Almost every rectangular fuel can on the road today, steel or plastic, is a descendant of one design finished in a German ironworks in 1937. It was copied by the British, copied badly by the Americans, carried across North Africa, France, and Germany by the tens of millions, and then adopted as the standard container of every NATO army. This is the full story, drawn from the US Army's official logistics history, the account of the American engineer who smuggled the first cans out of Berlin, and the German record of how the can was developed.
The jerry can timeline at a glance
| Year | What happened |
|---|---|
| 1935 to 1936 | German army tender; the Müller ironworks in Schwelm develops the Einheitskanister under chief engineer Vinzenz Grünvogel. 5,000 trial cans go to troops in 1936. |
| July 1937 | Final form settled; officially introduced by General Army Communication No. 324 on 8 July 1937. |
| 1939 | Thousands stockpiled before the invasion of Poland. American engineer Paul Pleiss leaves Berlin with three cans on the underside of his car. |
| 1940 | British troops meet the can in Norway and name it. A sample reaches the US War Department; the Camp Holabird copy replaces the cam closure with a screw cap. |
| 1941 to 1943 | Captured cans replace Britain's leaking flimsies in North Africa. Britain ships two million of its own copies by early 1943. |
| 1944 to 1945 | Millions land in Normandy. 3.5 million go missing in the pursuit across France. Roosevelt credits the can with the pace of the advance. |
| 1950s onward | The German-pattern can becomes standard across NATO armies, including the new Bundeswehr. West Germany consolidates the steel canister specification in DIN 7274 in 1981. |
| Today | The NATO-pattern steel can is still built to the 1937 layout. Wavian cans are made in Latvia and sold in North America through Swiss-Link. |
Before the jerry can: what armies carried fuel in
By the 1930s every army had motorized, and none of them had solved the problem of getting fuel the last mile to a vehicle. Pipelines, tankers, and railcars moved gasoline to depots; from there it had to be carried and poured by hand, and the containers for that job were an afterthought.
The British Army went to war with two containers. One was a two-imperial-gallon pressed-steel can; the other was a four-imperial-gallon tin-plate container, officially the "Petrol, Oil and Water can" and universally known as the flimsy (Wikipedia). The flimsy earned its nickname. It had crimped or soldered seams that split on rough ground, and when cans were stacked in a ship's hold the upper layers crushed the lower ones, letting fuel run into the bilges (Wikipedia: Flimsy). In the North African campaign some flimsies lost 20 percent of their contents in transit and some more than half; one quartermaster recorded 70,000 gallons dispatched arriving as 30,000, and was told that was a good effort (Wikipedia: Flimsy). The best use troops found for an empty flimsy was to cut it in half and turn it into a stove, the Benghazi burner.
The US Army's standard container was older still: a cylindrical ten-gallon can, a World War I design, with two screw closures. Using it required a wrench to open and a funnel to pour (Daniel, Invention & Technology). Filled, it weighed far too much for one soldier to handle, and it did not stack.
1936 to 1937: the design brief in Schwelm
Germany approached the problem as an engineering requirement. Richard Daniel, a US Navy chemical engineer who later investigated Allied fuel losses, wrote that Hitler "recognized that the weakest link in his plans for blitzkrieg using panzer divisions was fuel supply" and ordered a container that would minimize gasoline losses under combat conditions (Daniel). Handy triangular-section fuel tins of 2.5 to 20 liters were already in civilian and military use in Germany, but none was built for war (German Wikipedia).
The army issued a tender in 1935 to 1936. The winning design came from the Schwelmer Eisenwerk Müller & Co. in Schwelm, Westphalia, with chief engineer Vinzenz Grünvogel credited as the lead. A trial series of 5,000 cans went to troops in 1936; the pressed-steel specialist Ambi-Budd gave the can its final form in 1937, and it was officially introduced on 8 July 1937 by General Army Communication No. 324. A patent application followed in 1938 (German Wikipedia). Its official name was the Wehrmacht-Einheitskanister, the armed forces standard canister. From 1939 to 1945, nineteen manufacturers built it (German Wikipedia).
What the 1937 specification fixed, and why
The requirement was written around the soldier, not the truck. The army specified that one man should be able to carry two full cans or four empty ones, and that single line produced the three-handle top: one person takes the center handle, two people share the outer ones, a chain of men can pass cans bucket-brigade style, and two empties can be carried in each hand by their outer handles (Wikipedia). Capacity was set at 20 liters, about 5.3 US gallons, which put a full can of gasoline at roughly 45 pounds (Daniel). Heavier than that and one man cannot lift it repeatedly; lighter and the truck needs more of them.
