7 Things German Officers Refused to Believe About the American Army

the wrong instrument. German officers were not stupid about the United States. That is the first thing to get out of the way because the story is usually told as though they were and it makes the whole thing meaningless. They knew the production figures. Their intelligence services read American newspapers which published everything.

They knew about the shipyards and the aircraft plants and the steel tonnage. And by 1943, a great many senior German officers privately understood that those numbers were not survivable. What they could not do was believe the other numbers, the ones that had nothing to do with tanks.

Because a German officer’s model of a nation at war was a model of extraction. The state takes. It takes men. It takes labor. It takes food. It takes the years out of people’s lives. And the measure of a serious country is how much it can take before something breaks. By that measure, Germany was the most serious country on Earth.

And the regime was proud of it. The United States was running the machine backwards. The American war effort spent extraordinary quantities of money, shipping space, industrial capacity, and administrative effort on things that killed nobody, on testing people, on mail, on soft drinks, on dentistry, on bringing home the bodies of men who were already dead and already buried.

Every one of those decisions consumed cargo tonnage that could have carried ammunition. Every one of them was by the arithmetic a German staff officer would apply waste. Seven of them. Seven things that showed up in German assessments, prisoner interrogations, and postwar memoirs as things that did not compute. Not because the Germans doubted the facts, but because the facts did not fit inside any theory of war they possessed.

The seventh one is the one that still stops people. One that they tested every single man. Start with the least dramatic and the most revealing. Somewhere around 9 million American men over the course of the war sat down in a room and took a written examination. The Army General Classification Test, roughly 40 minutes, vocabulary, arithmetic reasoning, spatial relations.

It produced a score. The score produced a grade from 1 to 5. And the grade followed the man into the machine that decided what he would spend the war doing. High scorers were funneled toward technical training, officer candidate school, signals, ordinance, air crew. Others went to the infantry. Roughly 300,000 men were commissioned as officers through officer candidate school during the war.

Enlisted men pushed through a course of a few months and handed a commission. The regular officers called them 90-day wonders and meant it as an insult. Now, the concession, because this deserves one. The system was not fair and it was not accurate. The test measured schooling as much as it measured capability, which meant it punished poor men and rural men and anyone whose education had stopped early.

Worse, it systematically stripped the best scoring men out of the infantry and sent them elsewhere. So, the branch that took the heaviest casualties was staffed disproportionately with the men the machine had graded lowest. Senior officers complained about this bitterly during the war, and they were right to. But look at what it was.

It was an attempt at national scale to work out what nearly every man in an army was individually good at, and then use him for that. It assumed that talent was distributed randomly across the population, including in places no one had thought to look, and that the job was to find it. That is a statement about people disguised as a personnel procedure.

The German army had excellent officer selection, but it was selection by institution and by tradition and by a professional core choosing its own successors. It was not a search of the entire population by examination and nobody in Berlin proposed conducting one. Two, that the women built the weapons. The number of American women in paid work went from around 12 million before the war to roughly 19 million by 1944.

They went into aircraft plants, shipyards, ordinance factories, and machine shops. Around 350,000 served in uniform. The Women’s Army Corps, the Navy’s Waves, the Nurse Corps, and the roughly 1100 Wasp pilots who fied military aircraft, including 4G engine bombers, around the United States. Here is what Germany did instead, and this needs to be stated precisely because the sloppy version of it is wrong.

Germany was not a country where women did not work. German female labor participation was already high before the war and it stayed high. That is not the difference. The difference is what happened when the labor shortage became critical. Albert Spear running armaments production pressed repeatedly for the conscription of German women into war industry.

He was refused. The regime’s ideology about German womanhood was not a slogan they were willing to trade away for production, and Hitler would not authorize it on the scale Shar wanted. So, Germany filled the gap another way. By 1944, something on the order of 7 12 million foreign workers and prisoners of war were laboring inside the Reich, most of them there by force.

Many of them worked under conditions designed to kill them. That is the comparison, and it is not really about women at all. Faced with an identical shortage of hands, one country asked its own population for more and paid them for it. And the other imported human beings at gunpoint rather than revise a belief about what its own citizens were for.

The men and women in this story mostly did unglamorous work that nobody has ever put on a monument. If you think it’s worth keeping visible, hit the like button. It costs nothing and it puts them in front of people who care about getting this right. Three, that the soft drinks followed the army. This one sounds like a joke until you look at the shipping manifest.

