“An army marches on its stomach.” This adage, variously ascribed to Frederick the Great or Napoleon Bonaparte, captured one of the universal truths of warfare: that battles are won not by men and weapons, but by logistics – the ability to efficiently and reliably supply said men and guns with the ammunition, food, medicine, and any other resources required to sustain the fight. As armies became increasingly mechanized in the early 20th Century, a new element became vital to the prosecution of war: the fuel needed to feed vast fleets of trucks, tanks, and aircraft. During the Second World War, the massive logistical problem of slaking armies’ endless thirst for fuel led to the development of a deceptively simple but ingenious device that changed the course of history and remains in widespread use today. This is the story of the humble Jerry Can, the little metal can that won a war.

Prior to the Second World War, the mechanized armies of the world used a wide variety of fuel containers largely adapted from civilian models – few of which were particularly suited to the rigours of combat. For example, the standard British Army fuel canister was the rectangular 18-litre Petrol, Oil, and Water or “POW” container – derisively nicknamed the “Flimsy”. And flimsy it was, with thin sheet metal walls and folded and soldered seams that frequently split and leaked. Indeed, so fragile were Flimsies that they had to be transported in special wooden crates to prevent them from crushing each other. Inconveniently, the screw lids also required a wrench and funnel to use.

Early in the Second World War, the British quickly discovered the importance of fuel logistics as their armies faced off against the Germans in the deserts of Egypt and Libya. The poor design and construction of the Flimsy caused up to 30% of British fuel bound for North Africa to be lost in transit, while leaking fuel containers caused the explosion and sinking of at least one transport ship in the Mediterranean. Such shortages severely hampered the British war effort, as historian Desmond Young later described: “No one who did not serve in the desert can realise to what extent the difference between complete and partial success rested on the simplest item of our equipment—and the worst. Whoever sent our troops into desert warfare with the [five-gallon] petrol tin has much to answer for…The overall loss was almost incalculable. To calculate the tanks destroyed, the number of men who were killed or went into captivity because of shortage of petrol at some crucial moment, the ships and merchant seamen lost in carrying it, would be quite impossible.”
Indeed, these shortages were largely responsible for the failure of several British offensives, including the First Battle of El Alamein in July 1942. Meanwhile, the panzers of General Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps were able to maintain their breakneck advance thanks to an ingenious piece of German engineering: the Wehrmancht-Einheitskanister or “standard army can.”

Developed in great secrecy by engineer Vinzenz Günvogel of Müller Engineering and first issued in 1937, the Wehrmachtkanister was specifically designed for the mechanized Blitzkrieg tactics that the German army would use to conquer most of western Europe. The 20-litre can was constructed of thick stamped steel with recessed welded seams, making it resistant to splitting and leakage even when roughly handled; while cross-shaped indentations in the side walls allowed the body to expand and contract with temperature. The interior was lined with plastic, protecting the steel from corrosion and allowing the can to safely carry water as well as fuel. The triple handles at the top allowed the can to be carried by one or two men or to be passed from man-to-man bucket-brigade style and. Even more ingeniously, the handles were hollow, holding just enough air to allow the can to float even when filled with fuel. Finally, the opening featured an integrated spout and air tube to allow for smooth and efficient pouring and – most importantly – could be opened and closed without the use of tools.

Hundreds of thousands of Wehrmachtskanisters were manufactured for the German armed forces, and it wasn’t long before examples of this ingenious device were captured by the British in Norway and North Africa. Immediately recognizing the superiority of the German design over the troublesome Flimsy, the British began capturing as many from the enemy as they could, and eventually began producing their own copies – which, due to their Germany origin, soon became known as “Jerry Cans.” Meanwhile, the much-maligned Flimsy was relegated to a variety of secondary roles. For example, cutting a flimsy in half and filling it with gasoline-soaked sand produced a handy makeshift stove dubbed the “Benghazi Burner” or “Benghazi Boiler.” Similar devices were also used as improvised flare pots for marking desert airstrips at night. Flimsies were also filled with sand and rocks and used in place of sandbags for fortifying trenches and foxholes.

By contrast, the United States was slow to recognize the virtues of the Jerry Can, despite first learning of the design before the British. In 1939, Paul Pleiss, an American engineer working for the German auto body firm Pleiss Ambi-Budd Presswerk or ABP, decided to embark on an epic road trip from Germany to India. Just prior to departure, however, Pleiss realized that he had forgotten to pack containers for emergency water. But as luck would have it, Pleiss’s travelling companion – a fellow ABP engineer whose name has been lost to history – knew of a supply of fuel canisters belonging to the Luftwaffe being stored at Berlin’s Tempelhof Airport. He managed to steal three of the newfangled cans and strap them to the bottom of the car, whereupon he and Pleiss set off on their journey. The pair made it across 11 national borders before Hermann Göring, head of the Luftwaffe, learned of the engineer’s departure and dispatched an aircraft to bring him home. Pleiss continued his journey alone, but by the time he reached Calcutta the Second World War had broken out, making a return trip impossible. Pleiss thus placed his vehicle in storage and made his way back to Philadelphia by ship.

Upon arriving back in America, Pleiss contacted the U.S. Army and informed them of the marvellous German fuel can which had served him so well on his journey. Realizing that removing and shipping the cans separately from India would attract suspicion, Pleiss instead arranged to have the whole car shipped instead. It arrived in the summer of 1940 and the cans were sent to Camp Holabird in Maryland for evaluation. But while Army inspectors were impressed, their redesign of the German can was a poor facsimile. Its seams were rolled instead of welded, it had no plastic lining, and the spout still required a wrench and funnel to use. Nonetheless, to Pleiss’s dismay the ersatz Jerry Can soon went into full-scale production.

This situation began to change in September 1942 when Richard M. Daniel, a quality control officer posted to American oil refineries in the Middle East, learned from British officers that the only kind of fuel can worth having was the German Jerry Can. In response, Daniel submitted a report to Washington, which convinced the Government to halt production of the old 10-gallon fuel can and a newly-designed but still inferior Navy can in favour of a direct copy of the Jerry can. With the United States’s conversion to the Jerry can, production was ramped up and nearly 2 million were sent to North Africa in 1943, playing a pivotal role in the eventual defeat of Axis forces in the region. And as the Allied forces advanced across Western Europe in the wake of the 1944 D-Day landings, the Jerry Can advanced right along with them. To give an idea of the pivotal role this seemingly simple device played in the European campaign, by October 1944 the Allies were moving more than a million gallons of gasoline a day – most of it in Jerry Cans. Yet despite nearly 19 million Jerry Cans being produced by the end of the war, lack of discipline in returning the empties led to severe shortages across Europe, with soldiers using them for all sorts of unauthorized purposes such as shoring up gun positions or creating footpaths across muddy roads. Indeed, the situation got so bad that the US Army even resorted to offering prizes to French schoolchildren to bring back as many empty Jerry Cans as possible. Nonetheless, the humble Jerry Can soldiered on with distinction to the end of the war, leading U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt to declare: “Without these cans it would have been impossible for our armies to cut their way across France at a lightning pace which exceeded the German blitz of 1940.”

But perhaps the greatest testament to the Jerry Can’s ingenuity and versatility is the fact that it remains in use today in both military and civilian applications, its design all but unchanged after 80 years except for the replacement of metal with modern plastics. An immortal design classic, the Jerry Can truly is the Little Can That Could.