THE HISTORIC RED BALL EXPRESS ON NE 28TH STREET. A Texas Highway of Remembrance for the World War II Soldiers Who Kept an Army Moving.

THE HISTORIC RED BALL EXPRESS ON NE 28TH STREET. A Texas Highway of Remembrance for the World War II Soldiers Who Kept an Army Moving.

By Digging for Dignity Legacy Project

HALTOM CITY, TEXAS — There are roads that take us somewhere.

And there are roads that tell us where we have been.

Northeast 28th Street does both. Link: https://fortworthreport.org/2026/06/22/digging-for-dignity-helps-restore-names-at-historic-cemetery/

Every day, traffic moves through this stretch of Tarrant County—past businesses, neighborhoods, intersections, churches, warehouses, families, and one of the region’s most consequential historic Black burial grounds. Drivers hurry east and west, many never knowing that just off the roadway, at People’s Memorial Legacy Park near NE 28th Street and North Beach Street, rests a World War II veteran whose military service connects this Texas transportation corridor to one of the greatest transportation operations of the Second World War.

His name was TEC 5 Douglas Westbrook.

And his story has given rise to an idea:

What if NE 28th Street became the Historic Red Ball Express Highway?

The Digging for Dignity Legacy Project is asking the State of Texas, state and local transportation officials, historians, veterans organizations, elected leaders, educators, and communities across Tarrant County to consider an honorary designation of an appropriate portion of NE 28th Street in recognition of the Red Ball Express.

Not merely one soldier.

Not merely one race.

But an entire mission.

A mission in which thousands of American servicemen performed one of the most demanding and consequential logistical operations of World War II.

A mission in which Black soldiers played an indispensable and disproportionately large role.

A mission whose unofficial command could be reduced to three unforgettable words:

Keep ’em rolling.

THE SOLDIER BESIDE THE HIGHWAY

Cemeteries have a peculiar way of collapsing distance.

A grave may occupy only a few feet of ground, yet the life beneath it can stretch across oceans.

That is what happened with Douglas Westbrook.

During the continuing restoration and historical research taking place at People’s Memorial Legacy Park, Westbrook’s military marker became more than another name among hundreds of veterans buried across the historic grounds.

It pointed toward the Red Ball Express.

Suddenly, the distance between Haltom City and wartime France became remarkably short.

A Black veteran connected to the massive truck convoys that supplied American forces across Europe was resting beside one of Tarrant County’s significant modern transportation arteries.

That is the kind of coincidence that makes a historian stop walking.

It is also the kind of connection that can transform a roadway into a memorial.

The idea behind the proposed Historic Red Ball Express Highway begins with Westbrook, but it does not end with him.

His grave is the Texas doorway into a much larger American story.

WHEN AN ARMY OUTRAN ITS SUPPLY LINES

By the summer of 1944, the Allied campaign in Western Europe had developed a problem that success itself had created.

American and Allied forces had broken out of Normandy and were moving rapidly across France.

The front was advancing.

The soldiers were advancing.

The tanks were advancing.

But the supplies were not keeping up.

Modern warfare consumes almost everything.

Fuel.

Ammunition.

Food.

Medicine.

Replacement parts.

Tires.

Oil.

Equipment.

An army may advance on courage, but it cannot continue on courage alone.

A tank without gasoline is not a weapon.

It is several dozen tons of steel sitting motionless beside a road.

A rifle without ammunition is little more than a piece of machinery.

An army without food eventually stops being an army capable of advancing.

The military needed a transportation system capable of feeding the advance almost as quickly as the fighting forces could move.

The solution was extraordinary in scale and strikingly simple in concept.

Put the supplies on trucks.

Give those trucks priority.

Keep them moving around the clock.

The result became known as the:

RED BALL EXPRESS.

Beginning on August 25, 1944, an enormous convoy system began hauling supplies from rear depots toward American forces moving across France.

The trucks rolled in daylight.

They rolled at night.

They rolled across damaged roads and through mud.

They rolled despite breakdowns, exhaustion, traffic, weather, and the constant pressure of moving enormous quantities of material toward an army that seemed determined to outrun them.

Drivers drove.

Mechanics repaired.

Loaders loaded.

Dispatchers coordinated.

Engineers maintained roads and routes.

Military police directed traffic.

Officers organized the flow.

An entire transportation system was improvised across a continent still at war.

Everybody had a role.

And the mission depended upon everyone doing it.

EIGHTY-THREE DAYS

The Red Ball Express operated from August 25 through November 16, 1944.

