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Rusting Jeeps in Okinawa, Japan, and Puson, Korea

• CATEGORIES: Features, GPW (Ford MB), MB, Old Images, Website This site contains affiliate links for which I may be compensated.

UPDATE: I added this post in January of last year with just the single image (the first one below).  Today, David pointed me to the Tahiti-pacifique.com website that has a few more images, which follow the first image.  You can learn more about these pics at that site.

(01/31/09) Robert pointed me to a collection of Life Magazine photos of old jeeps hosted at Google.  Click on the photo and then click on it again to see all kinds of details.

jeeps_rusting_okinawa_japan

 

9 Comments on “Rusting Jeeps in Okinawa, Japan, and Puson, Korea

  1. mmdeilers Post author

    I suspect they were there until they were either recycled as scrap metal, buried, or used in some other way. There’s other pictures from Italy and Korea as well that show similar type of military junk yards.

  2. Grant Houser

    I read somewhere it was a contract with (car companys maybe?) that they could not bring them back to the states after the war becuz they didn’t want to flood the car market with good used jeeps when they could instead sell new ones. Just a thought

  3. deilers

    Grant, what you say makes a TON of sense for at least two reasons. 1) It’s clear from early on in the development of the jeep that selling them to the consumer was high on W/O’s list. Bringing those vehicles and trailers back would have flooded the market and no doubt cut into sales of new jeeps. 2) Looking at many of the jeeps, they had been beaten up and used hard, so they weren’t in the best of condition. Reselling massive numbers of jeeps that were never really design for consumers with problems resulting from heavy duty use might also have damaged W/O’s reputation, giving them another reason to discourage bringing the jeeps back.

    -Dave

  4. deilers

    Simon .. that’s a good discussion at the G503 site.

    It reminded me Yasuo Ohtsuka, in his book JEEP JEEP JEEP #2 (#2 is the english translated version), has some pictures from Japan (p54 – 61) that show jeeps stored at Oppama awaiting reservicing by (mostly) Mitsubishi. He also has pics that show reservicing in process and yards of completed jeeps awaiting shipment to Taiwan and the Phillipines.

    So, while there were jeeps that were rebuilt, my sense is that the jeeps above might not have been. I suspect the “Y”s painted on the hoods of the jeeps in the pics above has some significance, but I can’t say what it is. Note that the jeeps in Ohtsuka’s book do not have Ys painted on the hoods.

    Thanks! Dave

  5. frank

    OUCH!! first time i’ve seen these pic’s. I literally almost gagged. What a waste. To see this just hurt’s. It’s worse than a divorce by far.OUCH!

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