The Kubelwagen: The Nazi Jeep

much has been made of the humble Willies MB better known simply as the Jeep over the years as evidenced by easily found and dramatic headlines such as Wily's Jeep how the US Army created the greatest military vehicle of all time from military.com and why the jeep was America's greatest contribution to Modern Warfare on slashgear.com we've even looked at it ourselves on this very Channel having published a video on it all the way back in August of 2023 so not actually that long ago but while the Deep certainly deserves all of that attention as really was a truly revolutionary bit of Kit the hype around it does obfuscate some interesting things like the fact that the Germans had their very own equivalent vehicle and well here it is the often overlooked and frequently forgotten volksvagen type 82 kubal vagen behold but what of this marginalized machine when was it built why was it built and was it any good well if those questions happen to be bouncing around your head don't touch that dial you're on YouTube what dial because they shall be on in the next 20ish minutes let's go ah the joys of public Wi-Fi you're out and about yes no spending on my data plan except public Wi-Fi is dangerous put it away unless you've got surf shark unless you've got today's sponsor surf Shar which will save you surf Shar allows you to protect all of your internet activities One Tap and your data is encrypted so whether you're shopping online checking your bank account whatever you are safe and if you're Trine how frustrating it could be to go somewhere you and it's like oh no but my Netflix show why is it not available here tell you what I'm watching a Disney plus I mean allegedly I'm watching a Disney Plus show that's only available in the UK where I don't live fire out my surf shark VPN boom pop over to the UK and at the show I'm watching is Boston Legal by the way quick content recommendation within an ad read there it's a brilliant show look I don't know what do you want Netflix in Japan bbci player allegedly in the US where I live allegedly not that ever use that myself without a television license that would be wrong surf shark is incredibly user friendly you don't need to be tech savvy to use it just download connect and voila your internet is private plus they've got a whole bunch of other stuff like a kill switch an IP Rotator GPS booing on Android all of that good stuff plus one subscription covers unlimited devices so why wait protect your online life with surf shark use the promo code Mega for 4 months extra at surfshark dodeals Mega big thanks them for sponsoring now back to today's video The kubal vargan Story begins on the 17th of January 1938 when a consultation took place between Jacob Verlin the head of the SS Farber shaft VW the branch of the SS responsible for liasing with and procuring vehicles from bulk zagen and car Becka the chief of the army weapons office the aim of this meeting was simple to bash out some preliminary ideas for taking Volkswagen Type 1 which you may know better by its post-war name the Beetle and plonking a more utilitarian body on its chassis to adapt it for military use during this meeting a basic set of specifications were agreed upon which stated that the new vehicle must have a three-man crew be able to mount a light machine gun and be no heavier than 950 kilos when fully loaded with all of those things aware that this weight goal was in the realm of possibility but a tad optimistic they also specified that the body should be made from aluminium which would be nice and light compared to the good oldfashioned steel as V would design it that was a no-brainer because Verlin and Becka knew just the fell for it Ferdinand Porsche PR had originally designed the type one and so we knew better than anyone else what to do he was given completely free reign to design the new vehicle as he saw fit on the 26th of January although the army weapons office did request to be regularly updated with schematics and blueprints as and when they were completed so that they at least had some idea of what he was doing and since he had been given free reign Porsche really took his time to get it right much the army weapons officers shagrin as they given that the job amounted to taking an already sorted chassis ploning utilitarian body on it and then bolting some military G on top of that had expected a nice and quick turnaround instead it would take until the 3rd of November for the first prototype to be delivered for testing that test would take place 11 days later and it saw the prot type vehicle now dubbed the type 62 which still retain the rear wheeel drive configuration of the type 1 was pitted against a hawk 901 which thanks to its four-wheel drive and four-wheel steering Arrangements was the creme de La Creme of off-road military cars we don't know exactly how this test went as the documentation that recorded it has long since been lost a time but we do know the result a big fat thumbs up from Becca with just one minor grip to fix the fact that it was far too pretty and didn't look nearly military enough with that in mind Porsche returned