In 1941, the head of the Coca-Cola Company made a public commitment that any American in uniform would be able to buy a bottle of Coke for 5 cents anywhere in the world, whatever it cost the company to get it there. The company was granted an exemption from sugar rationing for military production. And then it did something that has no equivalent anywhere in the war.

It built bottling plants where the army was. Around 64 of them shipped as crded equipment and assembled overseas following the campaigns across North Africa, Europe, and the Pacific. The men who ran them were company employees given quasi military status and sent forward with the armies. In 1943, Eisenhower’s headquarters in North Africa cabled a request for bottling plants and millions of bottles and got them.

Something on the order of five billion bottles were served to American service personnel during the war. Now do the German staff officers arithmetic on that. Every one of those plants occupied cargo space on a ship crossing a submarinefested ocean. Every crate of bottles was a crate that was not artillery ammunition.

In a war being decided by tonnage, the United States spent tonnage on a flavored soft drink. And it was not sentimentality. It was a deliberate morale investment by an army that had concluded correctly that a soldier’s willingness to keep functioning is a supply item like any other and that it can be resupplied.

The German solders’s equivalent was airsoft coffee made from roasted grain and by 1944 often not that four that the mail arrived. An army’s mail is the least military thing about it and the most important. The American solution to the problem was industrial in a way that is genuinely strange to look at.

A soldier or his family wrote on a standard printed form. The form was photographed onto 16 mm microfilm. The film, not the letters, the film was flown across the ocean. At the far end, it was printed back onto paper at about a quarter the original size and delivered. They called it Vmail.

Something over half a billion pieces went through the system on top of an enormous ordinary mail traffic. The reason was cargo space. A mail sack full of paper letters weighed something on the order of 50 lb. The same letters as film weighed a few ounces. The United States built a national microfilm bureaucracy so that letters from home would not compete with ammunition for space in an aircraft.

And there is a detail inside this that says more than the tonnage does. A country that photographs its soldiers love letters onto microfilm has decided at the level of policy that what a 19-year-old’s mother has to say to him is a strategic material, a concession because it cuts both ways. The male also brought the letter telling a man his marriage was over, and it brought news of deaths at home he could do nothing about, and sensors read all of it.

The system delivered pain as efficiently as it delivered comfort. The German field post was a good system too, run by professionals and in the early war it worked well. Then the rail network was destroyed and the transport was destroyed and by late 1944 a German soldier on the western front could go months without knowing whether the city his family lived in was still there.

Five that the bridge was there in the morning March 1945. The Rine, the last great barrier and the one German planning had treated as an asset that would buy months. At Remogen, the Americans got a break. The Ludenorf railway bridge failed to demolish properly and was seized intact on the 7th of March.

That part was luck, and every account says so. What happened next was not luck. American engineers working under fire and under air attack put a tactical pontoon bridge across the Rine alongside it in a matter of a day and a half, a floating roadway across one of the great rivers of Europe, built in the time it takes most organizations to hold a meeting.

Then they built another. When the Ludenorf Bridge finally collapsed on the 17th of March, killing engineers who were working on it, it no longer mattered operationally because by then the crossing did not depend on it. And that was one crossing. Across the whole Rin front in March 1945, American and Allied engineers threw bridge after bridge across at multiple sites faster than the German command could react to any of them.

The German assumption had been that a destroyed bridge removes a crossing point. It is a reasonable assumption. It had been true in every previous war against an army that carries pre-fabricated bridges as standard equipment with trained units whose entire profession is putting them up. It is not true.

Blowing the bridge bought ours. If your father or grandfather served in a combat engineer battalion, a bridge company, a port company, a signal outfit, or any of the units whose job was to build rather than to shoot. I genuinely like to know name, unit, theater. That service almost never gets written down and the families are the last people holding it.

Six, that they were fighting a racial ideology with a segregated army. This is the one where the honest answer is uncomfortable and it belongs in the list precisely because German officers did notice it and because Nazi propaganda used it constantly and because they were not lying about the facts. Around one and a quarter million African-Americans served in the United States armed forces in the Second World War in a military that segregated them by regulation.

Separate units, separate facilities, restricted to support roles for much of the war on an official assumption about their capability that was false and that the army itself would later abandon. They drove the Red Ball Express. They fought as the 761st tank battalion attached to Patton’s third army from November 1944 and in action for the better part of six months.

