Acknowledgements
I am indebted to former members of C Company, 514th Truck Regiment, who gathered one Saturday afternoon at the home of James Rookard in Cleveland, Ohio, to bring life to the story of the Red Ball Ball Express and the black quartermaster trucking companies that served in the European Theater of Operations in 1944 and 1945. Besides Rookard, Jack Blackwell, James Chappelle, Marvin Hall, Napoleon Hendricks, and Herman Heard took time to remember those long-ago days in France.
I interviewed several other members of C Company by telephone: James Bailey, of Dayton, Ohio, and Charles Fletcher and Fred Newton, both of the Cleveland area. Unfortunately, Fletcher and Newton died before the rest of the group assembled for the interview. I also interviewed John Houston, of Fort Lee, NJ, several times by telephone. He too was a member of C Company.
The U.S. Army Military History Institute in Carlisle, PA, was a major source of material for this book. Librarians John Slonaker and Louise Arnold Friend were especially helpful. I wish to thank the staff of the Easton (Pa.) Area Public Library for their help, Dorothy Patoki of Interlibrary loan, in particular, and the staff of the Lafayette College Library in Easton.
The U.S. Army Transportation Museum at Fort Eustis, VA, also made valuable information available, as did the National Archives. Timothy K. Henninger, with the Technical Reference Branch of the National Archives, was exceedingly helpful in retrieving material relating to the Red Ball.
Special thanks go to Bob Rubino and Frank Buck of The Motor Pool in Bartonsville, Pa. They made their knowledge of World War II military vehicles, as well as a restored 1941 Jimmy, available to me. Lee Holland of Virginia and Bryce Sunderlin of Michigan also provided their knowledge about the workings of the Jimmy.
This book could not have been possible without the help of editor Stanley Parkhill of CAM magazine, who contracted for an article on the Red Ball. Later research led to this book.
Introduction
Fall 1944somewhere in eastern France at dusk, a jeep carrying a first lieutenant in charge of a platoon of trucks hauling supplies to the front crested a hill. The young officer instinctively scanned the horizon for German aircraft that sometimes swooped in low on strafing runs. The sky was empty, and as far as the eye could see ahead and to the rear, the descending night was hauntingly pierced by the headlights of hundreds of trucks snaking along the highway.
The lengthy convoy, stretching away to the horizons, was part of the Red Ball Express, the legendary military trucking operation in the European Theater of Operations (ETO) in World War II that operated around the clock and supplied the rapidly advancing American armies as they streamed toward Germany. The Red Ball was a critical part of the tidal wave of arms, men, and machines that overwhelmed the German armies. Today, it goes largely unheralded by a postwar generation, but veterans of the ETO remember the Red Ball with pride, respect, and some amusement as they recall the trucks racing to the front with essential supplies, particularly gasoline.
Without the Red Ball and the sister military express trucking lines that it spawned later in the war, World War II in the ETO undoubtedly would have been prolonged and the extraordinary mobility of the American Army drastically limited. Certainly, the Red Ball contributed significantly to the defeat of the German Army in France during the summer and fall of 1944.
The Army organized the Red Ball Express on 25 August 1944, to rush supplies to the rapidly advancing First and Third American Armies when the German Seventh and Fifth Panzer Armies began to disintegrate and retreat eastward toward the German frontier. The French rail system west of Paris had been bombed to shambles, and the Germans held most of the French ports. The only method of supply for the Americans was to transport materiel by truck from the invasion beaches to the front.
So desperate were the Americans to catch and destroy the enemy after the breakout from the Normandy bridgehead two months after D-Day that only the most critical suppliesammunition, rations, medical supplies, and gasolinewere being hauled. The materiel was transported largely by thousands of six-by-six, 2-ton General Motors trucks, affectionately nicknamed Jimmies. The spearheading armored divisions, with their tanks, half-tracks, trucks, and jeeps, couldn't run without fuel. The infantry needed rations, ammunition, and transport into battle, and the artillery needed shells.
The Red Ball Express lasted eighty-one days, from 25 August through 16 November 1944. By the end of those three months, the Red Ball had established itself firmly in the mythology of World War II. More than six thousand trucks and trailers and some twenty-three thousand men transported 412,193 tons of supplies to the advancing American armies from Normandy to the German frontier.
Red Ball became the tail of an American Army that was the most highly mechanized and mobile combat force the world had ever seen. The Red Ball route ran from the beaches of Normandy and the ports of the Cotentin Peninsula, principally Cherbourg, to Paris, 270 miles to the east. From Paris, it branched to Verdun and Metz in the southeast, and to Hirson in northeast France on the frontier with Belgium.
Even the Germans, who had developed the blitzkrieg in their lightning invasions of Poland, the Low Countries, and France in 1939 and 1940, were astonished by the speed and mobility of the American advance, particularly that led by Gen. George S. Patton, and by the unimaginable number of vehicles and trucks that supplied the American forces.
What is most often overlooked about the Red Ball operation, as well as the war in Europe, is the contribution made by the African American soldiers assigned to Quartermaster and Transportation Corps units. Although three-fourths of Red Ball drivers were black, and the majority of the quartermaster truck companies in the ETO were manned by blacks, African American troops represented less than 10 percent of all military personnel in World War II. When the call went out to form the Red Ball Express, African American troops, in large measure, kept the supply lines rolling.