to his drawing board ruler in hands and set about flattening out all of the type 62 smooth curves that took the whole of five minutes and knocking out a few more prototypes in the new shape didn't exactly take much longer and so come the start of 1939 the ever more finalized vehicle was ready to be put through some intense testing with a view to ironing out any remaining and well- hidden Kinks before it was sent for mass production now the story gets a bit patchy again in regards to those tests but we know that one was taken up to the peaks of the Black Forest to see how it fared in snow as well as two of them being put through a Six-Day endurance test in teral Austria where they were driven to their limits to see what if anything broke under heavy use these tests were far from a disaster but equally they were far from a home run for the type 62 because when they were completed the army weapons office presented Porsche with a list of further modifications that he had to make this time they were a bit more serious than making it look a bit meaner and included things like messing about with a normal type 1 gearbox to increase torque output at the cost of top speed giving it a further 50 mm of ground clearance things like that not minor changes for sure but by no means daming orders to fundamentally redesign the whole thing this took into December of 1939 with the first two completed units of what was now called the type 82 being delivered to the army weapons office that same month they were dead chuffed by that point and so full production began in February 1940 all right so now that we know about the how of the type 82 coming about let's bring this chapter to a close and zoom in on what it actually was beyond the surface level details that we've just mentioned all in all the kual vargan proved to be quite a handy bit of Kit a standard type 82 was 3.74 m in length 1.6 in width and 1.65 in height which for a point of reference makes it not far off the same dimensions as the Willies Jeep which was near as dam it the same width and height but the jeep was nearly a full 30 cm shorter than the kubal this slight difference in length might seem immaterial at first but actually in Practical terms made quite a bit of difference on how they could be used as it allow the kual vargan to have four proper doors and thus be able to carry four people far easier than the Jeep could whose back passengers instead had to awkwardly scramble either over the sides or climb over the front seats to get in not the end of the world to be sure but certainly not the most ergonomic design is it now normally one could argue that this was in fact a hidden Advantage for the Jeep as a shorter ground clearance means that it's less likely to bottom out thanks to this affording a higher breakover angle the maximum angle of which a vehicle can pass over a Crest or ramp without the underside of the vehicle touching the ground but alas no because thanks to the kubal vargon having a ground clearance of 28 CM compared to the Jeep's 22 cm the advantage of having a shorter wheelbase was completely nullified we actually did the maths on this ourselves and figured out that with the kubal vargan having a wheelbase of 2.4 M compared to the Jeep's 1.9 M it can make it over a 26.2 Dee Ridge before bottoming out compared to the 25.9 de for the Jeep the kubal vargan is also markedly lighter than the jeep with a standard unloaded type 82 coming in at a mere 750 kilos compared to 1,60 for the jeep that is a solid victory for the buv vargon and there's no two ways about it lighter is better for an off-roader as it means a vehicle will exert less ground pressure and thus be less likely to sink into soft surfaces and is easier to manhandle out when it does get stuck when it comes to power however the tables turn completely as the Jeep blows the kubal vargan out of the water with a whopping 60 horsepower compared to a Mir 23 and the standard type 82 this meant that a Jeep could top out at 105 km per hour compared to 80 km per hour for the kubal vargan and this is despite the Jeep being much heavier further to just straight line speed however the extra power of the Jeep also affords it an advantage in towing with it being rated to pull a maximum of 97 kilos compared to 450 for the cubal and that's just with the cubal that actually had a tow hook fitted as it was not even a standardized feature so then with there being no clear winner between them that makes answering the question that we've been clearly building towards in this chapter which is which one is better all the harder to answer the Jeep for example is better in a straight line and much better at Towing whereas it would appear that the kubal is handier Offroad despite lacking four-wheel drive a takeaway that while very much grounded in objective metrics that we could actually compare in a format such as this also more or less matches the author of today's piece who's actually driven them both's experience although he does note that he's done this within the sanitary confines of military vehicles shows not exactly kneep in the frozen mud of the Battle of the Bulge but still