When convoys were stalled for short periods, the drivers dozed, their heads slumped over the steering wheel. A jolt from the truck in front, backing up to tap the front bumper of the truck behind, was the signal that the convoy was once again on the move.

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There were commanders who went by the book. A 21/2-ton truck would carry no more than a 5-ton load and that was that. Prior to the Normandy invasion, the Transportation Corps authorized trucks to carry twice their normal load. That helped compensate for the lack of trucking, but one layer of 105mm and 155mm artillery shells put the truck over the weight limit. “People would laugh when they saw us driving with so few shells,” Emerick recalls. Most Quartermaster officers, however, ignored weight restrictions and sent the trucks out overloaded.

The armies were so desperate for gasoline and ammunition that they sometimes sent out raiding parties to commandeer Red Ball trucks and “liberate” their supplies before the trucks got to a depot. Charles Stevenson, a lieutenant in the 3858th Quartermaster Gas Supply Company, remembers being stopped by a colonel on the Third Army front who demanded he turn over his truckloads of jerrycans full of gas.

“You don’t move until we get those cans,” the colonel barked.

“We fussed, jumped up and down and cussed that colonel and raised hell and damned everybody around,” Stevenson says, but the colonel was unmoved. Ultimately, the convoy was left with only enough gas to get back to the company area.

Often the front was moving so fast that Red Ball drivers never found their destination. It was not uncommon for drivers to hawk their loads to anyone interested. They always found takers.

Most often, trucks carried supplies from one depot to the next, dropped them and returned. From the advanced depots more trucks picked up the supplies and carried them farther or to the front lines. Shortly after the breakout from Normandy, it was not uncommon for Red Ball trucks to drop ammunition at artillery positions within a few miles of the front line. One Red Ball veteran remembers driving right up to a stranded Sherman tank and passing jerrycans of gas to the crew while the Germans were within shouting distance.

If gasoline was gold, cigarettes, rations and sugar were jewels to the French. Black marketeering was rampant as some drivers delivered whole loads to anyone willing to buy. Convoys always posted guards around the trucks to prevent the war-weary French and profit-minded American troops from taking anything not tied down.

Even drivers not involved in theft took what they wanted from the loads. They sometimes took a jerrycan here and there to sell to the French. A 5-gallon jerrycan brought $100 on the French black market.

One Red Ball veteran recalls kicking ration boxes off the truck to feed demoralized MPs who had not been relieved for days and had no rations. But the MPs were always watching for pilferage. Usually they were stationed at intersections to ensure the convoys stayed on course, or they directed traffic at blown bridges or through the narrow streets of villages such as Houdan, where medieval timbered houses crowded the main, winding thoroughfare. Large, rectangular signs with huge red balls in the center kept the convoys rolling on the right roads when the MPs were not around. And convoy directors always carried maps to their destinations.

Engineers constantly patrolled the roads to repair damage. Ordnance troops manned wreckers such as the Diamond T Prime Mover, strong enough to wrestle even a disabled tank back to a repair depot. Red Ball drivers were instructed to pull over and wait for the wreckers when their trucks broke down. If the mechanics could not make repairs on the spot, they pushed or pulled the trucks to a maintenance depot.

The Red Ball trucks took tremendous beatings. Batteries dried up, engines overheated, motors burned out for lack of grease and oil, transmissions were overstressed, bolts came loose, and drive shafts fell off. In the first month of operation, Red Ball trucks wore out 40,000 tires. General wear and overloaded trucks were the biggest reasons for the heaps of truck tires awaiting rehabilitation at repair depots. Most of the tires were retreaded and recycled, and they often came back from the repair depots glued and taped together. Treads also came loose, and sometimes the inside dual tire in the rear blew out and caught fire from friction as the truck rolled on. One major cause of the damage done to tires was the hundreds of thousands of ration tins carelessly disposed of along the highways–the sharp metal edges tore into the rubber.

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