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Contrary to the usual chant, "Little Bantam" proved it could have produced a very high percentage of the jeeps required by the Army.
Everyone seems to equate the Bantam plant size with the size of the car. It wasn't some double garage out in the weeds, it was a fully operational and very modern automobile assembly line (Austin set it up 1930, only 10 years earlier) and had one of the best most well equipped tool rooms in the business. Moreover it had a stable, highly skilled, non union labor force at it's fingertips. Furthermore, a little noted advantage, the Bantam plant would have been given over 100% to jeep production, and they had three and a half miles behind the plant to expand if production warranted it.
Nothing upset the Bantam people more than reading in the papers the constant reports, many of them apparently Government press releases (or Willys and Ford PR men at work?), that Bantam was too small, and would not be able to produce the now growing demand its product had created. Quite to the contrary, in building the BRC 40 the factory was well along in it's improvement curve. Ralph Turner, who stood at the end of the assembly line for it stated emphatically that they were making 250 units in an eight hour shift. Expanding that to three shifts extrapolates out to 273,750 units PER YEAR! Cut it down for overhead by any percentage you want it's still one hell of a lot of jeeps. Ford and Willys together only made about 650,000 during the 4 war years, so do the math.
Frank Fenn in the Truman hearings was more conservative than Turner, but still said 300 jeeps a day would not be a problem without increasing any size or tooling. So, that is still over 100 thousand jeeps a year. At this point the Army had told hime they wanted more than one supplier anyway.
On top of this if they were not able to meet the demand Bantam apparently had a contract with Checker or was at least in negotiations to produce overflow as early as February of 1941 . Whatever the reason was for Bantam being squeezed out, it wasn't for this phoney excuse of being "too small". This is a conclusory statement. repeated again and again in jeep histories but no one has ever set forth a figure beyond which Bantam would not be able to meet demand.
Certainly Bantam could have produced SOME jeeps? If there was any justice it should have been Bantam and Checker producing Bantam jeeps with Willys engines. Needless to say, there is no justice, and events were moving very quickly during the period of jeep development. we must remember, in the beginning (say, any time before the end of 1940) the Army wasn't sure it wanted any jeeps because they didn't even know what they were! When the first 70 were built, distributed and field tested it was gang busters, everybody wanted a lot of them ASAP. Of course it wasn't only the Army who was impressed, when Willys and Ford saw how obviously amazing the jeeps were they wanted in as well and began political rearguard and an industrial espionage actions while their engineers tried to catch up.
So, in the absence of some specific facts about wimpy Bantam production I cannot accept that the reason Bantam did not get the contract was because it was too small. I think it was for some other reason.
Do you have facts or information which are at odds with what you see here, or support it? Let's hear it from you so we can get the full story.