52 ANY COLOUR AS LONG AS IT IS
ARMY GREEN

In 1945 in the newly renamed city of Wolfsberg, a number of dusty, disused and seemingly unwanted car parts lay in the basement of a factory bombed by the British Royal Air Force. There they lay until Colonel Charles Radclyffe and Major Ivan Hirst of the British Royal Electrical & Mechanical Engineers came across them and saw what others had missed: a short-term solution to the British military’s need for economically produced vehicles, and a longer-term potential to help get Germany back on its feet.

The parts were all that was left of the “People’s Car”, first produced in 1933 and part of Hitler’s “economic miracle”. Thousands of these cheap, utilitarian cars had been built at the factory prior to its conversion to the production of Luftwaffe aircraft.

Despite apparent severe damage to the factory, Major Hirst quickly realized its potential. Having cleared some debris from the generating plant building, Hirst discovered that some of the rubble had been put there to disguise the fact that it was still operational.

The original blueprints for the car had been destroyed in the Allied bombings, leaving Major Hirst and Colonel Radclyffe to painstakingly reconstruct them from the remaining parts. They produced two folios of new technical drawings, each containing 18 tabbed sections detailing the parts and specifications of what was to go on to become one of the iconic automobiles of all time.

Production restarted in 1946 with the order for 20,000 Type 1 “Beetles” for the British Army – in, to paraphrase Henry Ford, any colour so long as it was army green.

Raw materials were in short supply and it was a constant struggle to source steel, glass and tyres. Malnutrition amongst factory workers was a key problem as food was also in short supply, so the lawns next to the factory were turned into vegetable gardens to grow extra food. Despite all this, by March 1946 the one thousandth Beetle had been produced.

In May 1949, Volkswagenwerk AG was formed and in October the Volkswagen factory was officially handed back to the Germans under the leadership of Heinz Nordhoff.

At the end of 1951, Major Hirst⁵ was demobbed and returned to civilian life in England. The Beetle, the Bug (as it’s known in the USA), the Kaefer (as it’s known in Germany) went from strength to strength.

And the moral is (with a nod to another iconic car – Chitty Chitty Bang Bang) that sometimes from the ashes of disaster grow the roses of success. How can you use a past failure to drive future success?

⁵ Ivan Hirst died on 10 March 2000 aged 84. There is still a street near the original VW factory that was named after him in appreciation of the work he did to help put Germany on the road to recovery: Major-Hirst-Straße, Wolfsburg.