Ford GPA "The Amphib" (GPA 4545)

"The Amphib" is Ford GPA amphibious jeep serial number 4545, built on or about 22 December 1942. Its wartime service is unknown. In 1957 it was one of four GPAs lying in Levy Auto Parts' surplus yard at Weston, now part of Toronto. Lionel Forge, a former paratrooper, bought it there for $300.

Lionel Forge

Forge was born in 1925 and served with the 13th Battalion of the Parachute Regiment, 6th Airborne Division. He jumped across the Rhine in Operation Varsity in March 1945 and later served in Palestine, Java and Singapore before emigrating to Canada. He had read Half-Safe, the story of Ben Carlin's round-the-world GPA, and decided to build his own travelling amphibian, although he did not plan to cross oceans in it.

Conversion

Forge worked as an aircraft sheet-metal mechanic, later on the Avro Arrow fighter and then at de Havilland. He stripped out many of the original fittings and grafted the roof of a 1949 Dodge station wagon onto the jeep's hull, turning it into a closed, camper-like car with a tent that could go up on the roof. He used it as his daily car and swam it on Lake Ontario in 1958-59, and in 1961 it was licensed as a vessel. Later he replaced the engine with a bigger post-war Jeep unit, which made the engine cover sit higher.

The 1967 journey

In 1967, Canada's centennial year, the Toronto press called it "our strangest car" as Forge set out for South America and beyond. He drove through the United States, past the Alamo, and on through every Central American country and into Colombia. He reached Tikal in Guatemala around December 1967 and Nicaragua in March 1968. He meant to ship the jeep to Africa, drive on through Europe and finish in England, but the cargo service he was counting on was withdrawn. He sent the jeep to Florida for storage and continued without it.

Later years

The Amphib ended up under a tarpaulin beside the boat Forge lived on in British Columbia. After his death in 2001 it was bought by collector Colin Stevens. He removed the civilian changes, gave it an olive-drab over-spray, wrote it up in Convoy magazine in 2002, and later sold it to a collector in the USA for restoration.