The Dodge Power Wagon

First section by Jack Nerad for Driving Today

There was a time when the people who drove four-wheel-drive vehicles were mainly men on missions, be it for the military, the Forest Service or utility companies. The vehicle of choice for those manly men who got the job done was the Dodge Power Wagon.

The Jeep and the Dodge-built M-37 truck virtually monopolized the military four-by-four scene in their day. Of course, several companies built the Jeep, including Willys-Overland, Ford, and Dodge, and there was a wrestling match for the Jeep trademark at war's end. Willys won that battle, and the Jeep went on to become the icon of the civilian off-roader thanks largely to its rugged construction, low price and constant appearance on Roy Rogers TV show. Jeep has managed to outlive three companies that have owned the brand - Willys, American Motors and Chrysler Corporation.

While Willys was taking the Jeep to the people, Dodge, a company that has a legitimate claim to off-road heritage, took its civilianized version of the M-37 in a different direction. It considered the model it first dubbed the WDX unsuitable for personal use for folks like you and me, so instead the company's marketing mavens decided to sell it as a commercial vehicle. And it was as a commercial vehicle that the Dodge Power Wagon, as it quickly came to be known, developed its special cachet. Produced from 1950 to 1968, the Power Wagon developed a cult following that is small in relative numbers but absolutely fanatic in its devotion to the tough, cantankerous oddball of a vehicle that is so ugly it's beautiful.

Since it was destined for life as a commercial vehicle, the folks at Dodge did very little to domesticate the military truck for civilian use. The closed cab version had a family resemblance to the Dodge VC series trucks, and the front hood, engine enclosure and grille were similar to the T234 3/4-ton vehicle built by Dodge for the Chinese Army, which was famous for its treks over the Burma Road.

In military use, Dodge trucks were configured various ways, including as ambulances and fire trucks, with WC series trucks acting as weapons carriers (1/2 tons WCs were produced from 1940 up until 1942 and then the 3/4 ton series were produced from 1942 up until 1945). Civilian Power Wagons also came in several types, and many did see service as fire trucks, especially in forestry work, but the most common Power Wagon was fitted with a pickup box that measured eight feet long by four and a half feet wide with sides the sides of the pickup box about two feet above the bed.

Perhaps because the vehicle was designed strictly with functionality in mind it has a beauty about it. The rudimentary fenders give it a rugged look that is accentuated by the upright grille, separate headlights and split windshield. The side-mounted spare adds to the jaunty appearance as do the tall, heavily lugged tires on 16-inch steel wheels.

Peering inside, one could grasp why Dodge executives decided the Power Wagon wasn't going to be a personal-use vehicle. Oh, they did add an amenity or two to the military version, but the 1946 WDX was none too plush even in the context of its times. Driver and passenger sat on a fairly narrow bench seat, and the driver was confronted by a paucity of gauges and a thin-rimmed, three-spoke steering wheel of impressive diameter - the Forties replacement for power-assisted steering. Three big levers jutted from the floorboards of the car, one the gearshift lever for the four-speed, non-synchromesh gearbox (can you say "double-clutch?") and the other two the selectors for the New Process two-speed transfer case that directed some of the engine power to the front wheels when the driver deemed that necessary. Just to demonstrate how rudimentary the base Power Wagon was, things like the driver's-side sun visor, armrest, overhead dome light and heater were optional. Air conditioning? Power windows? Be serious. [To be fair, back then, both were quite rare.]

A glance under the hood suggests the name of the vehicle was a misnomer. Some say the truck was named "Power Wagon" after a contemporary trucking magazine with that title. Whatever the reason for the name, the tried-and-true Dodge flathead six that resided under the front bonnet had a hard time living up to its billing [editor’s note: Jack is being rather harsh here. This engine had a lot of torque and back then, 94 horsepower was by no means a poor showing]. It produced just 94 horsepower from its 230 cubic inches of displacement. But the Power Wagon quickly built a go-anywhere reputation based on its stout four-wheel-drive system and the beauties of torque multiplication. Clearly, with a compression ratio of about 6.7:1, the Power Wagon's engine wasn't going to produce a lot of, well, power, but the vehicle's designers helped compensate for this with extremely low (high numerically) final-drive ratios, ratios that might have seemed more suited to farm tractors. Buyers had their choice of the highway-friendly 4.89 rear end or (good night!) the super-stump-pulling 5.83. If the buyer picked the former, he might be able to cruise the Forties fast-lane at 50 miles per hour. The latter limited top end to not much higher than 45 mph.

While these numbers are far from exhilarating even for the Forties, one must remember that this vehicle was designed for work and dirty, difficult off-road work at that. It was this type of work in which the Power Wagon showed its greatness. It had the torque and power multiplication to slog through just about anything. And if the engine couldn't pull its drivers out of the muck, the Power Wagon's optional 10,000-pound winch could be hooked up to a sturdy rock or tree to help extricate it from the predicament.

Like the contemporary Land Rover, the Power Wagon also could be purchased with a power takeoff system. This allowed the vehicle to be used as a stationary power source to run implements like saws or pumps. A governor kept engine power at a constant level in spite of changes in load. The only difficulty was the rear wheels had to be removed first.

Other manufacturers, including Mack, had built four-wheel-drive commercial trucks dating back to the pre-World War I era, but Dodge factories in Michigan and California started turning out Power Wagons well before Willys introduced its post-war 4T. Despite this, Dodge's heritage as a four-wheel-drive vehicle manufacturer is largely unsung.

