From the KROV News Center, this is KROV news sponsored by VIA Metropolitan Transit. One of Military City USA’s finest is getting a long over-due award from the President of France, Emmanuel Macron.
 
Eighty years after the Allied forces defeated Hitler’s Nazis, Gerald Mullin is being given the French Legion of Honor award for his role as platoon commander of the largely black “Red Ball Express”.
 
Consul General Valérie Barbaran will bestow the medal to Mr. Mullin on behalf of the President of France in recognition of his heroism as part of the American liberation of France and victory over Nazi Germany during World War II. 
 
The ceremony will be held at the Ft. Sam Houston Theater on Wednesday, July 3, 2024, at 2:30 PM.
 
Mr. Mullin served as platoon commander of the “Red Ball Express,” a transportation and logistics unit that supplied weapons, fuel, and food during the war. They also transported Jewish holocaust victims from concentration camps in Nazi Germany.
 
The French Consul General, Valarie Baraban, will present the award on behalf of President Macron and a grateful French nation to Mullin at a ceremony including the Mayor” of Joint Base San Antonio, Brig. General Driggers, County Commissioner, Tommy Calvert, Methodist Bishop Robert Schnase, the US Air Force Band, and leaders from the Jewish Federation.
 
The award would not have come without the advocacy of Mullin’s fellow veterans at his 100th Birthday party.  There, they informed Bexar County’s first Black County Commissioner, Tommy Calvert, of Mullin being in France at the time of V-Day and for the Battle of the Bulge.
 
Calvert had known Mullin for over 30 years but never knew of his WWII heroism.  Commissioner Calvert enlisted fellow Army veteran Ramon Chapa, who researched the issue with U.S. Senator John Cornyn’s Office and sent the information to the French government, where in May they promptly sent a letter indicating he would be given the prestigious national award, which was first given by Napoleon Bonaparte.