German POWs Laughed at America’s Empty Promises — Until This Happened

The spring of 1945, Camp Ko, Mississippi, a hut in a prisoner of war compound in the Delta Cotton Country in heat that men from the Rhineland had no vocabulary for. Walter Holstein was 43 years old, and he was a professor of law. He had not wanted any part of this. He had held a chair at Frankfurt before the war.

He had never joined the party, and he had been drafted into an artillery unit and sent to hold the coast of France. He was taken prisoner at Sherborg in the summer of 1944, shipped across the Atlantic and put behind wire in Mississippi, where he had done the thing that academics do when they are bored and surrounded by other bored men. He had started a university.

It was not a metaphor. Holstein organized lecture courses inside the camp. Law, economics, languages, history taught by prisoners who had been professors and lawyers and engineers before somebody handed them a rifle. The Americans allowed it and then encouraged it and eventually supplied books. It is worth stopping on that image for a second because it is the whole episode in miniature.

A prisoner of war in a compound in Mississippi lecturing other prisoners on constitutional law with textbooks provided by the army that had captured him. And somewhere in that year, in that camp, and in dozens like it across the United States, American officers began saying a thing to the men behind the wire that those men found genuinely, helplessly funny.

They said that when the war ended, America was not going to destroy Germany. America was going to help rebuild it. The prisoners laughed. I want to be precise about that laughter because the easy version of this story treats it as arrogance. Beataten Nazis sneering at their captors. naivity. That is not what it was.

The men in those compounds laughed because they had read the newspapers, because they were educated, and because on the evidence available to them in 1945, the American officer standing in front of them was either lying or a fool. They had three reasons, and every one of them was solid. They had Versailles, which their entire generation had grown up inside the wreckage of the peace that stripped Germany, occupied the ruer, and produced the hyperinflation their parents still talked about.

Every man in that hut over the age of 35 had a childhood memory of a wheelbarrow of banknotes. And every man under it had been taught about it in school by a state that made sure nobody forgot. They had the Morgan thou plan, which was not a rumor and not propaganda. It was a real American document initialed by Roosevelt and Churchill at Quebec in September 1944, proposing to strip Germany of its industry and convert it into an agricultural and pastoral country.

It leaked to the American press within weeks. Joseph Gerbles put it on the front page of every newspaper in Germany and kept it there. Every German soldier in every prison camp on Earth knew about the plan to turn Germany into a potato field because the German propaganda ministry had made certain of it. And they had the third reason, the one nobody in those huts said out loud, and it was the strongest of all.

They knew what victorious armies do to defeated countries, because they had been the victorious army. They had seen what Germany did in Poland. Men in those camps had served in the east, and whatever they admitted to their capttors, they knew what had been done to Soviet prisoners of war, to Ukrainian grain, to Warsaw.

A German soldier in 1945 who was told that the conquerors intended to feed and rebuild his country was being asked to believe something his own army had spent 6 years demonstrating was not how any of this works. So they laughed. And here is the part that the tidy version of this story always skips. For about 2 years they were right.

Germany after the surrender was not rebuilt. It was governed under an occupation directive that explicitly forbade rebuilding it. Its people came within sight of mass starvation in the winter of 1946 in cities of rubble on rations that would not sustain a working adult. Every single thing the men in Camp Ko predicted in the spring of 1945 came true on schedule in front of them.

And then something happened that none of them predicted. And it happened so completely that the country those men went home to in 1946 is not the country their children grew up in. This is the story of a promise that was made before anybody had decided to keep it. That looked like a lie for 2 years and that was then kept on a scale that has no precedent and of the moment the laughing stopped which happened in the sky over a city that American aircraft had spent 3 years destroying.

We are going to take it in order. Why the laughter was the correct reading of the evidence. What the Americans were quietly doing in the camps without authorization. The two years in which the skeptics were proved right. and the 18 months in which they were proved wrong for good. Part one, why the laughter was rational. Start with what the allies had actually decided.