They flew as the 332nd fighter group. During the Arden’s crisis, when the army was desperate for infantry, it asked for black volunteers to serve as replacements, and thousands stepped forward, served in provisional platoon alongside white troops, and performed well enough that the army’s own afteraction assessments could not explain it away.

And then there is the fact that no amount of context softens. German prisoners of war being transported through the American South were on occasion served food in establishments that the black American soldiers guarding them were not permitted to enter. That happened. It is documented it happened to men in the uniform of the country holding those prisoners.

The German officers who filed observations about American racial hypocrisy were not inventing anything. They had the facts right. What they got wrong was what the contradiction meant. They read it as proof that American claims about freedom were fraudulent and therefore that the society would fracture under strain. It did not fracture. The contradiction was real.

It was shameful and it was also under argument. Argued about in black newspapers, in courts, in the army’s own studies by the men living it throughout the war. In July 1948, President Truman signed the executive order desegregating the armed forces. 3 years after the war ended.

An ideology that cannot criticize itself has no mechanism for correction. That is not a small technical difference between two systems. It is over time the only difference that matters. Seven that they came back for the bodies here is the last one and it is the one German officers had no framework for at all because it happened after the shooting stopped and it served no military purpose whatsoever.

Every other combatant nation dealt with its war dead the way nations had always dealt with war dead. You bury them where they fall in a cemetery near the battlefield and you build a memorial and the families come to visit if they can afford to and most of them cannot. The United States asked the families.

After the war, Congress authorized a program through which the next of kin of every American serviceman buried overseas would be contacted and given a choice. leave him in a permanent American cemetery near where he died, maintained in perpetuity, or bring him home to a grave of the family’s choosing at government expense.

Then the government did the second one at scale for everyone who asked. Roughly 171,000 American war dead were disinterred, identified, casketed, shipped across oceans, and delivered to hometowns across the United States between 1947 and 1951. Roughly 93,000 remained overseas at their family’s request in the cemeteries you can still walk through in Normandy and Luxembourg and Manila.

The first large shipment reached New York Harbor in October 1947. Over 6,000 caskets on one ship. There was a ceremony and then the coffins went onto trains and the trains went out across the country and at small stations in Ohio and Texas and Oregon, an honor guard and a family were waiting on the platform.

That program took years. It cost an enormous amount of money. It moved nothing forward, deterred no enemy, and produced no capability of any kind. It was done because somebody’s mother asked. Verdict: Put the seven side by side, and they collapse into one. A test for 9 million men. 19 million women paid to build the weapons.

Bottling plants shipped across a submarine war for a 5-cent drink. Letters photographed onto film so they would not displace ammunition. Bridges carried in trucks. An argument about race conducted in public in the middle of a war. And 171,000 dead men brought home because their families were asked what they wanted.

Every single one is money and tonnage and administrative efforts spent on individual human beings by a state that had concluded those human beings were the expensive part and the equipment was the cheap part. German officers could not model this and the reason is not that they were fools. It is that they were operating inside a system built on the exactly inverted premise that the individual is the renewable resource and the state is the thing being preserved.

Everything in their war followed from that. It is why they used forced labor instead of asking. It is why they had no equivalent to any of the seven. It is why in the end they had nothing left to spend but men and spent them. Both countries called what they were doing total war. The phrase meant opposite things. In one of them, the nation was consumed by the state.

In the other, the nation supplied the state and was paid and fed and written to and eventually brought home. I want to be careful not to make this sound clean because it was not. The American Army that did all seven of these things also segregated its soldiers, also sent its lowest scoring men into its highest casualty branch, also fed replacements into rifle companies alone, and frightened and got a great many of them killed in their first week.

None of that is erased by the good. But that argument was happening out loud in newspapers and courts and congressional hearings while the war was still on. That is the difference, and it is not a small one. And of everything on the list, the seventh is the one I keep coming back to because it is the only one that had no strategic justification at all.

Nobody won anything by it. It happened years after the last shot at enormous expense, entirely for the benefit of people who had already lost everything the program could not give back. A telegram had already told them he was dead. The government came back anyway and asked where they would like him to be. If this audit gave you something to think about, hit the like button.

It puts this in front of the people who want the history the way it actually worked. Subscribe if you want the next one because there are more of these. More decisions nobody thought to photograph. More of the war that was won by things that killed nobody. And remember what the seven of them add up to.

