The story of World War II’s “Red Ball Express” serves as a reminder that winning wars means winning a battle of logistics. It also offers insight into how we should approach our assistance to Ukraine in the face of concerns about Ukrainian corruption, which is an issue raised repeatedly in the recent debates over the latest aid package and which is likely to be raised again and again as long as the war continues. One may not agree with those who’ve made Ukrainian corruption an issue, but it has loomed too large in recent months to simply be dismissed out of hand. The “Red Ball Express” was an emblematic American “can-do” solution to a problem that might well have defeated the armies of most other countries. After the “breakout” from Normandy at the end of July, 1944, after the crushing encirclement of the German armies at Falaise, the German defenses collapsed and the allied armies raced across France. Raced so fast that they exceeded even the wildest dreams of the D-Day invasion planners, so fast that the armies soon had outrun their base of supplies, hundreds of miles distant in back in Normandy. (READ MORE: Russia Is Pounding Eastern Ukraine’s Industrial Heartland) By Aug. 25, it had become clear that nothing short of desperate measures would enable the continued pursuit of the broken German forces. The French rail system and rolling stock had largely been destroyed by the allied air forces in the run up to D-Day, when the priority was denying supplies to the Germans manning the vaunted Atlantic Wall. If the necessary supplies were to reach the front line troops, truck convoys on a scale heretofore scarcely imagined, would have to do the job. The solution was the “Red Ball Express.” Combining virtually every available military trucking resource in France, mainly the famous “deuce and a half” trucks, it was a system designed to overcome the limitations of the French highway system, roads largely well-surfaced, but too narrow to sustain large volumes of two-way truck traffic. So instead MPs were deployed to create two one-way highways, the northern route carrying supplies forward, the southern bringing the trucks back to be loaded once again. And it worked. At its peak it delivered something like 12,000 tons of supplies per day to divisions along the entire Western Front. To be sure, it was a close run thing. For example, Patton’s famed 3rd Army, having charged over virtually the whole of France in little more than 30 days, literally ran out of gas just shy of the final great barrier to the German border, the Moselle river in the French province of Lorraine. At a critical moment, the pursuit ended, and, when it resumed a week later, the breathing space had enabled the Germans to put cobble together a new line of defenses along the river, presaging a bloody and brutal slugging match that would last deep into November. The “Red Ball Express” continued throughout these critical days, lasting until the opening of the port of Antwerp dramatically eased the allies’ supply situation. All along the front, in hard and bitter battles from the Hürtgen forest to the grand fortifications of Metz, tanks depended on thousands of gallons of gasoline, while bullets and shells were consumed in almost unimaginably vast numbers. Soldiers had to eat, and, as winter set in — what would be the most brutal winter in eastern France in decades — they also desperately needed winter clothing to replace the increasingly tattered lightweight garb. Saboteurs on Both Sides As I’ve listened to discussions about corruption in Ukraine and the misuse of the billions in assistance we’ve provided, I’ve found myself thinking of a family anecdote, and reflecting on the way in which it might point to a policy solution. In August, 1944, my uncle Tom’s regiment, the 29th Infantry, had just arrived in France from England, having spent much of the war up to that point providing security for bases in Iceland. Rather than being pushed forward to the front lines, the 29th was assigned the task of providing security for the “Red Ball Express.” Much of the territory through which the trucks passed day and night had only recently been liberated, and General Eisenhower feared that bypassed German units or Vichy French saboteurs might attempt to interrupt the flow of supplies. (READ MORE: The Strange Life and Ironic Death of Putin-Loving Russell ‘Texas’ Bentley) So while the MPs directed traffic and manned the many intersections along the way, the riflemen of the 29th patrolled the routes in vehicle mounted teams, ready to respond to any threats. One afternoon, my uncle, a very young second lieutenant, saw several “Red Ball” trucks pulled off the route onto a side street in a French village, where a crowd had gathered. He ordered his jeep driver to pull over, and he and a third soldier walked over to the back of the crowd, discovering that a couple of “Red Ball” drivers were conducting an auction, selling GI long johns, overcoats, and “ten-on-one” ration boxes off the back of their trucks. My uncle saw red. Unslinging his carbine, he led his soldiers through the crowd and levelled the weapon at the drivers. While his men dispersed the crowd, he ordered the drivers — at gunpoint — to reload their trucks and then followed them in his jeep to the next MP checkpoint, his gunner with a locked and loaded, pedestal-mounted .30 caliber machine gun trained on the truck ahead from the back of the jeep. As he told the story many years later, what infuriated him the most about the entire incident was knowing that, at that very moment, his older brother, my father, was freezing in the front lines outside Metz, waiting for the warm clothing that the drivers had been flogging to French civilians. Would he have shot the drivers, I asked. Only one, he replied, somebody was still needed to drive the trucks, and the trucks had to get through. But yes, as he put it: “Our mission was to stop saboteurs, and those drivers