not, I live an exceptionally exciting life. So I was watching the History Channel shock, nothing better. And they had on the big rigs of combat jeep. And just before a commercial break, they said the first jeep was created in 1940 by a bankrupt car company in Butler, Pennsylvania, and the astonishingly short timeframe of forty nine days. And I'm like, what is that all about? So I watched after obviously the commercial break and found out that was

basically the case. And I said that would make a great screenplay. And it's true, these guys had nothing bankrupt given this impossible task. All sorts of conflict, all sorts of things to overcome the world hanging in the balance and May, June, July 1940 with the Battle of Britain. So that's how I started pursuing it and I started researching it. I worked on the screenplay for about 12 years to two eleven. We were never able to get the movie made, despite a lot of efforts around 211.

I decided I really wanted this story to get out there. So we decided when to say we it's my late wife and I that we would write a book. And that ended up being the first book Project Management in history. In the first Geep, you said, I've really gone in deep into it. The key that way, the both books possible was a court case, the Federal Trade Commission versus Willis Overland Motors Inc. That was actually done during the war,

where it's literally an ultimate deposit of early history. When I was able to find that in the archives and all the materials that was there, the story was there to be told. And we told the first one just

the ban BRC in the first book. And then for the 80th anniversary, we decided to change it from a project management book into a history book and add Willis and Ford to the mix, plus the competition between the three throwout made forty one, because the first three jeeps, the ones I mentioned, the BRC, the Willis and the Ford were all built in nineteen forty. The more I found out about the story, the more amazing it becomes.

So you really have a Ph.D. in Jeep. And for those of us who have barely graduated from kindergarten, let's go back to the beginning for a minute and kind of set the stage. I was reading your book, some amazing stuff. And by the way, the first chapter is really a great primer on the history of American politics. From Woodrow Wilson to the beginning of the war, World War Two, it really set the stage and got me to understand that America was a very pacifist nation. They

had very little military infrastructure. And I guess by the time 1940 rolls around, the Germans are fine tuning their blitzkrieg, their lightning war. The US Army was still practically using mules and carts to haul stuff around. I couldn't even believe that. Yeah, that's absolutely correct. And your synopsis of the interwar years is spot on. You had the decade of the nineteen twenties where you didn't really have a major threat to world peace. So they called it the

peace decade. We talk a little bit about that. Then in the nineteen thirties you just had this slight thing going on called the Great Depression. That's right. But seriously, there was no money. They were spending the money on the New Deal, on domestic programs. The army was starved. So by the time he got to thirty eight, thirty nine, the American military was ranked like 19th in the world behind Bulgaria and meanwhile the clouds of war were gathering

fast in Europe. The writing was on the wall. Swastikas were everywhere. And of course, then the Japanese bombed us on December eight, nineteen forty one. And I guess they recognized the need for a cheap rate before that happened in the late thirties, especially in infantry. And we document this in the book. They did a lot of testing on vehicles. They came up with a Mormon Harington four

by four for what the infantry was looking for. But through some challenges in the procurement process, to put it nicely, they didn't get what they wanted. You also needed a vehicle that could be used across the using arms, had that level of versatility, not only infantry, but Calvary Field

Artillery ordnance. And so by May of 1940, the middle of the month, two weeks into Hitler's blitzkrieg, into the low countries of France, they had a meeting at Camp Holabird, Maryland, with all the using arms, looking at a vehicle that could replace the mule and the horse for transporting small payloads and troops. And they needed something between the motorcycle

and sidecar and a half ton truck. And at that meeting May twenty first nineteen forty, they had nothing, zip, nada, nothing on the drawing board, nothing in concept, and that's where they stood. Then the miracle started to happen. You mentioned three companies and I got a jeep. Initially I thought it was a jeep. But apparently you're talking about

everything from Bantam to Ford to Willis. So one of the guys at that main meeting in the infantry goes back to his office and the American Bantam Car Company, which would build the first jeep there, representative. And the gentleman's name was Colonel O.S.S. He goes back to his office and the banner representative is sitting in his window waiting for him. And he comes in. And the short version of the conversation is the gentleman was named by

