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Red Ball Express

The allies had floated on a sea of oil to victory. - Winston Churchill

The name for the Red Ball Express came from a railroad symbol meaning express freight. Each truck in the convoy was marked with a red disk.

During the engagement of Metz in 1944, the shortage of fuel in the Third Army was a significant factor. Beginning the pursuit on 1 August 1944 with a 1.5 million-gallon reserve, the Third Army depleted its stockpile by 7 August and had to operate on a "hand-to-mouth” basis. While the fast-paced pursuit is often blamed for Third Army’s high fuel use, inaccurate forecasts of consumption were also a significant cause. The 6th Armored Division, for example, used two to three times more fuel than anticipated.

The breakout from Normandy and the French hedgerow country started a race to Paris and points north and east. With the railroads damaged from Allied interdiction efforts and the port of Cherbourg almost unusable because of German sabotage, Patton stretched his supply line to near-collapse. Temporary harbors were established, and 24-hour trucking operations began. Thus was born The Red Ball Express.

After the breakout of Normandy in July 1944, an acute shortage of supplies on both fronts governed all operations. Some 28 divisions were advancing across France and Belgium, each ordinarily requiring 700-750 tons a day. Patton's 3rd Army was soon grinding to a halt from lack of fuel and ordnance.

The key to pursuit was a continuous supply of fuel and ordnance, thus leading to the Red Ball Express. The Red Ball Express was conceived in a 36-hour brain-storming session. It lasted only 3 months from August to November, 1944, but without it, the campaign in the European Theater could have dragged on for years. At the peak of its operation, it was running 5,938 vehicles carrying 12,342 tons of supplies to forward depots daily.

At the onset, there were not enough trucks or drivers. The Army raided units that had trucks and formed provisional truck units for the Red Ball. Soldiers whose duties were not critical to the war effort were asked - or tasked - to become drivers. The first convoys quickly bogged down in civilian and military traffic. In response, a priority route was established - two parallel highways between the Normandy beachhead and the city of Chartres, France.

The rules were clear: Trucks were to travel only in convoys. Each convoy was to have no fewer than five trucks each. Each truck was marked with a number showing its position in the convoy, and the trucks were to stay 60 feet apart and travel at 35 mph. Some of the supply lines were thousands of miles long, and the amount of provisions and munitions numbered thousands of tons. This was almost ten times that of World War I.

Tires took a real beating on the roads. Roads were littered with shell fragments, C-ration cans and bits of barbed wire. Trucks were overloaded and being driven faster than they should. Ten percent of the tires replaced were beyond recapping. Sixty-five percent were due directly to running over C-ration cans. Many trucks were run on flats to the nearest maintenance point. By war’s end, the supply of tires was almost non-existent.

Speeding was part of the mystique of the Red Ball drivers. "Push 'em up there," was a popular slogan in the ETO. Drivers and mechanics removed the governors on the trucks' carburetors (that restricted them to 56 mph), allowing them to reach speeds of 70 mph. Speeding, inexperience drivers and overloaded trucks caused numerous accidents along the route of the Red Ball Express. Weight restrictions were ignored as well. Some of the trucks were so overloaded that they swayed going down the roads, and boxes would bounce around.

Without the Red Ball, the advance across France could not have been made. When the Red Ball Express ended 16 November 1944, truckers had delivered 412,193 tons of gas, oil, lubricants, ammunition, food and other essentials. By then, 210,209 African Americans were serving in Europe and 93,292 of them were in the Quartermaster Corps.

Gas ... To Patton

Back in the summer of 1944 during World War II, the Allies had invaded Europe. The tanks were hung up for a month or so in the hedgerows of Normandy. Then they broke out and armored columns were streaking across Europe with a German army in retreat. There was just one problem; maybe two. They ran out of gasoline. The Germans sensed this and stiffened their resistance.

During all these exciting times, I was at a heavy bomber base near Norwich, England, flying milk runs or group support over France. One morning an officer shook me in my sack and asked if I had any infantry experience. Still rubbing sleep from my eyes, I told him I was a doughfoot for a year before I came to the Air Forces. He grunted: "OK, you'll do. Get dressed."