were saboteurs just as much as a bunch of Krauts.” So much has been made of World War II’s “greatest generation” that it’s easy to forget that not all of its members were all that great. In the wake of the advance across France in 1944, a massive black market arose, centered upon Paris, organized by AWOL soldiers and corrupt members of the services of supply. The temptations were huge. After years under German occupation, and faced with shortages of almost everything, the French were eager for clothing, foodstuffs, gasoline, and cigarettes, and huge profits accrued to the Americans who could supply this demand. TV’s Sgt. Bilko may have played this kind of thing for laughs, but there was nothing funny about the GI mafias that emerged in Paris (or, in fairness to the French, even more so in Naples). It’s no accident that the early history of the U.S. Army’s CID, it’s Criminal Investigation Division, is filled with tales of the battle against black marketeers in World War II, not just the occasional “Red Ball Express” driver, but much more the organized crime syndicates that arose in Paris and other French cities. GI criminality never actually threated the war effort, and most soldiers had little use for the criminals, but, as my uncle’s story makes clear, it had its effect. Many front line soldiers during December’s Battle of the Bulge lacked the winter gear a great nation should have provided, mainly due to the miscalculations of rear-area supply officers, but also because these items were hijacked along the way. Let’s Stop Sending Humanitarian Aid to Ukraine What, then, does the “Red Ball Express” have to do with supplying Ukraine’s war amidst allegations of Ukrainian corruption? The lesson should be obvious. No one was selling 105mm artillery shells off the back of ‘deuce and a half” trucks to French villagers, nor were tank transporters being hijacked so that French farmers could use Sherman tanks to plow their fields. Similarly, it’s doubtful that Ukrainian crooks want to put a HIMARS rocket system up for sale, or pallet loads of 155mm shells. When these things get to Ukraine, and in spite of the Biden administration’s ridiculous strictures on their use, they get used for the purpose of stopping Putin’s invasion and protecting the homes and families of ordinary Ukrainians. If there’s concern about the money spent buying weapons and ammunition, then critics should at least acknowledge that, overwhelmingly, this money is spent with American companies providing jobs for American workers here in the U.S. If the Ukrainians could make these weapons and systems in their own factories, no doubt they’d be doing just that. After all, having experienced the perpetually “hot and cold” manipulative nature of Biden’s approach to providing aid — and having witnessed in recent weeks his similar approach to Israel — who wouldn’t prefer to be self-reliant. (READ MORE: Ukraine’s Secret Hospital Train) One suspects that the concern about Ukrainian corruption and American military aid comes down less to a concern about corruption and more a desire to withdraw altogether from supporting Ukraine. And some undoubtedly, reflect a perfectly justified unhappiness with some of the suspected nefarious dealings between interests in Kyiv and the Biden family. All well and good. Therefore, with the lesson of my uncle’s experience of the “Red Ball Express” in mind, and with due deference to the famed satirist Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal, here’s a suggestion: Stop sending humanitarian aid to Ukraine, in any form. Undoubtedly, there are Ukrainians who deserve such aid, and maybe our European allies can take up the slack it — the Europeans, after all, are probably better situated to provide such aid and to monitor its honest use. For our part, send nothing that can be flogged by crooks for profit: not food, not clothing, not shelter. Above all, ignore the common NGO request to “send money” so that we can buy the things that are needed, money is far too fungible, far too mobile. Instead, send only things that blow up and destroy things, that is tanks and guns and shells and missiles. It’s not quite the same as Swift’s famed suggestion that the Irish eat their babies to solve their nutrition and population problems, but it is a solution to the anxieties over Ukrainian corruption as it relates to military aid. I know that the very notion of suspending our humanitarian aid will be met with froth and vaporing from all the usual suspects. Weapons bad, food good, and all that. But it might just be a salutary lesson for the NGOs around the world who, in many instances, have grown fat with our propensity for feel good messaging. Watching the manipulative political stench that has arisen around humanitarian assistance to Gaza, one can only hold one’s nose in disgust. After all, the proper time for humanitarian assistance there has always been only after Hamas has been crushed. Similarly, right now we might best provide Ukraine right now with the weapons necessary to bring Putin to the negotiation table, along with ending the inane restrictions on their use. This is the best foundation for peace, and something that has eluded the Biden administration altogether. James H. McGee retired in 2018 after nearly four decades as a national security and counter-terrorism professional, working primarily in the nuclear security field. Since retiring, he’s begun a second career as a thriller writer. His 2022 novel, Letter of Reprisal, tells the tale of a desperate mission to destroy a Chinese bioweapon facility hidden in the heart of the central African conflict region, and a forthcoming sequel carries the Reprisal team from the hills of West Virginia to the forests of Belarus. You can find it on Amazon in both Kindle and paperback editions, and on Kindle Unlimited. The post What the Red Ball Express Teaches Us About Ukraine appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.