Heroes: the Army
"...truck carried a .50-caliber machine gun in a ring above the cab, and Guthrie relished the challenge of taking on a Nazi fighter. It reminded him of his duckhunting days back home..."
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The Road to Victory:
the Untold Story of the Red Ball Express
exerpts from the book by David P. Colley
The original Red Ball route was a loop road that ran one way to Chartres on one designated highway and back, one way, on another. The French road system was so clogged with American military vehicles that had the Red Ball route not been a dedicated, one-way highway, the convoys would have quickly become bogged down in traffic.
The French civilians knew to get out of the way. Earl "Red" Swallow, a volunteer driver from the 102nd Inf. Div. wrote that he "drove on the narrow streets of St. Lo and came down a hill where the road turned a sharp right. Many people were riding bicycles and as I turned the comer I was a bit up on the sidewalk causing one bike rider to dart into the nearest open doorway."
Once the Red Ball route left the coastal areas, the convoys hurried through a flat open plain that resembled parts of the American West. The spires of Chartres came into view across a wide plain. Some drivers on the Red Ball, like Phillip Dick, from the 102nd, used the bell towers as reference points to guide his convoy, just as peasants had done centuries before in the Middle Ages.
"What you doing' on the Red Bali, soldier, you ain't no nigger?" Robert Emerick often got this type of comment from white soldiers when they learned he was a driver on the Red Ball Express. About 70 percent of the transportation companies were manned by African Americans because most blacks were relegated to service units.
When the need for more trucks and drivers became critical a large number of trucks and drivers came from idled U.S. Infantry divisions awaiting transfer to the front. Those units included the 26th, 95th. 104th, 94th, 84th and the 102nd. Newly arrived combat divisions were held in reserve for several weeks in rear areas because the lack of supplies made it impossible to equip and provision them adequately at the front. All in all, the U.S. Army created some sixty-one provisional truck companies whose service was invaluable.
Philo Rockwell King III, an artillery man with the newly arrived 102nd Division, answered the call for drivers. Although he knew the Army code of "never volunteer" he did because" this seemed like a great chance to see the countryside and get the hell away from the unit, and especially the First Sergeant."
Double clutching was an important element of driving a 2 1/2 ton truck. The driver had to learn to use the clutch as he took the truck out of one gear and had to pump the clutch again before going into the next gear. The purpose of double-clutching was to get all components in the engine and transmission spinning at the same speed.
Mearl Guthrie, also with the 102nd Div. learned quickly. "When you watch somebody long enough you can do anything, particularly when it's necessary. I was young and figured I could do it."
Another 102nd Div. man, Roy Leader of the Signal Corps, had grown up on a farm in Indiana. When asked if he could double clutch he said he didn't need to. He had driven a farm tractor for so many years he could tell from the sound of the engine when to shift without double clutching. He had to demonstrate his farm-learned technique to an inspector -- who let him pass.
Driving on the Red Ball may not have given Phito King as much of a view of the countryside as he had hoped for. They drove in convoys averaging speed of about 40 mph. during the day and somewhat less at night. "I drove all night, or most of it, and fell asleep many times. I once was awakened as the truck left the road," said Fred Schlunz, an infantryman with the 102nd. Randy Hibshman, a driver from the 379th FA Battalion, survived one stint behind the wheel that lasted seventy-two hours without rest. "We got back to the outfit for eight hours to wash, shave, get a good meal, a wink of sleep, and we were off again," Hibshman said.
There was a saying, "Red Ball trucks break, but don't brake." Red Ball drivers pushed on as fast as they could go, and many enjoyed the opportunity to "cowboy." The driver might be scolded by a colonel but never court-martialed for helping the cause. Gen. Patton would be more likely to give them a medal than a reprimand.
Drunkenness and unauthorized absences were particularly problems in many trucking units. "About five or six of us decided to go AWOL to Paris for the night since we weren't on duty 'til the next afternoon," wrote Philo King III. They hitched a ride with a French trucker who sold them cognac, for the trip into town. They groped around a dark city and pitch-black subways until they found a little bistro where there were women and dancing.