Because in 1945, the answer was not this. The document that governed the American occupation of Germany was a directive known as JCS 1067 issued in the spring of 1945 and its language is not ambiguous. Germany was to be occupied not as a liberated country but as a defeated enemy nation. American forces were to take no steps toward the economic rehabilitation of Germany or toward maintaining or strengthening the German economy.

Fraternization with the German population was forbidden. The occupation’s job was to disarm, to denify, to punish, and to prevent Germany from ever again threatening anybody, and explicitly not to fix anything. Behind that directive sat a genuine argument at the top of the American government and the man who had pushed hardest was Henry Morganthou Roosevelt’s Treasury Secretary.

Morgan thou’s reasoning was not stupid and it was not casual cruelty. He had watched Germany start two world wars in a quarter of a century. He had concluded that the problem was not a regime but a capacity. that as long as the ruler existed as an industrial complex, Germany would eventually rebuild an army and do it again, and that the only permanent solution was to remove the machine, dismantle the heavy industry, close the mines, turn the country into farmland and small workshops.

It cannot make tanks if it cannot make steel. Morgan thou had also by 1944 seen enough intelligence about what was being done to Europe’s Jews to have stopped believing in a redeemable Germany at all. And it is not difficult to understand why a man in his position concluded that the country should be permanently disarmed at the level of its foundaries.

Roosevelt and Churchill initialed a memorandum along those lines at the Quebec conference in September 1944. Within days, it leaked. The American reaction was immediate and hostile. Henry Stimson at the War Department fought it. The press attacked it and Roosevelt backed away from it within weeks and never formally adopted it.

As policy, the Morganthou plan was dead almost as soon as it was born. But it did not die entirely. And this is the part that matters for the men in the camps. Its logic survived inside the occupation directive that actually governed Germany for the next 2 years. Not the pastoral fantasy in full, but the core instruction that the occupying power was not to rebuild anything.

The prisoners were not laughing at a discarded proposal. They were laughing at a promise that contradicted the document their country was about to be governed under. As propaganda, it was the single greatest gift the Allies ever handed Joseph Gerbles. He seized it. German newspapers and radio ran it relentlessly through the winter of 1944 and into 1945.

This is what the enemy intends. This is the peace on offer. There is nothing behind the Allied lines except the destruction of the German nation. There is a serious historical argument made by people including American officials at the time that the leak stiffened German resistance in the last months of the war and cost lives on both sides because it converted the choice facing a German soldier from surrender or die into die now or starve later.

Whatever it did to the fighting, it did something very specific to the men in the prison camps. It gave them a documented, citable, official reason to believe that American talk of rebuilding was nonsense. They had not heard it from Gerbles alone. They had heard it from the Americans in the American press, quoting the American Secretary of the Treasury.

Now add the second layer, which is the layer the prisoners understood better than their guards. They knew the arithmetic of occupation from the inside because their own country had run the most systematic program of exploitation in modern history. German planners had drawn up what was known as the hunger plan for the occupied Soviet territories.

The deliberate redirection of food from the east to Germany with the explicit expectation that many millions of people would starve as a result. General plan Ost envisaged the removal and destruction of populations on a scale that has no comparison. Soviet prisoners of war in German hands died in the millions largely of starvation and exposure as policy rather than as failure.

A German officer sitting in a camp in Mississippi in 1945 did not necessarily know every detail of that. A great many of them knew enough. And when an American captain told them that their country would be fed and rebuilt by its conquerors, they measured that promise against the only model of conquest they had personally participated in.

and they concluded that they were being managed. That is why the laughter was rational, not arrogance. Induction from evidence. And there was a fourth thing quieter than the other three which shows up in the camp records and in the interrogators notes. Some of them wanted to believe it and would not let themselves.

Men who had spent 2 years watching lit farmhouses go past a train window and eating better as prisoners than they had as soldiers had already worked out that America was not what they had been told. The problem was that being wrong about America made the promise more painful, not less. Because if these people really were like this, then what had been done in Germany’s name was not even the price of victory.

