This week is the 100th anniversary of the Army convoy on the Lincoln Highway across Iowa. The Iowa DOT, quoting the Eisenhower presidential museum, says the primary goal was “an exercise to test the ability of the military to move great distances over roads under wartime conditions.” The experience would color Eisenhower’s experience about highways and (along with the Autobahn in World War II Germany) be among his inspirations for the interstate highway system.
There was a lot of promotion going on in this trip — the military, the Lincoln Highway Association, the Good Roads movement in general, and the military’s suppliers. Here’s what one advertisement in the Clinton Advertiser on July 22, 1919, said:
“The cross country trip of this first motor transport convoy will, in its way, be as historic an event as the first trans-Atlantic flight. The Lincoln Highway Association has for many months been working with the War Department and offices of the Motor Transport Corps in logging the various routes from interior manufacturing centers to the Atlantic coast, and later in providing the necessary data for the first trans-continental trip. The run which started from the Capitol at Washington July 7th is being made by 65 army trucks, staff, observation, and reconnaissance passenger cars, motorcycles, ambulances, tank trucks, mobile field kitchens, mobile repair shops, signal corps searchlight trucks, and personnel-of 290 army officers-and men.”
The Willys-Overland ad made note of its vehicles’ roles — the pilot car, an LHA car, the film/photo crew, and the newspapermen. It was capitalizing on postwar spirit to promote upcoming passenger cars. The company’s 4-cylinder models would become the basis, 20 years later, for a “light-weight, four-wheel-drive, general-purpose (GP) US Army vehicle.”
The GP vehicle … or, the jeep.