The body was two deep-drawn steel halves welded together "as in a typical automobile gasoline tank," with the seam recessed so it stiffened the can and was protected from impact (Daniel; Wikipedia). The X-shaped indentations on each side strengthened the panel, let a full can survive a fall from a vehicle, and gave the contents room to expand in heat (Wikipedia). Under the handles the can held an air chamber, so a full can would float if it went over the side of a landing craft, and an internal breather tube ran from the spout to that air space so fuel poured smoothly without gulping (Daniel). The mouth was closed by a large spout with a flip-top cam closure sealed by a gasket, opened and closed by hand with no tools, with a hole for a securing pin or a wire and lead seal (Wikipedia). Inside, a dip coat protected the steel from corrosion. Motorized troops were also issued a length of rubber hose so they could siphon fuel from any source they found (Wikipedia). From 1940 a 20-liter water version with a white cross marking was produced alongside the fuel can (German Wikipedia).
Every one of those features survives on the NATO-pattern can today. The feature-by-feature explanation is in What Is a NATO Jerry Can?; this article is about how it got here.
1939: three cans leave Tempelhof
The can was developed under strict secrecy, and the German army had thousands stockpiled before the invasion of Poland in September 1939 (Daniel; Wikipedia). The route it took to the Allies is the strangest part of the story, and it comes from Daniel's 1987 account in Invention & Technology.
In the early summer of 1939 an American engineer named Paul Pleiss, finishing a manufacturing job in Berlin, talked a German colleague into an overland drive to India. They bought a chassis, built a body on it, and then realized they had no provision for emergency water. The German engineer knew where thousands of the new cans were stored at Tempelhof Airport and took three, which they mounted under the car. The two crossed eleven borders without trouble and were halfway across India when Field Marshal Göring sent a plane to bring the German home. Before he left, he handed Pleiss complete manufacturing specifications for the can (Daniel).
Pleiss drove on alone to Calcutta, put the car in storage, and returned to Philadelphia. He tried to interest American military officials in the container but had no sample to show them, and shipping cans out of Calcutta seemed too risky. In the summer of 1940 he had the whole vehicle sent home by way of Turkey and the Cape of Good Hope. It arrived in New York with all three cans still bolted underneath, and Pleiss sent one straight to Washington (Daniel). Later that year, in London, British officers asked him whether he knew anything about the can's design; he had the second one flown over, and Britain began work on exact duplicates (Daniel).
1940: Norway, and a name
The British Army first saw the can for itself during the German invasion of Norway in the spring of 1940 and immediately recognized what it had (Wikipedia). British soldiers called Germans "Jerries," and the containers they captured were Jerry's cans. The name attached itself to the design and never came off; today it is used for plastic cans that share nothing with the original but the rectangular shape.
1940 to 1942: the American copy and its screw cap
Pleiss's can went from Washington to Camp Holabird in Maryland, the Army's vehicle research center. The evaluation there was favorable. A report dated 18 September 1940, "Advantages of the German Can," listed six: it stacked and did not shift or roll; one man could carry and use it, yet it was strong enough for the field; full, it floated, and the handles were ideal; the closure needed no tools and no accessories, would not open by accident, stayed open while pouring, and had a vent pipe; dirt, sand, and water did not collect around the opening; and it could be used for drinking water (Key Military).
Then Holabird redesigned it. The copy kept the size, shape, and three handles and threw away the two things that made the original work: the cam-operated closure and the two-piece welded body. In their place went the same screw cap as the existing World War I cans and a three-piece body with rolled rather than welded seams (Key Military). Daniel, a petroleum engineer, was blunt about it: "The welded circumferential joint was replaced with rolled seams around the bottom and one side. Both a wrench and a funnel were required for its use. And it now had no lining. As any petroleum engineer knows, it is unsafe to store gasoline in a container with rolled seams" (Daniel). The War Department's view at the time was that an updated version of its ten-gallon can would do (Daniel).
The US Army's own official history is only slightly kinder. It describes the American container, "sometimes referred to as the 'ameri-can,'" as "essentially a copy of the German can except for the closure. The jerrican had a simple locked-cap, cam-operated spout; the ameri-can had a larger opening with a screw cap, to which a flexible nozzle was supposed to be attached for pouring." The reasoning was that US vehicles had countersunk or flush filler openings that only a nozzle could reach. "But combat experience actually proved this to be its greatest defect. Nozzles were easily lost and were difficult to replace. Lacking them, or preferring not to bother with them, drivers often wasted gasoline through spilling" (Ruppenthal, Logistical Support of the Armies, vol. II). The rolled seams leaked in service, the screw cap proved weak in the field, and the Marine Corps ordered straight copies of the German original rather than the Army pattern (Key Military).
