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Jeeps were used by every division of the U.S. military and an average of 145 were supplied to every infantry regiment.

Jeep is an automobile marque

Jeep is an automobile marque (and registered trademark) of Chrysler. It is the oldest off-road vehicle (also sport utility vehicle – SUV) brand, with Land Rover coming in second.

The original vehicle which first appeared as the prototype Bantam BRC became the primary light 4-wheel-drive vehicle of the US Army and allies during the World War II and postwar period. Many vehicles serving similar military and civilian roles have since been created by many nations.

There are many explanations of the origin of the word "jeep," all of which have proven difficult to verify. One notion holds that the vehicle bore the designation "GP" (for "Government Purposes" or "General Purpose"), which was phonetically slurred into the word jeep. However, R. Lee Ermey, on his television series Mail Call, disputes this, saying that the vehicle was designed for specific duties, and was never referred to as "General Purpose" and it is highly unlikely that the average jeep-driving GI would have been familiar with this designation. The Ford GPW acronym actually mean (G for government use, P to designate its 80-inch (2,000 mm) wheelbase and W to indicate its Willy-Overland designed engine). Many, including Ermey, suggest that soldiers at the time were so impressed with the new vehicles that they informally named it after Eugene the Jeep, a character in the Popeye cartoons created by E. C. Segar. Eugene the Jeep was Popeye's "jungle pet" and was "small, able to move between dimensions and could solve seemingly impossible problems."[1] Words of the Fighting Forces by Clinton A. Sanders, a dictionary of military slang, published in 1942, in the library at The Pentagon gives this definition:

Jeeps were used by every division of the U.S. military and an average of 145 were supplied to every infantry regiment. Jeeps were used for many other purposes including cable laying, saw milling, as fire fighting pumpers, field ambulances, tractors and, with suitable wheels, would even run on railway tracks. An amphibious jeep, the model GPA, or "seep"(Sea Jeep) was built for Ford in modest numbers but it could not be considered a huge success - it was neither a good off road vehicle nor a good boat. As part of the war effort, nearly 30% of all Jeep production was supplied to Great Britain and to the Soviet Red Army during World War II. During the jeep's service in Korea the name was referred to as "Just Enough Essential Parts" by the troops due to the very basic design. When it became obvious that the United States was eventually going to become involved in the war raging in Europe the U.S. Army contacted 135 companies asking for working prototypes of a four wheel drive reconnaissance car. Only two companies responded to the request, The American Bantam Car Company and Willys-Overland. The Army had set what seemed like an impossible deadline of 49 days to supply a working prototype. Willys asked for more time but were refused. The bankrupt American Bantam Car Company had no engineering staff left on the payroll and brought in Karl Probst, a talented freelance designer from Detroit. After turning down an initial request from Bantam, Probst accepted the job after being asked again by the Army, and initially working without salary, went to work July 17, 1940.bystander, according to another account) what it was called, Irving answered, "It's a jeep."