he reckons they match but such a question at all may in fact be moot we chose to frame this chapter in the way we did partly because using a more familiar vehicle as a frame of reference allows you the audience to better get your head around what it is we are discussing but also because contemporary discourse around the kubal vargan is that it is not a specific vehicle that was made under unique conditions and to address very particular needs no it was a Nazi Jeep as evidenced by articles such as beat the kubal vag and Nazi Germany's very own military Jeep and this was Nazi Germany's answer to the Jeep as found in the National interest and we are the mighty respectively but in reality they were built to satisfy different military needs with the Jeep actually being a very light truck I.E a vehicle designed to move stuff and the kubal vargan being a light passenger vehicle I.E a vehicle meant to move people naturally with war being quite the chaotic affair they both strayed into each other's roles to a certain degree but nonetheless to compare the jeep with the kubal vargan is to compare an apple to an orange I mean yes they are both fruit they are both about the same size and they are both tasty but at the end of the day they're really quite different and so they shouldn't really be compared okay now we are very possibly about to set a record for the shortest chapter ever featured in a mega projects video because while the history around the kual bargain and its technical design are indeed rather interesting if we do say so ourselves it was ultimately just a car and so while it no doubt did have a huge impact on the war its impact wasn't exactly what you would find exciting certainly not in the way say a tanks service record would be you know tanks have big old cannons and they go fighting and stuff like that and so we could spend 900 words or so reeling off an endless list of various famous bums that plon themselves down in its seats over the years as well as all the weird little exceptions that saw it doing other things or or we could just sum it up with the following it went everywhere the German Army went during the war with some prototypes even seeing service in Poland and throughout all of that its main St role was as a personnel carrier but it also found itself pushed into other roles such as Battlefield ambulance a Commander's car a radio car and a very light artillery tractor basically any role that could be filled by a small car cuz it was a small car beyond that it was also one of the most produced German vehicles of the war with a grand total of 50,4 135 of them having left the factory come the end of hostilities in Europe a figure which as far as we can tell was only broken by the opal Blitz truck of which it appears that over 100,000 were produced or with the sources varying a bit on the exact number and that's it we're done end of chapter let's move [Music] on a lots of different varieties of the kubal vargan were turned out during its fiveish years in production and a lot of these are quite dull for few variants however were legitimately big departures from the type 88 norm and well they're worth us having a quick look at the first one of Interest appeared before the type 882 even entered mass production in February 1940 as in 1939 Porsche designed a four-wheel drive chassis that was able to take both the civilian vwb tool body which was dubb the type 87 and the military kubal vagen body which was named the type 86 for both of these types Porsche also rebor the standard engine stretching it out to a displacement of 1.1 L and as a result pushing its output up to an absolutely phenomenal 20 5 horsepower although these certainly represented a big leap in capabilities for the nent design both were met with initial apathy the type 82 despite lacking four-wheel drive and having a more modest engine appeared as though it was going to be perfectly adequate so why mess about And Delay the start of mass production as War loomed eventually however this apathy you would dissipate with the type 87 entering full production in 1941 with a total of 564 units being produced a good portion of these would end up being sent across the mediter Anan to the Africa Corp having been first beefed up with meteor filters to protect their carburetors and air intakes from the harsh North African sand as for the type 86 it was never adopted exactly as Porsche designed it with a grand total of six prototypes being the only units ever produced but its chassis and drive drain would eventually go on to form the bases of the type 166 shman bargain which as the name suggests was fully aquatic it ended mass production in 1942 and by the time production ended 2 years later 15,500 184 of them had been built making it the most produced aquatic vehicle in history Beyond just those two however another particularly interesting variant was the type5 a halftrack model it was designed as a response to the type 82's performance both in the Sands of North Africa and the snow of the Soviet Union where despite all the efforts made to engineer it as a cheap and cheerful utilitarian off-road vehicle it was