While some boys out in the Pacific decided to rebody their Jeeps using aircraft drop tanks, Wally Cohn came up with a different approach. Much like Brooks Stevens with the Victory Car, Cohn envisioned a somewhat more refined automobile body to go atop the Jeep four-wheel-drive chassis to create a new offering for the post-war economy. Unlike Brooks Stevens, however, he didn't have access to the head honchos in Toledo; instead, he was serving with the U.S. occupation forces (possibly with the Army Air Force) in Germany just after the war.

Also unlike Brooks Stevens (unless you count the Jeepster or the Willys station wagon), Cohn saw his vision to fruition. He found a workspace, apparently hired some German craftsmen, then cut apart a late 1930s Opel Olympia to merge its body with a Willys MB grille, chassis and drivetrain. Walter Sanders, a photographer for LIFE magazine, discovered Cohn and his Jeep in December 1946 and took plenty of pictures of the well-finished hybrid, along with pictures of Cohn's workshops, and filed them with LIFE shortly after.

Read the Whole Article