Charles Payne, the Bantam representative. He says, I'm looking for Robert Howay of the Howre machine gun carry, which is documented in the book. We need to talk about vehicles. We think we can build one for you and says I'm the guy that you need to talk to. And so they came up in two weeks with a general characteristics they needed for a vehicle that would be infantries need, which was needed away about thirteen hundred pounds, low silhouette, carry three people, be able to mount a machine gun,

so on and so forth. The memo was dated June six, 1940, exactly four years to the day before D-Day. That's an a day I think you said your dad was in the late Gulf. So in two weeks they came up with the general characteristics for a vehicle and then the story continued from there. Let's put this in perspective for a guy my age. I mean, I remember when Studebaker was around, but that's about it. I certainly don't remember

any bantams. What the heck was a bantam? The American Bantam Car Company was the successor to a company called the American Auston Car Company from England. Right. But they had an American arm, is that correct? Yeah, little tiny cars, tiny, tiny cars. And they built these tiny cars, the Austin seven in the twenties and was very successful in Europe. And Sir Herbert Austin in the late twenties wanted to bring it to America. Well, of course he brings it

right at beginning of the Depression. American Austin goes bankrupt. Four years later, the company's bought by an exceptional gentleman named Roy Evans for Reconstitutes, the company in nineteen thirty five thirty six. They try to sell small cars late in the Depression. There's no market for it. So in the spring of 1940, the America Bantam Car Company, which was the premier small car company in the country, is completely, utterly,

totally bankrupt. They have nothing. And their only last shot to stay in existence is to get a government contract. They were doing the Hail Mary pass before they invented that in the seventies and football. So clearly the Bantam Car Company had experience building lightweight cars. And we talk about this jeep being up. You say fifteen hundred pound vehicle. That was one of the bugaboos in the whole procurement

and I was a project manager. So, Robert, this is a requirement you don't want to have developed this way. The Army decided we need something between this motorcycle and sidecar and a half ton truck. So that's five hundred pounds to twelve pounds. So this vehicle's just going to magically way without talking to anyone that would actually build it. It's gonna have to weigh thirteen hundred pounds. Nobody could build a vehicle for thirteen hundred pounds. No, that's unthinkable.

I mean unless it's a load of Super seven or something. The Nazis were building their Kubel Fagin's, those tin cans and those things weigh two thousand pounds apiece. Exactly. So the weight requirement was a real issue for all the three manufacturers throughout the procurement. But what happened was they put a thing on the June six memo for armoured

face shielding. And why did they do that? Oh, Seth basically says, I was upset at the quartermaster and I didn't want the quartermaster to procure this vehicle, which is what the quartermaster does. So by putting that requirement in, it would go to the Ordnance Committee. So I went over to ordnance in mid-June, an order that said, you know, we have absolutely no clue how to procure or build a vehicle. Let's go visit Badam and see what they say to do. And that's what happened. They went to

ban them. And it's documented in the book those two days. And I just figured that the change is eighty years later, I'm really upset at the quartermaster because they didn't give us one of the last. So we'll see if we could shove this over on your dad to see how that goes. What a great story. So it sounds like Bantam actually made a miracle happen, what you had there and you also had it, Willis and Ford is 1940 was kind of the end of the initial time of

the car industry. So you look at the car industry and we do a lot of history of that, both for Barnum and Willis. These people that started say nineteen hundred to nineteen forty, they were hands on experts built them themselves into the details of actually building the vehicles. They did some office and design it and then have

someone else build it. They built them. So Barnham, you had these exceptional individuals that had cars in their blood and the same at Willis and the same at Ford, and that's why they were able to pull off the miracle. The forty nine days that was called with Barnum, they basically had built it, reverse engineering it where they actually built the parts, put it together, and then they would do the blueprints and the forty nine day requirement from

