jerrycan

This is the Wehrmachtkanister or Jerrycan, as it is now known today, “Jerry” being Allied slang for German.

Armies need fuel almost more than water, so in Nov. 1936 the German Army launched an invitation to tender for a new model of container to replace the old cans and equip all their motorized units. The firm Müller of Schwelm under the direction of the chief engineer Vinzenz Grünvogel developed a revolutionary new design that is still as good today as it was almost one century ago. 

With rectangular form and curved edges, it was constructed from two pressed steel plates, needing to be assembled by just one single weld in the central gutter, or “Equator”, and an X-shaped indentation on each side which ensured its shock protection, never leaked, and had a capacity of twenty liters with a weight of only four kilos. Maybe the most interesting part is the handle with three bars. And you may think why three?

For two reasons: One, when a soldier placed two cans side-by-side, the handles on the edge of each can touched and could be used as a single big handle, meaning one person could carry four cans. Two, think about unloading a bunch of these off of a truck, how would you do it? The extra handles on the side meant it was easy to make a bucket brigade line of troops and neatly hand cans off to each other. The caps could be opened and closed by hand, no tools necessary, and the extended neck meant you could pour without a funnel in a pinch. Each can held an even 20 liters, making it easy to calculate bulk amounts (whereas the Brits had to multiply everything by four). There was even an airpipe leading to the air pocket above the spout and below the handles so that the contents would pour smoothly and would even make it float in water even when full!

In contrast the Allies were carrying fuel in the so called “Flimsy”, which was a flat sided, unergonomic, pressed steel container, in which all flat sides needed to be individually welded together at the edges. You needed a wrench to attach and remove the cap, a funnel to fill the container and a spout to empty it. The containers held four Imperial gallons… and tended to leak at the corners, where the welds would fail, and there why the containers became colloquially known as “flimsies.”

Such was the superiority of the german design that as soon as the troops on the battlefiled realized of the Wehrmachkanister, they rapidly used the captured units for their own service, and obviously it wasn’t long until the Allies had their own knock-offs made in factories all across the world. 

via: http://elsolitariomc.com/2013/05/the-wehrmachtkanister-aka-the-jerrycan/