Over half a million 6x6 Jimmys were delivered by General Motors (GM) during World War Two. (‘Jimmy’ was US Army slang for GM.) All in all, type CCKW 2.5-tonners (also known as ‘Duce-and-a-half’) accounted for around 40-percent of GM’s group-wide WW2 contracts for a combined total WW2 of some 1,200,000 million trucks for US, British/British Commonwealth and allied armed forces. The other 60-percent or so comprised 201,000 Canadian Military Pattern (CMP) Chevrolets, 280,000 US Chevrolets and 250,000 Bedfords.
In those days, General Motors was the world’s biggest industrial corporation. The claim: ‘What’s good for GM is good for America – and what’s good for America is good for GM’ has considerable justification. This certainly held true when the US became a direct participant in WW2 following the Japanese 7 December 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, Honolulu, in the Hawaiian Islands.
GM’s – and America’s – prodigious engineering and volume manufacturing capacity swung into action. That said, before US might joined the fray, some sections of US industry – and overseas GM subsidiaries – had already got their act together fulfilling orders for war materiel against contracts placed by Britain’s War Office.
As the saying goes: ‘When the going gets tough, the tough get going’. This certainly applied GM’s US, Canadian and British truck divisions. Urgency dictated that the various types were either militarised upgrades of commercial designs, or their engineering was heavily reliant on standard commercial truck components.
The soundness of GM commercial truck engineering