the army. That was another well thought out one which was like how long do we think we need. Let's just doing a forty nine days and Barnham, they built their vehicle in forty nine days and delivered it on the forty ninth day with a half an hour to spare. This is a great movie. It's more exciting than Tucker or any of those others. I hope to heck a Hollywood producer is listening to this because you got a blockbuster there. Forty nine days to build a car. So

that's what Bantam was doing. But again, I'm confused because there were some other names that you dropped, Ford and Willis. What happened with Willis was Willis struggle during the Depression. So they were conveniently not bankrupt in nineteen forty, but they were still not where they were. The glory days back in the 20s and they really wanted to get in on this cheap stuff. So what happened was the army developed the specifications working with Barnham from mid-June to

early July, Bantam thought they would get a negotiated contract. No, they went out and sent the bid to one hundred and thirty five companies. Only four came to the bid in July. Twenty second nineteen forty one was Willis. It was Banham. And then Ford and Chrysler. Ford and Chrysler said, we can't even build this. Seventy five. We can't build this in forty nine days. We're not even going to bid. Willis put in a time material bid. The guy comes out and Bantams bid was perfect. They had a drawing

and I actually held Banon's bid proposal in my hand. Butler, Pennsylvania. Da da da da. It's all major laws. Who was the head of procuring vehicles at Camp Holabird, Maryland, which was the primary depot at the time? It's outside of Baltimore. It's no longer in existence. It comes out and says, well, Barnum and Willis Willis has a little bit in the band of People Turn White and possible. And then he says,

But Willis can't build it in. Forty nine days are saying with seventy five days, Barnum says they can do in a forty nine days. So with penalty Willis is disqualified. Now I tell you I don't think Barnum didn't know if they could do it in forty nine days, but they were bankrupt. What did they have to lose. So so sure you needed forty nine days. Thumbs up. We'll get it to you. No problem. But it at forty

eight and twenty three hours and a half. So what happened with Willis was they lose the bid short version, the army contacts and they cut this deal on the side unbeknownst to Barnham Willis, if you want to build a vehicle at your own expense and your own risk, we, the Army are wonderful human beings. We will take a look at it and consider it. So Willis did that to their credit, these guys just marvel at the quality of individuals that were abandoned. Willis Ford sold. Willis built

their vehicle. They spent thirty five thousand dollars of nineteen forty money. And I looked that off recently. That's like six hundred and forty thousand dollars today. That's real money. So Willis got their vehicle in then Ford looking at an early October of nineteen forty. They're like the ban of vehicle is in but Barnham small. We don't know how they may do. I was in government. I know you can have a little bit of a bias toward bigger firms, less risk, that type of thing. So the

quartermaster calls up Ford in October of nineteen forty. They come down on October 4th. Nineteen forty, have a meeting. And the quartermaster, you know, Ford, if you want to build a vehicle and submit it to our specs and the things we're doing, we will take a look at it and give you a shot at it. So that's how Ford came in and they were able to build their vehicle about seven weeks also. But they had a lot of lessons learned from Bannermen Willis that was kind

of shared with them. I'm not going to say it was inappropriate. It's just the stuff was there. And plus they were Ford. They had some economies of scale that would allow them to leverage that short time frame and the size of the company and the team that they had to work with. So they had a good team, a lot of resources. So Banham delivered on September twenty third nineteen forty Willis delivered on November 13th, nineteen forty

and Ford delivered on November twenty third nineteen forty. So those first three original jeeps which are documented in the book all came in nineteen forty. So that's why we really wanted to put the story out there for the 80th anniversary. Tell us about the weight so nobody can meet the weight. Right. Would ban them. They hire this

engineer because they have no staff. He comes to Butler, draws up all the plans in like eighteen hours and then they fill out the forms and he puts a. Hundred pounds in the weight, they go down to Camp Holabird, Maryland, on Sunday, July twenty first and meet with Charles Payne, who I mentioned earlier. He looks at the form and he goes crazy. He goes, You can't put an eighteen hundred pounds for the weight because you'll be disqualified. This

