Here is the thing though about WW2. FDR was a genuine racist so he relegated blacks to driving and loading trucks.
There was one Battalion of armored that used blacks. Battalions normally have maybe 2,000 men.
General Dwight D. Eisenhower had a problem. In June 1944, Allied forces had
landed on Normandy Beach in France and were moving east toward Nazi Germany at a clip of sometimes 75 miles per day.
With most of the French rail system in ruins, the Allies had to find a way to
transport supplies to the advancing soldiers.
“Our spearheads … were moving swiftly,” Eisenhower later recalled. “The supply service had to catch these with loaded trucks. Every mile doubled the difficulty because the supply truck had always to make a two-way run to the beaches and back, in order to deliver another load to the marching troops.”
The solution to this logistics problem was the creation of the
Red Ball Express, a massive fleet of nearly 6,000 2.5-ton General Motors cargo trucks. The term
Red Ball came from a railway tradition whereby railmen marked priority cars with a red dot.
From August through November 1944, 23,000 American truck drivers and cargo loaders—70 percent of whom were Black—moved more than 400,000 tons of ammunition, gasoline, medical supplies and rations to battlefronts in France, Belgium and Germany.