The majority of the Red Ball drivers -- honest and hardworking -- had to be vigilant whenever and wherever they parked their trucks. Mearl Guthrie was part of a twenty-truck convoy making a night stop at a restaurant in a French town on the Red Ball route to Paris:
"We were in the restaurant and here were some GIs unloading some boxes from our trucks. We ran out and caught them, and I said "We're taking this stuff to the guys on the front and you rear-echelon SOBs are trying to take it away." They thought they were dead and they almost were. I put a forty-five in one guy's middle and he thought 1 was going to shoot him, and damn near did."
The truck was the secret weapon in the ground war in the European Theatre, but it was one distinctly lacking in romance and glory. Even the name had no ring, although troops squeezed some panache out of the duece-and-a-half by affectionately nick naming it the "Jimmy." Without the truck, nothing would have moved -- neither tanks nor infantry. Even the artillery would have been silenced by lack of shells. The armies would have advanced at the pace of horse-and-wagon trains, and WWII could have become a conflict of attrition similar to WWI.
The American Army in WWII truly became the world's most highly mobile and mechanized force largely because it was supplied by trucks. In fact, the Americans fielded the only army capable of full mechanization. By war's end, the ratio of trucks to men in the American Army in the ETO was one vehicle for every four soldiers.
In 1919. the Army dispatched a cross-continental convoy to test the efficiency of the truck for supplying a fast-moving army. One of the junior officers on the expedition was Lt. Dwight D. Eisenhower. The tactical and strategic importance of the truck was not lost on the future Supreme Commander.
Gen. Courtney Hodges, of the First Army and Gen. Patton of the Third Army believed, as did Gen. Bradley that "rapid, sweeping massed movement of forces deep into the enemy's heartland was the best way to destroy an enemy army." The tank might lead the way, but it was supplied by trucks.
The Jimmy was said to be durable; it was said to outperform its enemy counterparts and get the job done. Certainly without the Jimmy, it would have taken many more months to subdue Nazi Germany. Was the Jimmy the best truck of the war? It undoubtedly was.
The Germans were known to have superb military equipment, well-designed and beautifully engineered tanks and trucks. But well engineered vehicles are not necessarily better in war.
The simplicity of the Jimmy helped extend its life-span. Good mechanics could remove the engine and attached transmission in several hours. A new or rebuilt power train could be installed in about the same amount of time. There was not much more in the engine compartment than the motor and transmission. Added features under the hood included the radiator, coil, starter motor, oil filter, oil pump, breather for the crank case, and voltage regulator. That was it.
Various components in the engine compartment were painted red to alert drivers and mechanics to those parts needing constant attention. The truck was able to operate on gasoline with an octane rating as low as sixty, but the U.S. Army's gas was usually around eighty octane.
When the advance quickened in late August and early September, more and more trucks drove through the night with lights ablaze, as the drivers chanced that the German fighters were too few to be a threat. This practice sometimes proved dangerous.
Mearl Guthrie, who had delivered papers to Eisenhower's mother in Abilene, Kansas, was in a convoy strafed by German planes. His truck carried a .50-caliber machine gun in a ring above the cab, and Guthrie relished the challenge of taking on a Nazi fighter. It reminded him of his duckhunting days back home - "I jumped up and four of us started shooting at them. I'd shot a lot of ducks as a kid so I knew how to lead them with the tracers. We got one of them because he came down in a plume of smoke."
On 1 October, General Eisenhower recognized the efforts of the men on the now famous Red Ball Express with a well worded commendation.
Success brought down the curtain on the Red Ball express. By the fall of 1944 it had done its job. The Jerries in France and the Low Countries had been defeated. The channel ports had been captured. Antwerp was open, and supplies were being shipped to the vast depots at Liege and Verdun and to the front.
