Puerto Rican Relief and the Red Ball Express
In August of 1944 General Dwight D. Eisenhower had a problem.
D-day, June 6, 1944, had been a
costly but genuine success. The German Army
had been misguided by the Allies, misled by absent and arrogant leadership and
interfered with by the drugged, paranoid and increasingly desperate Adolf
Hitler. The invasion of the Continent
had begun, but had then bogged down. It
was not until Eisenhower brought a chastened and grateful George Patton back
from London, put him in charge of the Third Army and told him to “punch”
through the enemy that the promise of D-Day became a certain victory for the
Allies.
Patton marched eastward toward
the Seine. Montgomery broke out of Caen
in the north. Bradley was moving out of
the Cotentin Peninsula. The oft
forgotten landing and successful assault on the Riviera had resulted in all of
France now being one long Allied offensive line. On September 14th (D+100) the
Allied armies were occupying territory they were not expected to be near until
May of 1945! They were exactly 7 months
(!!!) ahead of where the logisticians thought they would be. And that was where Ike’s problems lay.
A World War II combat division
required 7 hundred tons of supplies—per day—to maintain sustained combat. All those supplies were still in and around the
beaches in Normandy, where the powers-that-be had assumed they would be close
to the action. Well, the “action” had
outstripped its supply lines and then trumped it with an ace. Patton, who famously said “Give me 400,000
gallons of gas and I will put you in Germany in two days!” was out of fuel. So were Bradley, Montgomery and every other
Allied commander. Out of gas, out of
food, out of ammunition, out of everything.
Both communication and material were simply cut off by distance born of
speed. Our own success had become the
enemy.
A temporary and stop-gap solution
was provided by what become known as the Red Ball Express. Six thousand trucks took to the road along a
dedicated one-way highway system. Twenty-four
hours a day, every day, the trucks were loaded at rear-area depots and sent
east to the front. The objective of
these G. I.’s turned truckers was to deliver 82,000 tons of supplies. They delivered 89,000 tons before the trucks
simply disintegrated with the work load.
The Red Ball Express was not an
unqualified success. But it did make a positive impact at a time when it was
needed. Something does not have to be a
permanent solution in order to provide a temporary good. A tourniquet can stop a person from bleeding
to death, but it has a short shelf life apropos to its usefulness. And that brings us to Puerto Rico.
In Puerto Rico we have a land and
people who are part of the United States.
They need our help. Puerto Rico
is an island that has had every on-site resource available to them
destroyed. They are in full-on survival
mode. To help them we need a Red Ball
Express. It needs to be coordinated and
executed by the military because that is the one entity that routinely plans
and practices this kind of battle ground assault. [God bless them.] They have a chain of command, a mission and
the personnel. We need to send the
military in, get the job of life-saving done and worry about how to restructure
Puerto Rico’s lame-ass economy later.
Trust me, every other nit-picking problem will be there after the food,
water, power and transportation are restored.
The military can leave, the politicians can take over and the Red Ball
Express can start gearing up for the next emergency.
Send in a few military truckers
and keep the faith.
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