is a government procurement. You've got to check the check boxes, Robert. They literally call up a stenographer three, 30 in the morning. They retype all the forms. And 20 years later, Carl Probst is recounting this and he says, We put in twelve hundred and seventy three pounds for the weight. I go to the archives and to 13 I find their bid proposal. I look at the weight box and it says twelve hundred and seventy three pounds. And I know

exactly where that number came from. It was a moment as a historian going, this is the exact document and he put in twelve hundred seventy three passes. We don't want to be too close to thirteen hundred because that might not look that was a great story. I know you're right, you can't make this stuff up. Incredible. What are these things actually end up weighing? Did the US government care what they weighed in the run? They did.

After a lot of going back and forth in the testing and in February of forty one, I think they came up with twenty one hundred and sixty pounds. Officially, Willis came in at twenty one fifty nine and 11 ounces. Well they were right on the edge. I used to say if you wanted to disqualify Willis, just put your foot on the scale under way in the man. They'd be fine. But I got to tell you this story.

They're testing the bantam in October of nineteen forty in these generals come out, Calvary General and an infantry general, and they go, we want to go out in his vehicle. So they go out, they get stock while their stock sitting there waiting for someone to pull them out. They go, how much is this way? And Karl Propst and Charles Payne were there. So Charles Payne tried to start working around the way to say, well, we're going to get it the way a little bit lighter. And Probst is saying, well,

it weighs this and that. And the generals go, you know what? If the two of us could lift the back of this out of where we're stock, the weight's good. They go behind it. The two of them lift that vehicle out of where they were stock and they go, you know what? Thumbs up. It's all good weights. Good. Another one of those exceptionally scientific ways to decide something like that story, a story about it. Make this stuff up. Like you say, this is really one for the ages.

We're going to take a short break, but we'll be right back.

Veterans Memorial Museum in Huntsville, Alabama. What a remarkable artifact that thing is. Yeah, I think the Ford sold the thing off in the 80s to somebody and they realized what they had. The Willis prototype was lost to history, as far as I know. But the Barnham prototype that was also lost to history but the seventh Bantam ever built was called the BRC 60. That's actually at the Smithsonian in Butler, Pennsylvania, is just north of Pittsburgh and

they call it Gramps. So you have the two oldest jeeps. The oldest first jeep is the Ford Pygmy. Absolutely. And then you have Gramps and Pittsburgh also. And so that's like amazing that you use the absolutely correct term artifacts that you have for that. Now, one of the things I find interesting was I found the list. What happened is Bantam got a contract to build 70 if their pilot model was accepted. Their pilot model is accepted in

October of 94 and they started building their vehicles. Gramps number seven on the list of when it was completed, December 7th, 1940, literally a year to the day before Pearl Harbor. That's amazing. These things. I mean, they look like old, basically, Popeye spinach can they're so tinny and primitive looking now when you look at them. And they did the job and looking at the little pygmy, the Ford pygmy, that's the one that has the kind of

iconic grill that we see even on Jeeps today. It was sort of those vertical slats with the little headlights poking out from either side. Talk about an industrial design that's had some longevity. The Barnum and the Willis, they used a rounded hood early on Barnham because they base their design a little bit on what was called the Barnham Roadster. And then Ford came up with the flat hood, as you mentioned, with the slats and the army really

like that. So moving forward. And that was one of the things you had all three of the Jeeps document in the book. They kind of were very similar because they were built to the same specs, which because I like to geek out on this stuff, is four seventy five. We actually have that speck in the book and concept drawings, zero eight three seven zero Dash Z, which is in the book, and I got to hold that in my hand. So they built them to those specs. So there was

a lot of similarities, but there also were differences. And then after the first three were in the vehicle evolved over nineteen forty one to eventually the will assembly and the Army, to their credit, took the very best of all three, so on and so forth as the vehicle evolved and the testing went on and feedback was given

