This Lumbering Truck Was The First ‘Standardized’ Military Vehicle Ever

Have you ever ran a military? We haven’t sent out a reader survey in quite a while, so I have no idea how many of you out there are currently in charge of a major military force. I assume at least some of you are, commanding armies and navies and forces of air, and I’m sure you’re aware of all of the complexities it takes to operate a military force. Once of these complexities has to do with the machinery used; unless you have standards types of machines and vehicles, the logistical complexity of operating and maintaining a fleet of different kinds of vehicles would be an absolute nightmare. This is a lesson the US Army learned over a century ago, and it’s worth looking at how they ended up solving it.

The US Armed Forces were actually quite late to mechanize travel if you think about it. Well, maybe not the Navy; the Navy had been using steam-powered ships since before the Civil War, and really expanded their use during the Civil War, including ships that did not rely on sail power at all, like the USS Monitor ironclad and the montior-type ships that followed it, such as the Passaic class. But everyone else? It was still a fighting force powered by horsemeat.

Even in 1914, when Gavrilo Princip decided to add some speed holes to Archduke Ferdinand and thereby set off what would come to be known as World War I, somehow didn’t quite sway the US Army to start thinking about motorization in an organized way, even as American truck companies like Mack and GMC were getting swamped with orders for trucks to be shipped over to the war in Europe. In fact, the first actual, official use of motorized trucks in a military operation didn’t happen until 1916, with the Pancho Villa Expedition.

Essentially, this was an attempt by the Army to hunt down and capture or kill Mexican revolutionary Francisco “Pancho” Villa, who had attacked a town in New Mexico, part of a larger conflict along the Mexican border. This expedition used about 588 trucks, and while there were certainly a few dominant types – the GMC Model 15 and F.W.D. four-wheel-drive trucks, for example – well over 100 different types of trucks made up this very eclectic fleet.

As you can imagine, the maintenance and repair demands of this huge fleet of primitive trucks going over some extremely rugged terrain in the punishing context of a military mission were huge, and trucks were breaking down all the time. Because there were so many different kinds of trucks, getting the right spare parts for the right trucks was incredibly difficult, and broken down trucks were often stripped for parts to keep the rest of the trucks going, because that was easier than trying to repair them.

In short, it was a huge mess, but it taught the army a very valuable lesson, one that may seem obvious, but likely takes the pain of experience to really drive home: a standardized truck, built with a standard set of parts that could be stocked and made available to any army truck, anywhere, would be a massive improvement.

These hard lessons informed the Army’s Quartermaster Corps who teamed up with the then-young Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) to come up with a design for the Army’s ideal truck, or at least ideal enough given the state of motor vehicle technology of the era. The resulting vehicle, which was ready by 1918, was an impressive and extremely utilitarian machine. It was a very basic design, with a beefy, simple chassis, an inline-four engine displacing nearly seven liters (425 cubic inches) and making all of 52 horsepower, the same as my Nissan Pao. Though, to be fair, the Pao does it with only 997cc, but it does have about eight decades of progress helping out.

This new standardized truck, known as the Standard Liberty truck, was a rear-wheel drive machine, with large spoked wheels and solid rubber tires, so at least flat tires were no problem, and, I suspect, ride comfort was also as unlikely to happen as a flat tire. There was a four-speed transmission, to get everything going, and when it got going, the top speed was only about 15 mph, and it only got around 7 mpg, at best. Considering this was a machine with an over 10,000 pound curb weight and a payload of three to five tons, I suppose these numbers really aren’t all that surprising.

I do like that spring-mounted front bumper, which sort of predicts the energy-absorbing 5 mph bumpers of the 1970s. The first series of Liberty trucks had electric lights front and rear, and a full electrical system with a battery and generator, along with a parallel magneto system for the ignition. A second series of Liberty trucks simplified the electrical system significantly, retaining the magneto-based ignition system but getting rid of the generator-battery electrical system, and with that the electric lights, which were replaced with oil-wick sidelights and taillight, and carbide spotlight mounted on the dash, which you can see in this photo:

This may be the only example I can think of in all of automotive history where an update to a vehicle switched from electrical lighting to oil/gas lighting?

A huge number of companies were contracted to build Liberty trucks and/or Liberty truck parts, including Bethlehem Motor Truck Corporation, Diamond T Motor Car Company, Packard, Pierce-Arrow, Selden Motor Vehicle Company, and more, most or all of which are long gone today. Unfortunately for the Allies in Europe, not all that many really made it to the front before the Armistice that ended the Great War, which isn’t surprising considering how late the United States entered the fight.

All in all, 9,364 Liberty trucks (both versions) were built before the war was over, and while there were about 40,000 orders outstanding, production ended in 1919. Incredibly, some of these beefy old brutes remained in service into 1940, though they had received a lot of updates and mechanical upgrades that pretty significantly changed their abilities.

Even if it came a bit too late to be a big part of WWI, the Liberty truck is a huge milestone in US Military history, as it is the very first armed-forces specified, standardized motor vehicle. There would be no Jeep, no Humvee, were it not for the path laid by the slow, heavy Liberty.

If you’re still eager to ponder this influential truck and its legacy, there’s a very comprehensive video here you should enjoy:

I think what makes the Liberty so fascinating is that it may be the first time that a mass-produced vehicle type was designed and built based on a set of criteria and use cases from an organization. The Liberty truck wasn’t so much designed as it was cast by the demands and restrictions of what the army wanted and needed. A lot of truly iconic cars came from this approach after the Liberty, cars designed to solve a specific set of problems.

The Jeep, for example, was another military project designed from the demands of a go-anywhere small general-purpose car; the Volkswagen Beetle came from a set of demands that the German people have an affordable car to carry a family down the new Autobahns at 60 mph; and the Citroën 2CV was designed to get French peasants off their horses and into a car, a car that could go over a field and not break any eggs. There’s more, sure, but I think you get the idea.