by Barbara Wood

In World War II, at a time when women made up only .033 percent of the military and almost all but nurses were stationed far from the front, the American Red Cross sent hundreds of young women tasked to boost military morale to the European frontlines in “clubmobiles,” 2.5-ton trucks and buses repurposed as mobile social clubs.

The American Red Cross was the sole nonmilitary agency designated to provide welfare and recreation services for the US expeditionary forces in World War II. With the official job description of “club services worker,” clubmobile crews, usually three young women, were tasked to prepare and serve coffee and doughnuts, and other reminders of “home” that might allow the soldiers to momentarily forget the stresses of war.

The Red Cross women drove and serviced their own vehicles, and even camouflaged them if necessary to avoid enemy fire. They also distributed mail, handed out gum, candy and cigarettes, provided music from onboard record players and public address systems and listened, and listened, and listened to the stories young soldiers were desperate to share with someone from “back home.”

Some of the clubmobiles, called “cinemobiles” were set up to provide movies and music. They had a movie projector, portable screen, small piano, portable stage and a public address system, with Red Cross women who could sing and dance to entertain the troops when not showing movies.

Each vehicle had a register for troopers to sign with their names, states, hometowns and divisions so those coming after them could look for those they knew.

Landing on the beaches after D-Day

A cadre of 80 clubmobiles and 320 Red Cross women landed on European beaches from American troop ships weeks after D-Day,  and then followed the Army divisions they were assigned to.  Ten groups each had 32 Red Crossers in eight clubmobiles, a cinemobile, and supply trucks.

Paige N. Gulley wrote a master’s degree thesis at Chapman University on the clubmobile women in 2020.

“They pitched tents in the muddy fields of France, dove into foxholes under shellfire, and were greeted by grateful French and hostile German civilians. Clubmobile groups’ vehicles and living quarters were destroyed, and some clubmobilers were injured or killed as a result of their service,” Gulley wrote.

Gulley’s research showed that five of the clubmobile crew members died in the war, two in airplane crashes, two in vehicle mishaps (including one who fell under the wheels of her own clubmobile) and one by hostile fire while in a military hospital for “a bad cold.”

Gulley quoted a clubmobile crew member named Nathalie Fallon: “As we move along with Corps, we become experts in our own ways. Camouflaging the trucks each night, digging our slit trenches, and learning to bargain for eggs or potatoes with a handful of cigarettes.”

“Like soldiers, clubmobile women pitched tents and dug latrines in the muddy fields of France, with only a helmet to help them bathe,” Gulley wrote.

Long, hard days

Without even taking into consideration the dangers of being close to fighting on the frontlines, the Red Cross clubmobile crews worked long, hard days. According to Red Cross records, nearly 254 million doughnuts were served by Red Crossers between 1944 and 1946, with the clubmobile newsletter reporting that more than 43 million of them were made and served by the clubmobile crews. One of the groups stationed in continental Europe served more than 80,000 doughnuts and more than 34,000 cups of coffee in just one week, all prepared in the confined clubmobile kitchens.

Author Luis Alberto Urrea’s recent novel, “Goodnight Irene,” is based on the experiences of his mother, Phyllis McLaughlin, and other clubmobilers in WWII. He also wrote a New York Times essay about their experiences. His mother and two fellow crew members followed the troops “from Normandy to the Bavarian Alps, through the liberation of Paris to the Battle of the Bulge to the liberation of Buchenwald,” Urrea wrote in the essay.

The clubmobile groups were attached to Army units, serving in France, Luxembourg, Belgium and Germany until the war ended in Europe on May 7, 1945. Once the war in Europe ended the clubmobiles continued for another year to serve troops in occupied Germany and other areas, with some of the women being among the first to enter the concentration camps and POW camps that had held allied troops.

How they prepared

Jill Pitts Knappenberger told her story to author Maureen Holtz for the Warfare History Network. “Mobilization for D-Day required clubmobile women picked for Europe to drive 2.5-ton GMC trucks,” Holtz wrote. “Jill and her crewmates took a 10-day, 500-mile obstacle driving course, learning truck maintenance and how to change the 55-pound tires.”