The Germans kept asking how much America could produce. They should have been asking what America was willing to spend it

7 Things German Officers Refused to Believe About the American Army

the wrong instrument. German officers were not stupid about the United States. That is the first thing to get out of the way because the story is usually told as though they were and it makes the whole thing meaningless. They knew the production figures. Their intelligence services read American newspapers which published everything.

They knew about the shipyards and the aircraft plants and the steel tonnage. And by 1943, a great many senior German officers privately understood that those numbers were not survivable. What they could not do was believe the other numbers, the ones that had nothing to do with tanks.

Because a German officer’s model of a nation at war was a model of extraction. The state takes. It takes men. It takes labor. It takes food. It takes the years out of people’s lives. And the measure of a serious country is how much it can take before something breaks. By that measure, Germany was the most serious country on Earth.

And the regime was proud of it. The United States was running the machine backwards. The American war effort spent extraordinary quantities of money, shipping space, industrial capacity, and administrative effort on things that killed nobody, on testing people, on mail, on soft drinks, on dentistry, on bringing home the bodies of men who were already dead and already buried.

Every one of those decisions consumed cargo tonnage that could have carried ammunition. Every one of them was by the arithmetic a German staff officer would apply waste. Seven of them. Seven things that showed up in German assessments, prisoner interrogations, and postwar memoirs as things that did not compute. Not because the Germans doubted the facts, but because the facts did not fit inside any theory of war they possessed.

The seventh one is the one that still stops people. One that they tested every single man. Start with the least dramatic and the most revealing. Somewhere around 9 million American men over the course of the war sat down in a room and took a written examination. The Army General Classification Test, roughly 40 minutes, vocabulary, arithmetic reasoning, spatial relations.

It produced a score. The score produced a grade from 1 to 5. And the grade followed the man into the machine that decided what he would spend the war doing. High scorers were funneled toward technical training, officer candidate school, signals, ordinance, air crew. Others went to the infantry. Roughly 300,000 men were commissioned as officers through officer candidate school during the war.

Enlisted men pushed through a course of a few months and handed a commission. The regular officers called them 90-day wonders and meant it as an insult. Now, the concession, because this deserves one. The system was not fair and it was not accurate. The test measured schooling as much as it measured capability, which meant it punished poor men and rural men and anyone whose education had stopped early.

Worse, it systematically stripped the best scoring men out of the infantry and sent them elsewhere. So, the branch that took the heaviest casualties was staffed disproportionately with the men the machine had graded lowest. Senior officers complained about this bitterly during the war, and they were right to. But look at what it was.

It was an attempt at national scale to work out what nearly every man in an army was individually good at, and then use him for that. It assumed that talent was distributed randomly across the population, including in places no one had thought to look, and that the job was to find it. That is a statement about people disguised as a personnel procedure.

The German army had excellent officer selection, but it was selection by institution and by tradition and by a professional core choosing its own successors. It was not a search of the entire population by examination and nobody in Berlin proposed conducting one. Two, that the women built the weapons. The number of American women in paid work went from around 12 million before the war to roughly 19 million by 1944.

They went into aircraft plants, shipyards, ordinance factories, and machine shops. Around 350,000 served in uniform. The Women’s Army Corps, the Navy’s Waves, the Nurse Corps, and the roughly 1100 Wasp pilots who fied military aircraft, including 4G engine bombers, around the United States. Here is what Germany did instead, and this needs to be stated precisely because the sloppy version of it is wrong.

Germany was not a country where women did not work. German female labor participation was already high before the war and it stayed high. That is not the difference. The difference is what happened when the labor shortage became critical. Albert Spear running armaments production pressed repeatedly for the conscription of German women into war industry.

He was refused. The regime’s ideology about German womanhood was not a slogan they were willing to trade away for production, and Hitler would not authorize it on the scale Shar wanted. So, Germany filled the gap another way. By 1944, something on the order of 7 12 million foreign workers and prisoners of war were laboring inside the Reich, most of them there by force.

Many of them worked under conditions designed to kill them. That is the comparison, and it is not really about women at all. Faced with an identical shortage of hands, one country asked its own population for more and paid them for it. And the other imported human beings at gunpoint rather than revise a belief about what its own citizens were for.

The men and women in this story mostly did unglamorous work that nobody has ever put on a monument. If you think it’s worth keeping visible, hit the like button. It costs nothing and it puts them in front of people who care about getting this right. Three, that the soft drinks followed the army. This one sounds like a joke until you look at the shipping manifest.

