War History Online has an article about a classic, the 1942 Jeep:
The 1942 Ford GPW and the Willys MB is perhaps the most iconic American four-wheel-drive vehicle of the Second World War. But you may simply know it as a Jeep.
Of course, today the Jeep is known all over the world as a rugged off-road vehicle but, back during the Second World War, this classic American vehicle was built also by Ford to help meet the Army’s demand.
One account of the origin of the term Jeep begins when the prototypes were being proven at military bases. The term Jeep was used by Army mechanics for any untried or untested vehicles. Jeep was also used for several types of heavier equipment. In the armored branch, jeep generally referred to a half-ton or three-quarter-ton truck, with the quarter-ton called a peep. The militarized Minneapolis-Moline tractor was known as a jeep, also named for the cartoon character. Finally, heavy equipment transporters, gooseneck low-bed trucks for oversize, overweight cargoes, were known as jeeps by 1940.
Although folk etymology claims it due to slurring of an unused acronym, GP for General Purpose, a more likely part of the jeep name came from the fact that the vehicle made quite an impression on soldiers at the time, so much so that they informally named it after Eugene the Jeep, a character in the Popeye comic strip and cartoons created by E. C. Segar as early as mid-March of 1936. Eugene the Jeep was Popeye’s “jungle pet” and was “small, able to move between dimensions and could solve seemingly impossible problems”.
In early 1941, Willys-Overland staged a press event in Washington, DC, having the car demonstrate its prowess by driving up the Capitol steps. Irving “Red” Hausmann, a test driver on the Willys development team who had accompanied the car for its testing at Camp Holabird, had heard soldiers there referring to it as a jeep. He was enlisted to go to the event and give a demonstration ride to a group of dignitaries, including Katherine Hillyer, a reporter for the Washington Daily News. When asked by the reporter, Hausmann said: “it’s a Jeep”. Hillyer’s article appeared in the newspaper on 20 February 1941, with a photo showing a jeep going up the Capitol steps and a caption including the term jeep. This is believed to be the most likely cause of the term being fixed in public awareness. Even though Hausmann did not create or invent the word Jeep, he very well could be the one most responsible for its first news media usage.
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