Now for an exciting mission you would have expected something more dramatic than that. I dressed and reported to Group Operations. There I learned our bombers were going to be used to haul cans of gasoline to the tanks that were stalled in northern France.

As a sergeant, I was to take an advance party over in the first plane and guard the cans of gasoline the bombers would ferry from England to San Quentin, France. There was one other very big problem. The runways had holes, and landing a B-24 bomber loaded with hundreds of jerry cans of gas was no joke. One bad landing and everything would go boom.

Getting our first flight down onto French soil was like walking on eggs. Oh, yes, I almost forgot the most important part. We had assumed the base was secured. When our Liberator bomber zoomed in for a landing, I could see men in gray suits running like crazy for the roads leading away from the base. I was so scared with all that explosive aboard, it never crossed my mind that those were Germans.

I didn't really think about it when I was lining the planes up for unloading on an apron as far from the landing runway as we could get. Then one of the unloading crew came up and said it sure was odd. There was still a fire in a cookstove in the underground bunker where the Germans had lived. It didn't take us long to unload the gasoline cans and pitch tents along the apron. The colonel told me our group was to scrounge up wheelbarrows and get a detail busy pouring rocks into those bomb craters before one of those B-24s crashed and blew us all to kingdom come.

After the officers flew back to Rackheath in their big silver birds, we started to explore the base. French kids materialized from nowhere. They eyed us and we eyed them. The little boys wore dresses. (This seemed odd to me.) The older people made sign language and we soon learned that the Germans actually were fleeing when our squadron was circling the field that morning.

None of us spoke French. But Phil Wuertemburg, a Texan, spoke Spanish. Wart, as he was called, soon learned that the American infantry was still about 30 miles away. The Frenchmen had seen no tanks. They showed us a warehouse where the Germans stored supplies. We found cans of sausage and some delightful bittersweet chocolate.

On the next flight of gasoline, we were better organized with a crew to guide the bombers around the chuck holes and another group to unload the plane. The air crews did not have to dismount. Wart told me if we could get a few cases of lye soap from the base back in England, he thought he could swap it to the French farm women for fresh vegetables to go with our C rations (and German sausages).

One of the air crews delivered a packet of French money from our escape kits. It turned out that the peasants around the base would rather have soap and sugar. Wart, who had been a lowly Jeep driver in England, was now a Texas wheeler-dealer in onions, eggs, and ripe tomatoes. Several bottles of vin rouge and vin blanc materialized. We had two crews of civilians hauling rocks to fill the bomb craters. We paid them in paper money and C rations.

The word spread fast when we learned that the shops in the village near the base had lots of French perfume and face powder. Being ambassadors of good will, we really set up the first European Common Market. Wart traded G.I. soap for vegetables and perfume. We then swapped the perfume and lipstick to air crews, who took them back to England. The English girls had been several years without cosmetics. "Oh, ho, ho, Henry Higgins, just you wait …"

Our paradise lasted about a week. Then a squadron of 9th Air Force P-38s (fighter planes) was moved to the base to protect the gasoline. The fighter pilots had been in France longer. They could parlez vous, and we could only use a sign language and a few winks. Guess who took over? When the foot soldiers arrived in late August, we had the runways repaired, a functional black market in perfume and G.I. soap, and several thousand gallons of fuel for the armored columns.

The French baker was delivering long loaves of bread to our mess tent and the priest was worrying about the young girls. When the first American infantry officer rode up in a Jeep, we expected praise and stood at attention. He looked at me and said: "Where the hell you guys been? Dammit, don't salute me. There may be Krauts around here.” I was sort of glad to return to England. Our war was better.

Tom Swint (467th). How We Hauled Gas ... to Patton! The Journal 2nd Air Division. Volume 43 Number 2, Summer 2004.

Road to Victory: The Untold Story of World War II's Red Ball Express The true story of a bunch of tough-as-nails drivers who, during three pivotal months of World War II, operated the "Red Ball Express", is told through firsthand accounts. Almost all African Americans, these truckers rushed fuel and supplies to the rapidly advancing American armies desperately needed after D-Day to crush the German Panzers.

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