Power Wagons continued to be equipped with custom bodies, including tow truck rigs, fire engines, school buses and stake bodies. In 1957 Dodge introduced a second line of four-wheel-drive trucks and created decades of confusion by also calling them Power Wagons. These have the model designations W100, W200, W300 and W500. These trucks offered more modern, conventional styling, and many are quite handsome in their own right, though they lack the bulldog look of the original.

Over the years, Dodge made changes to the original truck, including moving to a 251-cubic inch version of the flathead six in 1961, adding (in 1955) a synchromesh transmission, higher compression ratio and aluminum alloy pistons, and (in 1956) adding power steering as an option.

In all nearly 100,000 Power Wagons in one form or another were sold from the beginning of production in 1946 until it closed out domestically in 1971. Even after that Dodge continued to produce export-only models as late as ten years later, when the vehicle was finally discontinued. Little did Dodge executives know then the size of the sport-utility vehicle market, a market they had helped to create with the under-appreciated Dodge Power Wagon.

© Studio One Networks

Power Wagon: The Movies

by Jim Benjaminson, editor emeritus, the Plymouth Bulletin. Not associated with Studio One Networks or Driving Today.

It was January of 1983 when I flew into Los Angeles to meet with Sullivan Richardson, Arnold Whitaker and Kenneth Van Hee. Together the three men had comprised the Richardson Pan-American Highway Expedition. The "Expedition" had occured back in 1940-41, when the trio left Detroit, Michigan driving a 1941 Plymouth sedan with the goal of being the first people to drive the entire length of the proposed Pan-American Highway, from the United States, through Mexico, Central and South America to the tip of Chile. The slogan of the expedition was "Detroit to Cape Horn" -- even though Cape Horn is a rock in the middle of the ocean, hundreds of miles off the southern tip of Chile.

I had read a rather upsetting article about the trio in a book published by Petersen Publishing, questioning whether they had actually accomplished their feat--and why they would have even attempted it. One of the photos in the article (obtained from Chrysler by the way) showed a badly battered Plymouth with 1945 Illinois license plates. The caption read something to the effect of "what happened to the car? Chrysler officials say it was left in South America." Whoa! If it was left in South America in 1941, why then did the photos show it with 1945 Illinois license plates?

From that point on, I became determined to track down the men behind the expedition. The search led me to Detroit, Chicago and ultimately to Los Angeles where all three men were still living. Now well up in age, I realized this might be my only chance to actually get to meet them face to face.

From the outset I found the trio to be friendly and out-going--and more than a little amazed that someone from the hinterlands of North Dakota was still interested in what they had done so many years ago. Sullivan Richardson and his wife Elva picked me up at the LA airport and that first night hosted a dinner party in which the other two members, Arnold Whitaker and Kenneth Van Hee attended. As it turned out, it would be the last time the three of them were together in their lifetimes.

I spent three days with the Richardson's, pouring over old photographs, scrap books and watching the film they had made of their trip. The original intent of the trip, in addition to promoting the building of the Pan-American Highway, was to document their travels in the Plymouth. What they had expected to be a fairly short trip turned into a nine month ordeal--and by the time they got back to the USA, their trip was soon forgotten, being overshdowed by the events of December 7, 1941. In the early 1950s Richardson resurrected the thousands of feet of movie film made and put it together into a travel-log--one film entitled "Rough Road To Panama," the other "Rugged Road To Cape Horn."

During the war, Richardson and Whitaker returned to Central America under the auspices of the U S Government, documenting the "Other Peoples of the Americas" -- while Van Hee served in the SeeBees. Their vehicle of choice this time was a Dodge Power Wagon Weapons Carrier.

After the war Richardson and Whitaker began doing product films for firms such as Sears, Dodge Division, Encyclopedia Britannica and others. As I sat in Richardson's study I peered into a closet piled from floor to ceiling with cans of movie film. Near the bottom, one caught my eye. It read simply "Power Wagon". What, exactly, I asked, was that film. After much digging I watched two movies unfold, documenting the product film they had made for Dodge Division about the civilian version of the Power Wagon.

The first film was simply titled "Power Wagon", a 34 minute color tome documenting the many uses of the Power Wagon, from floods in Mississippi, to winter storms in Wyoming delivering feed to cattle, fighting fires, hunting rattlesnakes to make anti-venom, etc. The second film, also in color and running 39 minutes, was entitled "Power Wagon-For The Farm."

Like Willys, Dodge advertised the Power Wagon as the perfect vehicle for the farm. It could be used to pull a plow, with a post hole digger attachment it took no time at all to install a new fence. And once you unhooked--you could let your wife drive it to town for groceries. One scene showed a young woman with a baby in arms doing just that--the woman was Sullivan's wife Elva and the baby was son Sullivan, Jr., whom I met while visiting at the Richardson home (and who happened to be my age).

Because of his years in the film business, Sullivan Richardson knew who to contact about having the original films put on videotape. In fact, all four films were put on video tape and the Plymouth Owners Club became exclusive distributors of the film (there are boot leg copies on the market but such is the nature of video recorders...).

That was not the end of the Richardson film library however. Also in the closet was a film entitled "Northward to Nome"--a documentary done in 1949 for Dodge Division, driving the new '49 Dodge over the new Alaska Highway. In making that trip, Richardson and Whitaker had achieved a personal goal of driving from the "north pole to the south pole", or as closely as that could be done at the time. "Northward to Nome," too, became a part of the Plymouth Club video library.

All three expedition members passed away in 1986 -- Arnold Whitaker in January, Sullivan Richardson in July and Kenneth Van Hee in December. I was priviledged to know them. Their films live on and can be rented from the Plymouth Owners Club Video Library.

About the photo: Arnold Whitaker watches the volcano Paricutin erupt. Photo by Sullivan Richardson; from the Jim Benjaminson Collection - used by permission.

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