The Red Ball was retired on 16 November 1944 when its usefulness declined because the Allied armies were stalled by tenacious enemy forces at the German border. But the Red Ball never really died. Its name and mystique were so embedded in the technology of WWII that, even after its termination, most of the men who drove the trucks until the end of the war believed that they were a part of the Red Ball. Welby Frantz, a trucking company commander who later became president of the American Trucking Association and whose unit did not arrive in France from Iran until February 1945, still believed, a half century after the war, that his unit was on the Red Bail. "That's what we were all told."
The Battle of the Bulge was a victory and valediction for the truck, and, indirectly, for the drivers of the old Red Ball Express who played major and equally decisive roles in the battle. While many of his fellow commanders snickered at his boastfulness, Patton, at Eisenhower's request, turned around a large portion of the Third Army in Eastern France. He transported three divisions, largely by truck, north to the Ardennes, where they helped stem the German advance and relieve the 101st Airborne Division at Bastogne, Belgium. Patton moved an entire corps -- some 60 thousand men -- more than 100 miles northwest, then northeast to the left flank of the bulge. Without Patton's quick response, the Battle of the Bulge could have been an even more serious reversal for the Allies.
Hundreds of trucks were also used to evacuate the huge stores of gasoline from the main reserve dumps located between Spa and Stavelot in Belgium and prevented them from falling into German hands. In one depot near Malmedy, Belgium, directly in the path of the German drive, trucks evacuated 1,115,000 gallons of gasoline and the operation was completed in forty-eight hours. The old Red Ball provided an established organization and framework that enabled commanders to call for thousands of trucks to transport entire divisions into action within a matter of hours.
The Red Ball formed the basis of several! later express routes with different designations, some for specific tasks, that operated through the rest of the war. These included the Red Lion Route, the White Ball Express, the Green Diamond Route, the ABC Express, the XYZ Express and the Little Red Ball Express.
With the end of the war in the ETO the public quickly forgot the great logistics battles of 1944 and 1945. Nevertheless, the Red Ball Express lives on in the minds of veterans of the ETO as one of the more enduring legends of WWII. The operation is remembered, in part, because it fits so well into American folklore. American have had a long love affair with the road and the truck. The speeding Red Ball drivers, thumbing their noses at military authority and the enemy to speed supplies to the front and victory, symbolized American individualism and embodied the spirit of the frontiersmen and cowboys who had tamed the American continent. The Red Ball drivers were the first true road warriors.
This is a new book published in 2000 by Brassey's, Washington, DC. A magazine article by the same name and author appeared in World War II magazine of Mar 97. Vol. 11 Issue 7.
(Editor's note: Attempts were made throughout the text of the following story to place full names to the men listed in the story. For the most part, this is an educated guess and some names may very well be mistaken in their identy. The names were all taken from the division history book: With The 102d Infantry Division Through Germany, edited by Major Allen H. Mick. Using the text as a guide, associations with specific units were the basis for the name identifications. We are not attempting in any to rewrite the story. Any corrections are gladly welcomed.)
Interested in some background information?
Check out the related links below...United States Army, 102nd Infantry Division
History of the 102nd Infantry Division
Attack on Linnich, Flossdorf, Rurdorf - 29 Nov -- 4 Dec 1944
Gardelegen: April 13, 1945:
Massacre at the Isenschnibbe BarnAmerican Battle Monuments Commission: WWII Honor Roll
National World War II Memorial
The above story, "The Road to Victory: the Untold Story of the Red Ball Express", by David P. Colley, was originally published in the 102d Division "Ozark Notes", Vol. 53, No. 3, Jan/Mar., 2001, pp. 6-9.
The story is re-printed here on World War II Stories -- In Their Own Words with the kind permission of the 102d Infantry Division Association, Ms. Hope Emerich, Historian. Our sincerest THANKS for the 102d Infantry Division Association allowing us to share some of their stories.
We would also like to extend our sincere THANKS to Mr. Edward L. Souder, former historian of Co. F., 405th Regiment. His collection of stories of the "Kitchen Histories Project" series entitled, Those Damn Doggies in F, were responsible for bringing the stories of the men of the 102nd Division to the forefront.
Original Story submitted on 25 March 2005.
Story added to website on 26 March 2005.
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