In 1941, the head of the Coca-Cola Company made a public commitment that any American in uniform would be able to buy a bottle of Coke for 5 cents anywhere in the world, whatever it cost the company to get it there. The company was granted an exemption from sugar rationing for military production. And then it did something that has no equivalent anywhere in the war.

It built bottling plants where the army was. Around 64 of them shipped as crded equipment and assembled overseas following the campaigns across North Africa, Europe, and the Pacific. The men who ran them were company employees given quasi military status and sent forward with the armies. In 1943, Eisenhower’s headquarters in North Africa cabled a request for bottling plants and millions of bottles and got them.

Something on the order of five billion bottles were served to American service personnel during the war. Now do the German staff officers arithmetic on that. Every one of those plants occupied cargo space on a ship crossing a submarinefested ocean. Every crate of bottles was a crate that was not artillery ammunition.

In a war being decided by tonnage, the United States spent tonnage on a flavored soft drink. And it was not sentimentality. It was a deliberate morale investment by an army that had concluded correctly that a soldier’s willingness to keep functioning is a supply item like any other and that it can be resupplied.

The German solders’s equivalent was airsoft coffee made from roasted grain and by 1944 often not that four that the mail arrived. An army’s mail is the least military thing about it and the most important. The American solution to the problem was industrial in a way that is genuinely strange to look at.

A soldier or his family wrote on a standard printed form. The form was photographed onto 16 mm microfilm. The film, not the letters, the film was flown across the ocean. At the far end, it was printed back onto paper at about a quarter the original size and delivered. They called it Vmail.

Something over half a billion pieces went through the system on top of an enormous ordinary mail traffic. The reason was cargo space. A mail sack full of paper letters weighed something on the order of 50 lb. The same letters as film weighed a few ounces. The United States built a national microfilm bureaucracy so that letters from home would not compete with ammunition for space in an aircraft.

And there is a detail inside this that says more than the tonnage does. A country that photographs its soldiers love letters onto microfilm has decided at the level of policy that what a 19-year-old’s mother has to say to him is a strategic material, a concession because it cuts both ways. The male also brought the letter telling a man his marriage was over, and it brought news of deaths at home he could do nothing about, and sensors read all of it.

The system delivered pain as efficiently as it delivered comfort. The German field post was a good system too, run by professionals and in the early war it worked well. Then the rail network was destroyed and the transport was destroyed and by late 1944 a German soldier on the western front could go months without knowing whether the city his family lived in was still there.

Five that the bridge was there in the morning March 1945. The Rine, the last great barrier and the one German planning had treated as an asset that would buy months. At Remogen, the Americans got a break. The Ludenorf railway bridge failed to demolish properly and was seized intact on the 7th of March.

That part was luck, and every account says so. What happened next was not luck. American engineers working under fire and under air attack put a tactical pontoon bridge across the Rine alongside it in a matter of a day and a half, a floating roadway across one of the great rivers of Europe, built in the time it takes most organizations to hold a meeting.

Then they built another. When the Ludenorf Bridge finally collapsed on the 17th of March, killing engineers who were working on it, it no longer mattered operationally because by then the crossing did not depend on it. And that was one crossing. Across the whole Rin front in March 1945, American and Allied engineers threw bridge after bridge across at multiple sites faster than the German command could react to any of them.

The German assumption had been that a destroyed bridge removes a crossing point. It is a reasonable assumption. It had been true in every previous war against an army that carries pre-fabricated bridges as standard equipment with trained units whose entire profession is putting them up. It is not true.

Blowing the bridge bought ours. If your father or grandfather served in a combat engineer battalion, a bridge company, a port company, a signal outfit, or any of the units whose job was to build rather than to shoot. I genuinely like to know name, unit, theater. That service almost never gets written down and the families are the last people holding it.

Six, that they were fighting a racial ideology with a segregated army. This is the one where the honest answer is uncomfortable and it belongs in the list precisely because German officers did notice it and because Nazi propaganda used it constantly and because they were not lying about the facts. Around one and a quarter million African-Americans served in the United States armed forces in the Second World War in a military that segregated them by regulation.

Separate units, separate facilities, restricted to support roles for much of the war on an official assumption about their capability that was false and that the army itself would later abandon. They drove the Red Ball Express. They fought as the 761st tank battalion attached to Patton’s third army from November 1944 and in action for the better part of six months.