from all the different using arms. But Bantam they got it so right on the first time though their pilot was universally loved from the beginning, again, a testament, the talent of people have been on the four individuals, but also Willis's and Ford. If I can mention one other thing, Willis, to their credit, Del Maru's, their vice president in charge of engineering. They had an engine called the Go Devil. That's right. They had a great engine in that that

was the heart of the machine. So they said right in his testimony in the court case, I mentioned that I knew you could never have enough power in a military vehicle. The problem was that engine was much heavier than the engines that bannermen Ford were using because they were trying to at least ostensibly meet the weight requirement. I use that word loosely, but they got it done. And that was the big difference with the Willis. They had a sixty horsepower engine and versus a forty horsepower

engine for Barnum and Ford. And when the wilesmith, which was their second generation, came out, they got the weight at a good place. They had that engine in it. They had a really good competitor. But I found in the archives Del Maru's talking about how they got the go devel engine improved and made better for putting in their jeeps. And that engine was used in every Willa's jeep from the quad to the fifteen hundred EMS to the three hundred and thirty thousand and these that were built.

So I just I like to say geek out on it, but that is great information. The guy that fine tuned the engine that won the war right in our book, the big question is what eventually got made and who made it spot on. Robert, great question. So what happened was by the spring of nineteen forty one, you had Baynham stirred iteration of their vehicle called the Bercy Forty. You had the Willis Wilesmith and the Ford was called the general purpose. The they did a lot of testing

in early spring of forty one into the summer. In the summer of nineteen forty one, the army decided we're going to go out winner take all sole source contract. Sixteen thousand jeeps, all three bid. Willis had the best entry, lowest price and Willis won the contract. There's some stories behind that. What would I like to say to people is as I looked through the documents and read the raw primary material in the summer of nineteen. Four to the Army's like, you know what, pool gets 70 of these,

let's go for 70. Wow, that's a lot. And then the next version, they give fifteen hundred contracts to all the forty five hundred within a series of months from winter of 1940 to July of nineteen forty one, you just see the army at dawning on them the magnitude of the conflict they were going to get into. I think it was June 20th or twenty first nineteen forty one Operation Barbarossa. So about a month later they evolved from seventy a year later to sixteen thousand, eventually would

build 600000 plus jeeps for the war. So that's another amazing thing you see in the story. The change in thinking that they really didn't understand in nineteen four to the magnitude of what was coming. And that's not a criticism, it's just a fact. I read in your book though it sounds like Bantam got a little bit of a consolation prize. Fantome was able to build trailers for the war. What happened was Willis won the contract. Bannon was basically

frozen out. And this is another one of the stories I love by October, November of nineteen forty one. This is not document in the book, but it's talked about a little bit in the epilogue. The Army realizes we're going to need even more of these than Willis can build. And also they were worried about sabotage and other things and bombings, which never happened. But there was actually sabotage in World War One at a New Jersey manufacturing plant.

Speaking of your esoteric history, Robert, so that was still in their mind. So they said we're going to need a second supplier of this. So they go to Willis and say, you know what, Willis? We think Ford should build these and they should build your model because we want to stay standard under license. How what do you think of that? And shockingly, Willis said, you know, that sounds like a good idea to us. Right? It's like a Godfather offer. You know, we're going to make an

offer you can't refuse. So that's how Ford was able to get in on the building for the war. And Ford renamed their general purpose, W. General-Purpose Willis. And they built, like, I think it was two hundred seventy seven thousand. But I just love that story. That is really amazing. Is that Ford Caldas, the general purpose, the Jeep where the name Jeep come from, I don't think anybody can ever really know. There's theories. It was Yujin, the Jeep, there's theories.