That split, cam lever versus screw cap, is still the dividing line between a NATO-pattern can and most of what is sold as a gas can in the United States. Wavian vs Scepter vs Generic Jerry Cans walks through what it means for the user today.
1941 to 1943: North Africa and Britain's two million
The desert war made the case for the can in gallons lost. Daniel's telling is that General Wavell's 1940 victory over the Italians "ultimately came to nothing because his planes and combat vehicles ran out of gasoline," and that General Auchinleck's win over Rommel the next year "withered away" for the same reason (Daniel). After the second capture of Benghazi at the end of 1941, the British took enough German cans to equip whole units, including the Long Range Desert Group (Wikipedia). From late 1940 the flimsies and the two-gallon cans were gradually replaced, first with captured cans and then with British-made copies (Wikipedia: Flimsy).
In September 1942, two weeks before El Alamein, Daniel and a colleague passed through Cairo as Navy quality-control officers and learned that the British did not want the container the US Navy was planning; the only can they considered worthwhile was the German one, and their supply was whatever had been captured. The two men cabled Washington that 40 percent of the gasoline sent to Egypt was being lost to spillage and evaporation. Daniel later admitted the figure "was actually a guess intended to provoke alarm." It worked; Washington asked for confirmation, and their tour of fuel depots behind Montgomery's army documented the losses in detail (Daniel). By early 1943 Britain had shipped two million of its own jerry cans to North Africa, and by early 1944 was manufacturing them in the Middle East as well (Daniel). British firms including Briggs Motor Bodies, Vauxhall Motors, and the Pressed Steel Company built copies of the German design (Wikipedia), stamped with the War Department broad-arrow mark, W↑D (German Wikipedia).
The United States finally moved. Early in 1943 an American can-making plant was shipped to England and set up in Middlesex under Britain's Ministry of Supply (Ruppenthal). Because Britain had the head start, the Allies agreed that Britain would produce all the cans needed for the invasion of Europe. "Millions were ready by D-day" (Daniel).
1944 to 1945: Normandy to the Rhine
American forces went into Normandy with a stock of about 12 million cans, which planners expected to cover only the opening phase. The system was built on exchange: a unit could draw 100 full cans only by turning in 100 empties. Then the breakout came, the armies ran far past their planned phase lines, and the turnaround time for a can, from filling to the front and back, stretched far beyond the assumptions. The exchange rule "was widely disregarded in the heat of the pursuit, resulting in a trail of abandoned or discarded jerricans stretching from Normandy to the West Wall. Hundreds of thousands lay in abandoned dumps and bivouacs; thousands more had been used to build sidewalks in the mud, or as chairs, and for hundreds of other purposes not intended; others had found their way into French homes" (Ruppenthal).
By mid-October 1944, 3.5 million cans could not be accounted for. The Army appealed through the French Ministry of Education to French schoolchildren, with prizes and certificates for the best collectors, and got about a million back. At the end of November, 2.5 million were still, in the Army's word, "AWOL" (Ruppenthal). Planners estimated they needed 800,000 new cans a month to cover losses, then revised it to 1.3 million a month for 1945; Britain agreed to supply about 550,000 a month, and Belgian and French production was scheduled but never amounted to much for want of sheet steel. Shortly before the end of the war the chief quartermaster put the required can population at 19 million. The target was never met (Ruppenthal).
In August 1944 the shortage of cans, not of fuel, was what limited how much gasoline could be brought forward to combat units (Wikipedia). That is the context for the sentence President Roosevelt wrote in November 1944: "Without these cans it would have been impossible for our armies to cut their way across France at a lightning pace which exceeded the German Blitz of 1940" (Daniel). By V-E Day, Daniel estimated, some 21 million Allied jerry cans were scattered across Europe (Daniel).
After the war: from Wehrmacht canister to NATO can
The design did not go home with the armies. The German-pattern 20-liter can remained the standard fuel and water container in the armies of the NATO countries (Wikipedia), which is where the modern name comes from: it is a NATO jerry can because NATO armies carried it, not because a treaty invented it. The new West German Bundeswehr was refueling its vehicles from the same can by the late 1950s, and in 1981 West Germany consolidated the steel canister specification in DIN 7274 (German Wikipedia). The can became a civilian object in the same years; a former RAF serviceman posted to Germany in the 1970s and 1980s recalls that jerry cans were sold at filling stations there (Hagerty).