They flew as the 332nd fighter group. During the Arden’s crisis, when the army was desperate for infantry, it asked for black volunteers to serve as replacements, and thousands stepped forward, served in provisional platoon alongside white troops, and performed well enough that the army’s own afteraction assessments could not explain it away.

And then there is the fact that no amount of context softens. German prisoners of war being transported through the American South were on occasion served food in establishments that the black American soldiers guarding them were not permitted to enter. That happened. It is documented it happened to men in the uniform of the country holding those prisoners.

The German officers who filed observations about American racial hypocrisy were not inventing anything. They had the facts right. What they got wrong was what the contradiction meant. They read it as proof that American claims about freedom were fraudulent and therefore that the society would fracture under strain. It did not fracture. The contradiction was real.

It was shameful and it was also under argument. Argued about in black newspapers, in courts, in the army’s own studies by the men living it throughout the war. In July 1948, President Truman signed the executive order desegregating the armed forces. 3 years after the war ended.

An ideology that cannot criticize itself has no mechanism for correction. That is not a small technical difference between two systems. It is over time the only difference that matters. Seven that they came back for the bodies here is the last one and it is the one German officers had no framework for at all because it happened after the shooting stopped and it served no military purpose whatsoever.

Every other combatant nation dealt with its war dead the way nations had always dealt with war dead. You bury them where they fall in a cemetery near the battlefield and you build a memorial and the families come to visit if they can afford to and most of them cannot. The United States asked the families.

After the war, Congress authorized a program through which the next of kin of every American serviceman buried overseas would be contacted and given a choice. leave him in a permanent American cemetery near where he died, maintained in perpetuity, or bring him home to a grave of the family’s choosing at government expense.

Then the government did the second one at scale for everyone who asked. Roughly 171,000 American war dead were disinterred, identified, casketed, shipped across oceans, and delivered to hometowns across the United States between 1947 and 1951. Roughly 93,000 remained overseas at their family’s request in the cemeteries you can still walk through in Normandy and Luxembourg and Manila.

The first large shipment reached New York Harbor in October 1947. Over 6,000 caskets on one ship. There was a ceremony and then the coffins went onto trains and the trains went out across the country and at small stations in Ohio and Texas and Oregon, an honor guard and a family were waiting on the platform.

That program took years. It cost an enormous amount of money. It moved nothing forward, deterred no enemy, and produced no capability of any kind. It was done because somebody’s mother asked. Verdict: Put the seven side by side, and they collapse into one. A test for 9 million men. 19 million women paid to build the weapons.

Bottling plants shipped across a submarine war for a 5-cent drink. Letters photographed onto film so they would not displace ammunition. Bridges carried in trucks. An argument about race conducted in public in the middle of a war. And 171,000 dead men brought home because their families were asked what they wanted.

Every single one is money and tonnage and administrative efforts spent on individual human beings by a state that had concluded those human beings were the expensive part and the equipment was the cheap part. German officers could not model this and the reason is not that they were fools. It is that they were operating inside a system built on the exactly inverted premise that the individual is the renewable resource and the state is the thing being preserved.

Everything in their war followed from that. It is why they used forced labor instead of asking. It is why they had no equivalent to any of the seven. It is why in the end they had nothing left to spend but men and spent them. Both countries called what they were doing total war. The phrase meant opposite things. In one of them, the nation was consumed by the state.

In the other, the nation supplied the state and was paid and fed and written to and eventually brought home. I want to be careful not to make this sound clean because it was not. The American Army that did all seven of these things also segregated its soldiers, also sent its lowest scoring men into its highest casualty branch, also fed replacements into rifle companies alone, and frightened and got a great many of them killed in their first week.

None of that is erased by the good. But that argument was happening out loud in newspapers and courts and congressional hearings while the war was still on. That is the difference, and it is not a small one. And of everything on the list, the seventh is the one I keep coming back to because it is the only one that had no strategic justification at all.

Nobody won anything by it. It happened years after the last shot at enormous expense, entirely for the benefit of people who had already lost everything the program could not give back. A telegram had already told them he was dead. The government came back anyway and asked where they would like him to be. If this audit gave you something to think about, hit the like button.

It puts this in front of the people who want the history the way it actually worked. Subscribe if you want the next one because there are more of these. More decisions nobody thought to photograph. More of the war that was won by things that killed nobody. And remember what the seven of them add up to.

The Germans kept asking how much America could produce. They should have been asking what America was willing to spend it