Guest Commentary
My father, Capt. George Weber, commanded a field company of what was known as the Red Ball Express in World War II. Formed to sustain continuous supply lines for Gen. Patton’s Third Army and other American forces as they raced across Europe toward Germany, the Red Ball Express took men like Dad with strong organizational skills, removed them from their original Army outfits and gave them top-priority access to essential fuel and equipment at coastal loading depots. Those supplies — up to 12,000 tons of fuel and materiel per day — were then loaded on thousands of trucks whose drivers had orders to do whatever was necessary to move them quickly to the front for direct use in the war effort.