Eighty-three days.

Barely three months.

That seems almost impossibly brief for an operation that became so deeply embedded in the history of American military logistics.

Yet those eighty-three days reveal one of warfare’s least glamorous and most enduring truths:

Battles may be won at the front, but wars can be lost on the road behind it.

The generals could plan.

The infantry could fight.

The artillery could fire.

The tanks could advance.

But somebody had to bring them what they needed.

Somebody had to fill the fuel tanks.

Somebody had to carry the ammunition.

Somebody had to bring the food.

Somebody had to repair the trucks that brought all of it.

The Red Ball Express became that somebody.

Eventually, French rail lines were repaired and other transportation systems began assuming more of the logistical burden. The great emergency trucking network was no longer necessary.

The trucks stopped.

The war continued.

And the names of many of the soldiers who made the Red Ball Express possible receded into the enormous shadow cast by the generals, battles, and political leaders whose names dominated the history books.

THE BLACK SOLDIERS BEHIND THE WHEEL

Any honest account of the Red Ball Express must tell another story.

The United States military of 1944 was segregated.

Black servicemen could fight and die for democracy overseas while living under a system at home that denied them equality because of race.

They were often steered into transportation, quartermaster, engineering, and service assignments.

Then the war turned those assignments into necessities.

Approximately three out of every four Red Ball Express drivers were Black.

That fact does not make the Red Ball Express exclusively a Black military story.

But it makes Black military history inseparable from the Red Ball Express.

These soldiers climbed behind the wheels of heavily loaded military trucks and drove mile after mile across Europe.

They served a democracy that did not fully serve them.

They transported the machinery of freedom while segregation waited for many of them back home.

Yet they drove.

The contradiction is one of the defining features of the Black American military experience during World War II.

So is the service.

The proposed Historic Red Ball Express Highway should therefore do two things at once.

It should honor every American who helped make the Red Ball Express work.

And it should tell the truth that Black soldiers—serving under segregation—formed the majority of its drivers and became indispensable to its success.

Those stories are not competitors.

They belong together.

ONE MISSION

There is a temptation in public history to divide people into categories and then tell their stories separately.

The Red Ball Express resists that kind of simplification.

Black and white.

Officer and enlisted.

Driver and mechanic.

Loader and dispatcher.

Engineer and military policeman.

Thousands of Americans filled different assignments.

But the convoy only worked when those assignments came together.

One truck could not do it.

One company could not do it.

One race could not do it.

One rank could not do it.

It was a system.

The greatness was collective.

That is why the proposed designation on NE 28th Street should not become merely a memorial to one man or one demographic group.

TEC 5 Douglas Westbrook gives the proposal its local connection.

The Red Ball Express gives it its larger meaning.

One veteran makes the story local.

One extraordinary military operation makes the story national.

TWO ROADS

The symbolism of NE 28th Street is difficult to ignore.

The Red Ball Express existed because transportation mattered.

NE 28th Street exists because transportation still matters.

The Red Ball Express connected supply depots with advancing military forces.

NE 28th Street connects neighborhoods, businesses, municipalities, workers, families, highways, and communities across a rapidly growing part of Tarrant County.

One road system moved the necessities of war.

The other moves the necessities of daily life.

One kept an army moving.

The other helps keep a metropolitan county moving.

And beside NE 28th Street rests a man whose life connects the two.

That is what gives this proposal a character beyond ordinary honorary roadway naming.

It is not simply:

A veteran happens to be buried beside this road.

It is:

A veteran associated with one of America’s defining transportation operations rests beside a Texas highway whose own significance is transportation.

Two roads.

Two eras.

One story about movement.

PEOPLE’S MEMORIAL LEGACY PARK

The story becomes even richer because Westbrook does not rest in an ordinary cemetery.

He rests at People’s Memorial Legacy Park.

The historic burial landscape near NE 28th Street and North Beach Street has emerged through the Digging for Dignity Legacy Project as something much larger than a collection of graves.

It is an underground archive of Black life and American service.

Here lie formerly enslaved people and their descendants.

Pastors.

Mothers.

Fathers.

Educators.

Businesspeople.

Community builders.

Veterans.

Hundreds of military markers record generations of service.

The rediscovery of Florence Marie Cole Rawls, a member of the historic 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion, helped draw renewed attention to the extraordinary military history resting here.

And once people began looking carefully, the cemetery began speaking.

Different markers revealed different wars.

Different branches.

Different units.

Different eras of American history.

Then came Douglas Westbrook.

And with him came the Red Ball Express.

