This postcard demonstrates the use of a jeep on a gunnery school target range in 1943. Here’s the view of an actual target practice jeep being setup.
Maury shared information about this: “If you haven’t seen one of these setups before, this was a “jeep range” to train air crew gunners. The idea was evidently to set up a remote-controlled jeep** with wood posts bolted to it. A heavy cloth target was attached to the posts, and the jeep ran behind an earth berm to protect it, at least somewhat, from the gunfire from the truck-mounted turrets beyond.
Evidently the bullets for each turret were painted with different colored dyes. A bit of the dye would come off on the target when the bullets passed through it, allowing the instructors to tell which guns were actually hitting it.
**I’m not sure how the remote-control was accomplished, but maybe someone else knows (…..and if it wasn’t remote-controlled, that was sure one ballsy driver!!)”
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My Dad was a tail gunner on a B17 in WW2. He trained on this exact same setup in Gunnery school. He remarked to me that there was one low place in the berm where the jeep was visible for a second-they all aimed for the jeep there!
The “remote control” was that a guy would put it in low gear, pull the hand throttle, and jump out. It wasn’t going very fast, so the guy could run along side and jump in to stop it, or just let it run out of gas.