More than 6,000 trucks kept gasoline and other vital supplies
rolling in as American troops and tanks pushed the Germans
back toward their homeland.

By David P. Colley

It was dusk, somewhere in France in the autumn of 1944. A jeep carrying a first lieutenant in charge of a platoon of trucks crested a hill. Instinctively, the young officer scanned the horizon for enemy aircraft that sometimes swooped in low for strafing runs. The skies were empty. But as far as the eye could see, ahead and to the rear, the descending night was pierced by specks of white and red light–cat eyes, the blackout running lights of hundreds of trucks that snaked along the highway.

The huge convoy stretching from horizon to horizon was part of the Red Ball Express, the famed trucking operation in the European Theater of Operations (ETO) in the late summer and fall of 1944 that supplied the rapidly advancing American armies as they streamed toward the German frontier. Chances are that most Americans have never heard of the Red Ball Express. In the hundreds of films about World War II and in all the books about the conflict, it gets little mention. Yet the Red Ball may have contributed as much to the defeat of Germany as any other land operation. Certainly without the Red Ball, and its sister express lines that went into operation later in the war, World War II in Europe might have dragged on even longer, and the extraordinary mobility of the U.S. Army would have been drastically limited.

The Red Ball was created to supply the American combat units that were pushing the Germans back to their homeland. In the first few weeks after the Normandy invasion, the Allies made little progress against the disciplined and stubborn enemy. Some in the military even feared a return of trench warfare as the Germans continued to blunt each thrust the Allies launched while attempting to break out of their Normandy beachhead.

Then, in late July, the German front cracked. American forces rushed toward the Seine River in pursuit of the German Seventh Army. But the Allied high command had not anticipated the rapid German retreat. They had expected the battle for France to be a slow, steady roll-up of the enemy’s divisions.

The original plans called for Lt. Gen. George Patton, Jr.’s newly formed Third Army to turn westward to clear the Brittany ports while Lt. Gen. Omar Bradley and British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery pushed the Germans eastward across the Seine. Because of the precipitous German retreat, however, Bradley gave Patton permission to wheel some of his forces eastward toward Paris.

If Patton and Bradley could outrun the Germans, the American Twelfth Army Group could trap the enemy between Normandy and the Seine. The reduction of the Falaise pocket northwest of Paris, in which some 100,000 German soldiers were surrounded, 10,000 killed and 50,000 captured, demonstrated how vulnerable the Germans were.

The key to the pursuit, however, was supplies. Modern armies guzzle gas and expend ammunition in vast amounts. As the charging Americans pummeled the Germans, U.S. forces began to run out of needed materiel.

“On both fronts an acute shortage of supplies–that dull subject again!–governed all our operations,” General Bradley wrote in his autobiography, A General’s Life. “Some twenty-eight divisions were advancing across France and Belgium. Each division ordinarily required 700-750 tons a day–a total daily consumption of about 20,000 tons.”

Ironically, the Allies were victims of their own military successes and strategy. For months before the D-Day assault on June 6, Allied air forces had roamed the skies across northern France destroying the French rail system to prevent Field Marshal Erwin Rommel from supplying his forces on the coast after the Allied invasion came. But if the railroads were made useless for the Germans, they would be equally useless for the Allies. To add to the problem, the Germans still held the Channel ports of northern France and Belgium, notably Le Havre and Antwerp, so most of the supplies to the advancing American armies came over the invasion beaches on the Normandy coast.

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