Made In America - Bill Bryson [191]
Several World War II words, it will be noted, were foreign creations. Blitzkrieg (literally ‘lightning war’), flak (a contraction of Fliegerabwehrkanone, ’anti-aircraft gun’) and gestapo (from Geheime Staatspolizei, ‘Secret State Police’) are of obvious German derivation. Also from Nazi Germany came one of our more chilling phrases, final solution (German Endlösung) coined by Reinhard ‘The Hangman’ Heydrich. Fascism dates from long before the war – from 1919, in fact, when Benito Mussolini launched the Fascismo movement in Italy – but came to prominence only in the period just before the war. It comes from the Latin fasces, ‘bundle’, and alludes to a bundle of rods that was used both as a tool of execution and a symbol of authority in imperial Rome.26 Kamikaze is of course Japanese. It means ‘divine wind’, and commemorates a timely typhoon that routed a Mongol seaborne attack early in Japan’s history.
Among the native-born terms that are not self-evident, bazooka was called after a comical stage prop – a kind of homemade trombone – used by a popular comedian named Bob Burns, and GI stands for general issue, the initials stamped on all military property. No one knows quite when GI was first applied to soldiers, but GI Joe can be dated with certainty. He first appeared in the 17 June 1942 issue of Yank, the armed forces newspaper, in a cartoon drawn by Dave Berger.27
Jeep, as a concept if not as a word, slightly predates America’s involvement in the war. In 1941, just before Pearl Harbor, the Army introduced a sturdy vehicle for negotiating rough terrain. The jeep was actually not a very good vehicle. It was heavy, difficult to manoeuvre, devoured oil, had a chronically leaky water pump and cylinder head, and could run continuously for no more than four hours. But something about its boxy shape and go-anywhere capabilities earned it instant and widespread affection. No one knows how it got its name. The most common, and seemingly most plausible, explanation is that it is taken from the letters GP, short for General Purpose. The problem is that General Purpose was never officially part of its title, and doesn’t appear on any documents associated with it. The Army with its usual gift for clunky appellations termed it a truck, quarter ton, four-by-four. More puzzlingly, the prototype for the jeep was generally known – for reasons now lost – as a peep. Mencken stoutly maintains that jeep comes from the Popeye the Sailor comic strip written by EC Segar.28 It is true that a character named Eugene the Jeep appeared in the strip as early as March 1936, though no one has ever explained how, or more pertinently why, that character’s name would have been applied to a four-wheel-drive vehicle. What is certain is that Segar did give the world another useful word at about the same time, goon, named for simian-like characters in the strip.
Towards the end of the war, a slogan, often accompanied by a cartoon drawing of the top half of a face peering over a fence or other barrier, mysteriously began appearing wherever the US Army went. The slogan was ‘Kilroy was here’. No one has any idea who this Kilroy was. The figure at whom the finger is most often pointed is James J. Kilroy, an inspector of military equipment in Quincy, Massachusetts, who was said to have chalked the three famous words on crates of equipment that were then dispatched to the far corners of the world. Others attribute it with equal assurance to a Sergeant Francis Kilroy of the Army Air Transport Command, who would also have had the opportunity to place his name on boxes of supplies and munitions. But the theories are manifold. One desperately imaginative scholar has even interpreted it as an anti-authoritarian Kill Roi, or ‘Kill the King’*32
One of the more striking fashions