A time to remember

May 23, 2025Newsletter Archives

Americans tend to think of Memorial Day as the official start of summer, a long weekend focused on baseball, hot dogs, apple pie and… patriotism. (Bet you thought I was going to say Chevrolet.) But Memorial Day is intended to be the most somber of our national holidays, created to honor and remember those now gone who served in the nation’s armed forces. 

To mark the occasion, GM News this week looked at the contributions General Motors made to the American cause in World War II. What’s often forgotten is just how dramatically GM revamped its business to respond to the huge need for military vehicles and hardware during the war years. 

For one thing, President Franklin D. Roosevelt conscripted GM President William Knudsen to take control of war production efforts. And he leaned hard on his old employer. GM converted its entire manufacturing base over to the war effort. From February 1942 through the end of the war, we stopped producing civilian passenger cars entirely. During that period, we made a wide range of military supplies - more than 120 million artillery shells, over 18,000 tanks and tank destroyers, and tens of thousands of aircraft. And we made an astonishing number of military trucks.

As noted in the latest edition of Retro Rides, our series on historically important vehicles, GM produced more than 850,000 trucks for the U.S. military during the war years, including more than 570,000 of the heavy-duty GMC trucks known as the “Jimmy Deuce-and-a-Half.”  

None other than Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower called the Deuce-and-a-Half – a reference to its two-and-a-half ton cargo capacity - one of the five most important pieces of equipment to winning the war. In particular, the truck played a huge roll in the Red Ball Express, a convoy that kept the American troops in France supplied following the D-Day landing in Normandy in 1944. GM trucks, in short, played an important role in winning the war. 

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One great Memorial Day weekend tradition is the Indianapolis 500 – the race has been held on the same weekend since it first started in 1911. One person who’ll be at this year’s race is Ken Morris, a GM senior VP who among other things runs the company’s motorsports program. This will be Ken’s 37th consecutive year attending Indy. In a moving column on GM News, he talked about his love for the race – and how his involvement with Indy has changed the course of his career – and his life. 

-- Eric Savitz, editor-in-chief, GM News