It was from Jeep, from general purpose. But what I found out later on was in the interwar years, the people would call a lot of different vehicles that would come in to the depot, jeeps, new vehicles, experimental vehicles for I don't know why, for whatever reason. My best theory is we documented this from the court case. They spent a lot of time and this was during the war just a few years after everything happened, trying to

find out where the Jeep name came from. And all they could conclude was we don't really know because there's conflicts in the stories, but that they probably started calling these things cheap. Originally, they were calling them the Barnum, the Willis, the Ford. They were known as a quarter ton, four by four truck. So they probably start calling them Jeeps in the fall and winter of 1940 and then in the nineteen forty one and the name just stuck to the quarter tons as they call them, even though

they never really weighed a quarter ton. That's how they became known as Jeep. That's our best guess. If they couldn't figure out with all these people they deposed for the court case exactly where it came from, I could live with that. But that's the best that we have at this point. It's sort of like the argument about where did Uncle Sam come from? Where'd that name come from? Where do they call the old guy with the top hat and the beard? Uncle Sam? These are one of

the great mysteries. Paul, we have to take a quick break, but we'll be back in just a moment,

to sell Jeeps after the war with varying success. And what's happened to the Jeep brand and this is in the epilogue of the book, it seems like every 10 years has been bought by a new company around the mid 50s. Kaiser bought out Willis in the early 60s. They changed the name from Willis Jeep, the Kaiser Jeep. So the Willis name went out, I think it was around 1970, American Motors Corp., famous as the two of us older people would know for the Pasir put a

little more glass on the Pacer. Oh, and by the way, we got a gremlin out of the deal, too. So there was a whole lot of crap there. I mean, it's like American Motors on the Jeep. Are you kidding me? So then Chrysler decided to buy the Jeep brand from American Motors when they ran into trouble in the late 80s. I think, boy is the smartest thing that company ever did because it's the only thing keeping them afloat today. Exactly 10 years later, Daimler buys Chrysler two thousand seven

a Chrysler. Daimler has some issues. They turn into FCA and then Mussad scheduled 10 years later, FCA merges with Peugeot. The key to me for the story, though, is you look at the first three Jeeps on the cover of the book and in my opinion, the DNA of all the Jeeps ever built. What I even see one on the road today go back to those first three in those hands on individuals that ban them at will, as at Ford that put that ruggedness, put that exceptionalism, put

that versatility into the Jeep DNA. And that's what's carried down through all the corporate changes, all the other changes. They were really the first some people say SUV. It was four wheel drive, which was very revolutionary at the time. That's right. There's a lot of stuff in the book, literary detail of how they developed the axles from a company called Spizer Manufacturing, which was coincidentally in Toledo along with Willis, if that became what we now know is

the rear end. So that's to me is the real legacy is how well these were built that 80 years later, you still see them on the road, still being built new. But more importantly, the vehicle lasted 40 years and service almost 50 years to the late 80s. And military equipment goes obsolete very quickly. Have a fifty year service life. That Jeep was so well built and did what it was supposed to do so well, which you mentioned earlier, is a real testament to all the people and early history.

And it's a real privilege to me, very humbling to tell their story. I wanted to do a little research and looked up something that the greatest journalist, the war correspondent Ernie Pyle, who was actually killed in action. But he was the greatest American war correspondent by far. He wrote at the time, Good Lord, I don't think we could continue the war without the Jeep. It does everything. And I have to give credit. A friend of mine, Steve, he found this book, D-Day, through the German Eyes and

in the book. And we put this as the ending to our book, The Original Jeeps. This soldier said, when we saw the allies come on shore, completely mechanized. And that was very much due to the Jeep. And we, the vaunted German Vermaak, was still using horses and had veterinarians. We knew we were facing a mighty opponent. And that's just another one of those testaments to what the Jeep meant to warfare in World War Two in modern warfare, that we ended the book on that. And you probably

can't make a better movie either. I'm telling you, man, you've got to get this thing made because it is a fascinating story. Just the way I'm wired, I read the documents and I can feel the people in them. So when I found in the archives, when I found the court case and they had deposed all these people, I realized that you had the people just a few

years after all the events telling exactly what happened. Now, as an historian, oral history, which just is what would be usually you have you never get that exactly again. As a historian with oral history, you have two problems. One, it could be done long after the event. So people's memories are not as good. And then, shockingly, this never happens, except when it does, people might embellish their role and what they do and so on and so forth. But they were in a court case, so they were being

deposed under oath. So they had to tell the truth of what happened only a few years afterwards. This is exceptionally rare. So what I realized was my job is to allow the people that did it to tell their story and just tie the pieces together. The narrative now in the court case, and it's like 4000 pages of documents. So I read it all. It came alive for me while reading what these people did, but it wasn't an order.

