German Engineers Mocked America's "Toy" Jeep—Until 640,000 Crossed Europe While Kubelwagens Died.

The morning air in the Volkswagen works at Fallersleben carried the sharp smell of welding flux and machine oil. It was September of nineteen thirty-nine, three weeks after German forces crossed into Poland, and the engineers gathered in the main testing facility were examining something that had arrived via diplomatic pouch from the German embassy in Washington.

Spread across the worktable were American automotive trade journals, technical specifications, and grainy photographs of a vehicle prototype that the United States Army Quartermaster Corps had commissioned from three separate manufacturers. The Americans were calling it a reconnaissance car. The German engineers called it something else.

Ferdinand Porsche himself picked up one of the specification sheets and read aloud to his colleagues. Maximum weight fifteen hundred pounds. Wheelbase eighty inches. Four-wheel drive. Capable of climbing a sixty percent grade. The men around the table exchanged glances. One of them, an engineer named Franz Reimspeiss who had spent six years perfecting the Kubelwagen's suspension geometry, actually laughed.

He pointed to the gross vehicle weight specification. Eleven hundred thirteen kilograms with crew and equipment. Then he gestured toward their own Kubelwagen prototype sitting in the corner of the facility. Seven hundred twenty-five kilograms empty. Built to carry four men over any terrain the Wehrmacht would encounter. Simple. Efficient. Proven.

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