Camp Meigs in Washington, D.C., was the starting line. On July 7, 1919, an 81-vehicle Army convoy rolled out from there bound for San Francisco, and it did not arrive until Sept. 6. The trip covered 3,251 miles in 62 days at an average of six miles per hour.
The trip was an observation run: a test of how military trucks, and the roads under them, would hold up over a cross-country haul. What it turned up was a long list of things that broke: trucks, trailers, roads and, along the way, 88 bridges and culverts.
Those figures come from the Army’s own account of the trip, “The Army Goes Rolling Along,” written by James A. Harvey III of the Army Materiel Systems Analysis Activity at Aberdeen Proving Ground and published on Jan. 22, 2015. Harvey draws on the journal kept by one of the officers who rode along as an observer, Lt. Col. Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Eighty-one vehicles on the Lincoln Highway
The convoy was a rolling sample of the Army’s motor fleet. Eisenhower’s written report on the trip, dated Nov. 3, 1919, and posted by the Federal Highway Administration, lists light and heavy trucks, touring cars, observation cars, motorcycles, ambulances, trailers, a tractor and a machine shop unit. Makes named in the report include Mack, F.W.D., Garford, Packard, White, G.M.C., Cadillac and Riker. Cargo trucks made up the largest share of the 81 vehicles, per the Army account.
The route followed the Lincoln Highway, which the report says the convoy picked up at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and followed almost constantly from there. Road quality fell off as the convoy moved west. Eisenhower recorded concrete in Maryland, a road “almost entirely tarvia” in Pennsylvania, paved and macadamized sections in Ohio and Indiana, and mostly dirt from Illinois through Iowa.
The Eisenhower Presidential Library describes Eisenhower’s job on the trip as an observer for the War Department, and keeps his memorandum to the Chief of the Motor Transport Corps among its online documents. The library notes he “learned first-hand of the difficulties faced in traveling great distances on roads that were impassable and resulted in frequent breakdowns.”
Mud in Nebraska, salt crust in Utah
Six miles per hour was an average, and some days fell far below it. In his journal entries for Aug. 2, 1919, as quoted in the Army account, Eisenhower noted that rain in Nebraska made the dirt roads slippery and that 25 trucks slipped into a ditch during that day’s drive. The next day the convoy covered 34 miles in more than nine hours.
The Great Salt Lake Desert was worse. Harvey’s account describes a “salt marsh with [a] thin, hard crust of sand and crystallized alkali” that mired the vehicles, and it reports that water had to be placed under guard and rationed to one cup per man. Eisenhower’s report was blunter about the run into Nevada: “From Orr’s Ranch, Utah, to Carson City, Nevada, the road is one succession of dust, ruts, pits, and holes.”
A National Archives article, “Ike’s Interstates at 50” by David A. Pfeiffer in Prologue magazine’s summer 2006 issue, puts the toll in numbers. Half the distance, mostly west of the Mississippi, ran over dirt roads, wheel paths, desert sand and mountain trails, and the convoy logged more than 230 recorded road accidents. Pfeiffer gives the pace as about 6 miles an hour, or 58 miles a day.
What the Army learned about trucks
The convoy was hard on bridges as well as men. Harvey writes that it destroyed or damaged 88 bridges and culverts that troops then had to repair, and that sleep averaged about five and a half hours a night. He describes the crews’ duty as an “almost continuous and excessive amount of strenuous work.”
One machine earned special praise. Eisenhower’s Nov. 3, 1919 report says the Militor, one of the vehicles in the column, “did wonderful work in pulling vehicles out of holes, sand pits, etc.” His broader finding cut against the heavy trucks: on bad roads, lighter vehicles held up better, and he concluded that a type “not exceeding 2 tons” was the most practical for long-distance work.
The two official counts differ in small ways. The Army account lists 39 officers, 258 enlisted men and one Ordnance Department civilian, while the Eisenhower Library and the National Archives article give 24 officers and 258 enlisted men. All three agree on the core record: 81 vehicles, 3,251 miles and 62 days from Washington to San Francisco, with Eisenhower’s report filed from Rock Island Arsenal on Nov. 3, 1919.
Top image: Trucks of the 1919 Transcontinental Motor Convoy on the Lincoln Highway approaching Dixon, Illinois. Image Credit: Lt. Jackson, U.S. Army Signal Corps (National Archives) — Public domain / Wikimedia Commons
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Combat Rated editors prior to publication.