still struggling here and there in Africa for example it was found the particularly Steep and soft San Gene simply couldn't be climbed and in the Soviet Union as any all-wheel vehicle did In fairness when the mud got really bad it just got completely bogged down and stuck a half track was the obvious solution to these problems as tracks offer far Superior Traction thanks to them having a larger surface area in contact with the ground as compared to wheels and they also reduced ground pressure by spreading the weight of the vehicle across a greater area unfortunately however despite these very real advantages it was not meant to be for the type 15 155 prototype work began in late 1942 which saw it tested alongside multier half tracks which thanks to them being very well known as a quality off-roader were to act as a benchmark for the 155 to meet it put in a decent showing to easily able to keep up with the multi but unfortunately this performance came at two higher price as the extra weight of the track system reduced the maximum road speed down to a mere 5 mph and the fuel economy down to 94 L per 100 km which for reference made the 15 5 about as thirsty as a tiger 1 tank and that just wasn't very good at all so the project was abandoned then there was the type 157 a variant capable of traveling on railway tracks thanks to having a set of flange steel inserts fitted behind the normal wheels and having its axles extended out to the width of the tracks unfortunately beyond that we couldn't find too much information about this one as all the sources we consulted featured barely a paragraph dedicated to it so this is nothing if not a shame because this is certain a pretty peculiar iteration the most peculiar variant of all though was probably this the type 823 which as you can no doubt out by the picture here was a type 82 that was rigged up to look like a dummy tank for many years this was an enigma a variant that much like the 157 was just something that existed at some point and hell if we knew much specific about it we knew that they were used both for tank crew training and as dummies to fool enemy reconnaissance efforts and well that's kind of it fortunately however one turned up on eBay of all places in 2016 which revealed that the modifications were actually rather extensive and not just a load of tankes bits plunked on top of a type 82 as you might initially imagine instead the tank body is a specifically constructed bit of kit that was plunked on top of a bare chassis and said body also had a dedicated swiveling Commander chair and a turret rotatable via a hand crank as for its history we got absolutely no idea oh and if you happen to be wondering it ended up selling for $228,000 initial production of the kubal vgan naturally came to a halt following the surrender of Germany but that is far from the end of its story because what if we were to tell you that actually not only did production of it continue after the war but that it is in fact the only reason that Volkswagen as we know it exists today sounds pretty far-fetched doesn't it but it's completely true as for exactly how well it all comes down to the efforts of major Ivan Hurst of the British army he was sent to secure the ruins of the Volkswagen factory in Wolfsburg in August of 1945 both from civilian looters and from other Allied armies who might try to claim the factory or at least strip it bare when there he found that what he had been told was a ruin was actually in pretty good Nick All Things Considered sure the odd building had been leveled a few rubs have caved in and there was still a few unexploded bombs lying about the place but all in all the facility was far from a wrof and even better still the Machinery the most expensive part of any Factory was largely still functional having been saved from the bombing by being relocated to a remote and outling location around the factory and so he arranged to have it all brought back to Wolfsburg and have the factory brought online again reasoning that restarting production there would both help Kickstart the local economy and alleviate British vehicle shortages in occupied Germany the British government agreed and duy placed an order for 20,000 type 82s only 2490 of this order would ever be delivered but it mattered not Volkswagen which like so many other Nazi founded companies could easily have been pulled apart for profitable Salvage and forgotten about but it was back up and running orbe it now as a British State Enterprise the cash gained from selling these postwar type 82s gave Volkswagen the resources it needed to fund for production of the type 1 Beetle which come 1949 when Volkswagen was handed back to the German state was steadily being pumped out of the factory by the tens of th000 per year and from there the rest was history volksen would become one of the biggest car manufacturers is in the world and it was all thanks to the kubal vargan

Channel: Megaprojects

Views: 134,041

Keywords: kubelwagen, schwimmwagen, combat dealers war trucks, jeep

Id: bsuMblTQGUY

Length: 19min 48sec (1188 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 13 2024