civilian jeeps in army?

[mdog]

At the local junkyard i saw a civilian 1971 CJ jeep that had army markings, paint, and data plates rivited to the dashboard. It also had a hardtop. I have no doubt it was a army contract jeep but i had never heard of such a thing. I was telling another junkyard owner about it and he said they were common. He had a CJ jeep from the 1980's that was used as aircraft tow tractor. It only ran in low range and had a big flywheel near the back end. Does anyone know how many civilian style jeeps were procured by the army? How many moifications? How many years?

[wesk]

Virtually every jeep model built saw military service somewhere. There are many photos of civvy jeeps in military paint. Wagons, pickups, CJ's, DJ's, and more. About the only jeep product I have not seen in military paint is the VJ (Jeepster). Some of these civvy jeeps were updated by Willys or Kaiser with special military items and became the M606 (CJ3B) or the M606A2 or A3 (CJ5). Some were limited special purchase and local purchase with off the shelf civvy equipment and paint. With the hap-hazard record keeping by Kaiser, AMC and Chrysler there will probably never be a full accounting of how many and where.

Just browse the many military historical sites and you'll see them often. The CJ3B page has done a nice job of covering some of them.

[cmpman]

Here in Canada we even had the Jeep commando in service. There were still about a half dozen of them at the trades school in Borden in the early 80s.We used them as training aids, along with a CJ6. All were painted Lincoln commercial green.
In the early 80s, Canada bought hundreds of CJ7s to replace portions of the aging M38A1 fleet in use by the militia. They were slightly militarized by adding a 12 to 24V convertor, bumperettes, olive drab paint, and 524 radio sets. Otherwise, they were just bare bones CJ7s.