Plastic arrived in 1970, when the Finnish designer Eero Rislakki produced a polyethylene jerry can with a small screw stopper behind the handle to let air in as fuel poured (Wikipedia). Plastic cans took the rectangular shape and the name, and most of the market. What they gave up in return, and what steel kept, is the subject of Steel vs Plastic Gas Cans.
The can today
A Wavian 20L can laid next to a 1937 canister would match it on every point of the original specification: 20 liters, two deep-drawn steel halves welded on a recessed seam, three handles, X-stamped side panels, an internal breather pipe ending in an air pocket under the handles, and a cam-lever bayonet cap with a gasket and a tethered locking pin. The seams are fully welded and recessed, with no crimped metal like cheap knockoff cans, which is the same distinction the Holabird copy got wrong. What has changed is the metallurgy and the chemistry: 0.9 mm cold-rolled steel, a powder coat outside, a fuel-resistant phenolic lining inside, and a UN packaging marking on the body. It has also gotten lighter. Wikipedia lists the wartime German can at 11.5 pounds and the US copy at 10 (Wikipedia); a Wavian 20L weighs 9.5 pounds empty.
Wavian cans are manufactured in Latvia, in a factory we have visited, and Swiss-Link is the exclusive distributor for North America. The full account of where and how they are made is on Where Are Wavian Jerry Cans Made? The current range is the 20L, the 10L, which is the same 0.9 mm steel in a shorter body, and a 22L water can that carries the water-can idea forward in a different material. How to choose between them is in Jerry Can Sizes Explained.
The reason the design has not changed is that the requirement has not. A person still has to carry fuel the last hundred yards, pour it without a funnel in the wind, and trust that what they filled last year is still there. The engineers in Schwelm solved that in 1937. Everyone since has been deciding how much of their answer to keep.
Frequently asked questions
Who invented the jerry can?
The design credited as the first jerry can is the Wehrmacht-Einheitskanister, developed at the Müller ironworks in Schwelm, Germany, after a 1935 to 1936 army tender, with chief engineer Vinzenz Grünvogel named as the lead. A trial batch of 5,000 went to troops in 1936 and the finished can was formally introduced in July 1937.
Why is it called a jerry can?
"Jerry" was British slang for Germans. British troops first met the can during the 1940 Norway campaign and then used captured German cans in North Africa in preference to their own leaking four-gallon tins. The captured cans were "Jerry's cans," and the name stuck to the design itself.
What did armies use before the jerry can?
The British Army carried fuel in two-gallon pressed-steel cans and four-gallon tin-plate containers nicknamed flimsies, which had crimped or soldered seams and leaked badly in the desert. The US Army's standard was a ten-gallon cylindrical can with two screw closures that needed a wrench and a funnel to use.
How many jerry cans were made in World War II?
Nobody has an exact total. The US official history records that American forces held about 12 million cans before Normandy, that 3.5 million were unaccounted for by October 1944, and that planners wanted a population of 19 million by the end of the war. Richard Daniel's account puts the number of Allied cans scattered across Europe at V-E Day at roughly 21 million.
Did the American jerry can have a screw cap?
Yes. The wartime US copy kept the size, shape, and three handles of the German can but replaced the cam-lever closure with a screw cap and a separate pouring nozzle, and swapped the welded two-piece body for a three-piece body with rolled seams. The Army's own history calls the nozzle the design's "greatest defect." The NATO-pattern can made today keeps the original cam-lever closure.
Is the modern NATO jerry can the same as the 1937 design?
In the parts that matter, yes: 20 liters, two deep-drawn steel halves welded on a recessed seam, three handles, X-stamped sides, a cam-lever cap with a gasket and locking pin, an internal breather pipe, and a fuel-resistant lining. Steel gauge, coatings, lining chemistry, and the UN 3A1 packaging marking are modern, and the can is lighter than the wartime original.
More questions about the can, its capacity, and how to use it are answered in the Jerry Can FAQ.
Sources
- Richard M. Daniel, “The Little Can That Could,” Invention & Technology, Fall 1987. First-hand account by a US Navy chemical engineer; source for the Pleiss story, the Cairo cable, and the Roosevelt quotation.
- Roland G. Ruppenthal, Logistical Support of the Armies, vol. II, ch. VII, US Army Center of Military History. Source for the ameri-can, can-loss figures, and production requirements.
- Key Military, “Winning the War”. Source for the 18 September 1940 Camp Holabird report.
- Wehrmacht-Einheitskanister, German Wikipedia. Source for the Schwelm development history, dates, and DIN 7274.
- Jerrycan and Flimsy, English Wikipedia. Source for design rationale, British containers, and wartime weights.
.jpg){kind=link}
