“Can this be an automobile?”

“Looks more like a four-wheeled beetle.”

The literal “auto”-biographical narrator of this 1943 World War II propaganda film is quite honest with us that these kinds of comments once shook his self-confidence. In a world of elegant coupes and sedans full of gadgets, of cars more “debutante” than machine, what was there to be impressed by in a boxy little open-topped thing such as himself?

Those past cars were all about style, but it’s wartime now. The army’s getting tough, and so cars have to get tougher. The Jeep (named for “GP”, the military designation of “general purpose”, our narrator claims) gets put through his paces: driving through shoulder-deep water, across moguls, through underbrush, hauling artillery, towing gliders, even getting rowed across a river in a custom canvas wrapper. Let’s see a Lincoln Continental do all that!

Our narrator is not just a Jeep but “Jeep” itself — when he passes his tests, he is thrilled that he “found myself in mass production. I was getting turned out one every two minutes. Thirty Jeeps a minute, what do you think of that!” He becomes ubiquitous, omnipresent, both at the start of the parade and the end of the battle. He gets to simultaneously raise money for war bonds in Washington, D.C., with Claudette Colbert and drive through New Guinea with General MacArthur and join victory parades in North Africa. All alongside his “pal” — the American soldier.

But it’s not those soldiers he’s talking to. Given voice by the Office of War Information’s Overseas Film Unit under the direction of Irving Lerner, a later-blacklisted left-wing documentarian, our Jeep is presenting himself to the people of the world. “Jeep” is the idea that will defeat America’s enemies, repeatedly instantiated in the more than 600,000 units that rolled off Ford, Willys-Overland, and American Bantam assembly lines between 1941 and 1945.

He doesn’t even know that General George Marshall would supposedly later call him “America’s greatest contribution to modern warfare,” but how can he have ever doubted himself?

“I was a success! But the thing that makes me a success most of all is this: I made a friend — I mean the soldier. Wherever you see one of us, the other one won’t be far behind. That goes for now, when we’re fighting together, and for after the war, when we’ll be building together. Because the rumor is going around that the Jeep is here to stay!” The Jeep was here to stay, but not just for postwar reconstruction: it would subsequently be deployed in Korea, Vietnam, and various other conflicts across the twentieth century. “No matter what they asked me to do”, snarls the Jeep at one point in the film, “it was no worse than what my driver was ready to do himself.”