So what we did with the books is we were able to take all the pieces almost like a puzzle and put it in order, allowing the people who did the work, who lived the story to tell their story. The early history, and that was an exceptionally humbling privilege to be able to do that. Let's give a little bit of a fanfare to the two books that are available and tell us where our listeners can obtain those in the first place. Have people go to, as we

have a Facebook page called The Original Jeeps? And I found it fascinating that you mentioned that your dad served in World War Two. One of the things we're doing out there at the original page, which is an homage to early history, but I had a couple uncles that served in the war and my cousin Nick and my cousin Gene got very close to were the children of Myanmar. Jamal Kalinich. My Uncle Nick served be twenty four out of Italy and my cousin shared some of the stories

that his dad told them. And we're sharing those family stories out on our Facebook page. So we're really trying to encourage people like you. If you ever went out to our Facebook page Original Geeves and wanted to post a little bit about your dad's service, that little golf story sounded fascinating. They can do that at the original Facebook page. My aunt served in the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps. So we've got a couple of wackos out there, too.

So that will give people, including yourself, a little bit of template that you can go by to post your stories. The book is available in paperback only at Amazon.com. However, for your listeners and anyone to listen to any podcast that I've done for the same price as Amazon. Twenty dollars plus shipping, you can get an autographed copy signed by me, which, you know, in my humble opinion, what could be better than that? Nothing is better than a

dedication by the author, right. They can go to despatcher magazine, dotcom books, despatcher magazine, dotcom books, order there. I get the information, I sign it and send it to the people and it's really, really good. So same price as Amazon plus shipping. And then lastly, we have a website, original Jeeps, Dotcom, with loads of early history things people can find out there a little bit more and get a primer of what we've talked about here today at

original Jeeps dot com. Paul, we're having this conversation over Zoom and of course, our listeners are going to be enjoying the audio tracks. But I see in your background, you've got a very interesting image. Can you tell us what that is? Well, I appreciate you asking about that. That is a photograph that I downloaded from the American Battlefield Trust, which I'm on their mailing lists and support what they do. The image you're seeing is actually from a..

To Maryland. It's called Burnside's Bridge from the Battle of Antietam on September 17th, 1862. And I've actually visited there. I used to live on the East Coast. I was born and raised in Albany, New York, a place called Colonie, literally 20 miles south of one of the ten great battles in all of history, the Battle of Saratoga and 1777. And I used to visit those battlefields and I have visited a lot of battlefields and I love them. The

nature is wonderful. The history is overwhelming. When you visit them, it just permeates you. You just feel it. It's a whole different feeling. Exactly. So the American Battlefield Trust originally was dedicated to preserving civil war history. Then they expanded to Revolutionary War in the War of 1812. And so when I came up with a Zoome background that seemed to be given my interest of military history that I visited many of these battlefields seemed like an appropriate some

background for me. That certainly ties in perfectly with your interest in World War Two history and the way that came to life with the first Jeeps. Pick up a copy of the original Jeeps commemorating the birth of an icon nineteen forty to nineteen forty one by Paul Bruto. Paul, thanks for joining us. It was an honor and a privilege to be with you, Robert and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I don't deserve to have this much fun, but I

appreciate you. Let me have it come back next time as we continue to talk about the passions that drive us and the passions we drive. This episode of Cars That Matter was hosted by Robert Ross, produced by Chris Border, edited by Chris Porter, theme song by Celeste Anorectic, Additional Music and Sound by Chris Porter. Please, like subscribe and share this podcast. I'm Robert Ross and thanks for listening.