“In the fall of 1944…26-year-old American Red Cross volunteer Jill Pitts maneuvered her 2.5-ton GMC truck, the clubmobile Cheyenne, through mud and rain to a chateau two miles southwest of Bastogne, Belgium,” Holtz wrote.

After four days spent driving 600 miles with a 135-vehicle military convey, “the women started on their usual tasks, cleaning inside the truck, ensuring their supply of kerosene for their primus stove used for heating water, and making donuts for the next day using the Cheyenne’s built-in electric donut-making machine,” she wrote.

“Nine hundred GIs awaited the Cheyenne the next day. While the built-in Victrola blasted V-disc records through loudspeakers and GIs surveyed a collection of newspapers, Jill, Helen, and Phyl heated water for the 50-cup coffee urns and served the snacks,” she wrote.

Later, Holtz wrote, Jill and her teammates were caught in the Battle of the Bulge, Germany’s last-ditch effort to stave off surrender. Surrounded by fighting, the women were prepared to blow up their clubmobile if they had to abandon it to escape. When a road leading outside the battle area was temporarily cleared, they removed the bomb from their vehicle and headed out in a snowstorm.

Other club services

The clubmobile crews in continental Europe were only a small part of the larger Red Cross effort to provide recreational club services during the war, with nearly 2,000 facilities operating at the peak with almost 5,000 Red Crossers helped by as many as 140,000 local volunteers in the European and Pacific theaters. Some clubmobiles operated outside the combat zones, traveling from base to base. Other recreation clubs were in set locations, with the largest being the Rainbow Corner Club in London, which was open 24 hours a day, serving as many as 60,000 meals a day.

The large facilities offered overnight accommodations and amenities such as barbershops and laundries in addition to food and recreation facilities. The smaller clubs, often located in outlying areas close to American military camps, had food and recreation facilities.

The clubmobilers had their own newsletter, “The Sinker” (named after slang for doughnuts), which clubmobilers edited and provided most of the content for themselves. One issue described their service this way: “In a little town East of the border in Germany, one could find in the early part of October 1944, a group of 29 women busily cooking doughnuts under a barrage of artillery. You could see them when the air cleared of falling shrapnel and the mist of bomb burstings let up a bit. Between doughnut batches, they would grab their helmets and run for a hole.”

Only one out of six

The Red Cross had many more women apply to be overseas club service workers than were needed, with fewer than one in six of the applicants getting the position. The Red Cross asked for women between ages 25 and 35 with college degrees, preferably in education, social work or recreation, but also accepted a few women who did not meet these criteria. They looked for poise and charm, good conversational skills, self-assurance, stamina and creativity in applicants and the ability to “hold her own in a male dominated environment.” They also had to pass physical fitness tests.

Once they were selected, the women were trained by the Red Cross at American University in Washington, D.C. The training was initially for six weeks but was eventually reduced to as little as two weeks as the war progressed.  The women usually traveled to their assignments with American troops on troop ships.

For more on clubmobiles

Read the story of Jill Pitts Knappenberger in the Warfare History Network website at and see a YouTube video interview with her.

Author Luis Alberto Urrea recently wrote a novel, “Goodnight Irene” based on the experiences of his mother, Phyllis McLaughlin, Jill Pitts Knappenberger and other clubmobilers in WWII. His New York Times essay can be read here.

Check our visual tribute to the clubmobile crews here.

Clubmobile.org has first-person recollections from Red Cross clubmobile crew members.

Read the official Red Cross history of World War I.

Check Paige N. Gulley’s Master’s thesis for Chapman University, “After all, who takes care of the Red Cross’s morale?”: The Experiences of American Red Cross Clubmobile Women during World War II” which contains excerpts from many of the clubmobilers own papers found in a collection in the Harvard Library.

Red Crossers will have a chance to learn more about Clubmobiles on March 2 at the San Mateo and San Francisco County annual volunteer recognition event in Menlo Park, which will have a Clubmobile theme.