Even before the end of the Second World War, Willys knew that they had a winner on their hands with the model MB jeeps that they were building for the government. As early as 1944, Willys had started preliminarily tests on MBs as a postwar civilian product. The first fruit of that labor was the CJ-2, as in “Civilian Jeep, Type 2” as opposed to the modified MBs that were called CJ-1s. On July 17, 1945, the first of a long line of civilian Jeeps went into production. It was called the CJ-2A.