They Mocked His Homemade Jeep Engine — Until It Made 200 HP

Video Description

Witness the unbelievable true story of how a Brooklyn mechanic’s “impossible” homemade Jeep engine went from motor pool punchline to battlefield lifesaver in the mountains of Italy during World War II. On August 14, 1944, under German machine-gun fire near Montecassino, Technical Sergeant Frank “Frankie” Castellano hauled wounded men and a stranded battalion surgeon up a deadly fifteen-degree pass at speeds no standard Willys Jeep could even dream of—outrunning the enemy’s aim because his scrap-built Go-Devil engine was producing roughly 200 horsepower from parts designed for 60. This documentary dives deep into the nights of field improvisation, salvaged metal, radical compression boosts, rebuilt carburetion, reworked ignition, and brutal trial-and-error that turned “Frankenstein’s motor” into a legend—then follows the consequences: missions no other vehicle could attempt, officers demanding specifications that never existed, copycats failing because the real secret wasn’t a checklist but Castellano’s intuition, and the unavoidable tradeoff of extreme power for shortened lifespan. From a Depression-era garage in Brooklyn to desert lessons in North Africa, to the moment Captain Robert Morrison stepped out shaking and admitted that “insane” speed had just saved five lives, this story reveals the raw truth of wartime innovation: when manuals say “impossible,” sometimes it only means “no one’s dared to try yet.”