“I did about everything a machine could do”

To go along with this morning’s story on the Ford Pygmy – the oldest existing jeep prototype – joining the National Historic Vehicle Register, let’s check out this newsreel film that United Films released in 1943 relating a sanitized-for-the-masses and rally-round-the-troops story of the jeep’s birth from the jeep’s point of view. The story might be light-hearted, but we see quite a bit of footage of Bantams and other early jeeps undergoing testing and enduring quite a bit of abuse.