FROM A FEW FEET OF EARTH TO AN OCEAN AWAY

This is what cemetery preservation can do.

A person sees a marker.

The marker provides a name.

The name leads to a military record.

The military record leads to a unit.

The unit leads to a story.

And suddenly a few feet of earth in Haltom City opens onto the roads of Europe in 1944.

That is Digging for Dignity at its best.

It begins with the grave.

Then it follows the history wherever the history leads.

With Westbrook, the road leads backward:

From NE 28th Street.

To People’s Memorial Legacy Park.

To a Texas veteran.

To the United States Army.

To the Red Ball Express.

To France.

To the Allied advance.

To World War II.

And then, eventually, back home.

There is something almost poetic about the journey ending beside another highway.

WHAT A SIGN CAN DO

Imagine driving NE 28th Street and seeing a sign:

HISTORIC RED BALL EXPRESS HIGHWAY

Perhaps beneath it:

HONORING THOSE WHO KEPT ’EM ROLLING

A child in the back seat asks what it means.

A parent looks it up.

A teacher builds a lesson around it.

A veteran pauses.

A history student discovers the Black drivers.

Another reader discovers Douglas Westbrook.

Someone learns about military logistics.

Someone else discovers People’s Memorial Legacy Park.

One sign creates a question.

The question creates curiosity.

Curiosity creates education.

And education keeps memory from dying.

A road designation can become, in effect, a classroom without walls.

That is why this proposal is about more than changing what appears on a highway sign.

It is about deciding what Texas chooses to remember in public.

A TEXAS STORY WITH NATIONAL REACH

Texas has always understood roads.

The size of the state almost requires it.

Roads connect ranches to towns, towns to cities, cities to markets, families to opportunity, and communities to one another.

Transportation has shaped the economic and cultural development of Texas for generations.

That makes the Red Ball Express an especially fitting story for a Texas roadway.

This was transportation under the most extreme circumstances imaginable.

No quarterly projections.

No commute times.

No ordinary freight schedules.

The cargo could determine whether soldiers ate, tanks moved, and military operations continued.

The stakes were measured in lives and battles.

NE 28th Street offers Texas the opportunity to connect that national military history to a real veteran, a real burial ground, and a real transportation corridor.

That is the foundation of the case.

NOT ONE RACE. NOT ONE SOLDIER. ONE MISSION.

The proposed designation should be understood clearly.

It is not an attempt to transform the Red Ball Express into an exclusively Black story.

Nor should the contributions of Black soldiers be diluted in an effort to make the history appear colorblind.

History rarely offers us such simple choices.

The Red Ball Express was an American operation.

Black soldiers formed the great majority of its drivers.

Both facts matter.

TEC 5 Douglas Westbrook was a Black military veteran connected to that operation.

That matters too.

But Westbrook becomes the bridge to the broader commemoration.

His presence at People’s Memorial Legacy Park explains why here.

The Red Ball Express explains why it matters.

NE 28th Street explains why a highway is the right memorial.

Together, those facts create a case that reaches beyond race while refusing to erase it.

LET TEXAS KEEP ’EM ROLLING

The Red Ball Express ended on November 16, 1944.

The roads quieted.

The trucks moved on to other assignments.

The soldiers came home—or did not.

The decades passed.

Douglas Westbrook eventually came to rest in Tarrant County.

And history settled into the ground beside NE 28th Street.

Now the road offers Texas another possibility.

To raise that history back into public view.

The Digging for Dignity Legacy Project is therefore calling upon the State of Texas, the Texas Legislature, transportation officials, local governments, veterans organizations, historians, educators, and citizens to consider the honorary designation of an appropriate portion of NE 28th Street as the Historic Red Ball Express Highway.

Not merely because a soldier is buried nearby.

Because the right soldier is buried beside the right road.

A member of one of the most consequential transportation operations of World War II rests beside an important transportation corridor in one of America’s largest metropolitan regions.

The connection is local.

The history is national.

The meaning is timeless.

The road already carries people.

Now it can carry memory.

THE HISTORIC RED BALL EXPRESS HIGHWAY

NE 28TH STREET — TARRANT COUNTY, TEXAS

Eighty-three days helped keep an army moving.

One Texas highway can help keep their story moving.

KEEP ’EM ROLLING.

DIGGING FOR DIGNITY LEGACY PROJECT

They Were Buried in Silence. We Will Raise Their Names in Remembrance.

PEOPLE’S MEMORIAL LEGACY PARK

North Beach Street at NE 28th Street
Haltom City, Texas