It was just crime. There is a documented pattern of prisoners refusing the promise most fiercely when they were closest to accepting it. And here is the sentence that this whole hour turns on, so let it land now rather than at the end. They were reasoning correctly from the world as it existed in 1945. What defeated their reasoning was not a better argument.

It was that the world changed. Part two. The promise nobody had authorized. Meanwhile, inside the camps, the United States Army was running an operation that had no basis in any policy directive and that a strict reading of JCS 1067 arguably forbade. The Prisoner of War Special Projects Division was created in 1944 with a mandate that sounds absurd on its face, to re-educate several hundred,000 enemy soldiers in the principles of democratic government in secret while the war was still being fought.

It was secret because the Geneva Convention prohibits compelling prisoners to engage in political activity and the Americans were not entirely certain their program was legal. So it was run quietly and participation was voluntary and nobody advertised it. Its intellectual center was a small camp at Fort Kernney, Rhode Island, which the men who worked there called the idea factory.

A converted coastal fort on Naraganset Bay holding a few dozen handpicked German writers, editors, and academics doing work that would have got every one of them killed had it happened inside Germany. Carefully selected anti-Nazi prisoners were brought in to produce material for the wider camp system.

Most importantly, a German language newspaper distributed across the whole network of camps called Derof, the call. Two of the young men who worked on that newspaper were named Alfred Andersh and Hans Verer Richter, a pair of anti-Nazis in their 30s who had been on the losing side of German politics since 1933 and had ended up in the Vermacht anyway and who now found themselves with a printing press and an American mandate to say what they liked.

Remember them? They are going to come back at the end of this in a way you will not expect. The program ran courses on American constitutional government, on the free press, on economics, on the history of the VHimar Republic and why it failed. Camps ran their own newspapers, over a hundred of them, across the United States.

Universities supplied correspondence courses. Men studied for examinations that German authorities later agreed to recognize, which meant that a 19-year-old drafted out of school in 1943 could come home in 1946 with a qualification earned behind wire in Kansas. Walter Hullstein’s Camp University in Mississippi was part of that ecosystem. And it was not unusual.

It was one of the better examples of something happening everywhere. And running through all of it in the lectures and the newspaper and the conversations with American officers was the argument that the prisoners found funniest that Germany would be reconstructed as a democracy. That the Germans and the Americans would end up on the same side of something and that these men would go home to help build it.

The Americans making that argument in 1945 had no authority to make it. There was no plan. There was no appropriation. There was a directive on the books saying the opposite. The officers in those camps were promising a future that their own government had not agreed to. And in several documented cases, they were promising it because they had come to believe it themselves after 2 years of living alongside the men behind the wire.

The most effective persuasion in those camps was never the curriculum. And this channel has made the point before. It was the ordinary functioning of the country outside the fence. But the curriculum mattered for one specific reason. It gave the prisoners a vocabulary. When the world changed in 1947 and 1948, several hundred,000 German men had already spent 2 years being taught the words for what was happening.

Nobody has ever built a monument to the officers of the special projects division, and most of them are not named anywhere. Every like on this video keeps that kind of work visible a little longer. It costs nothing and it matters more than it should. Part three. Two years of being right. The prisoners went home in 1946, most of them, and what they found confirmed everything they had said in the huts.

Start with the repatriation itself. Because it was the first betrayal, and it was real. Large numbers of German prisoners held by the United States were not sent to Germany at all. Under agreements with the Allies, they were transferred to France and Britain to work, clearing rubble, lifting mines, rebuilding infrastructure they had helped destroy.

Men who had been told they were going home in 1946 did not reach Germany until 1947 or 1948. Whatever the legal or moral case for that, from inside it looked exactly like what the skeptics in the camps had predicted. Then Germany itself, the country the prisoners returned to had no housing. The bombing had destroyed something like a fifth of all German dwellings and far more in the big cities in places like Cologne and Hamburgg and Dresdon.

Whole districts were rubble fields where people lived in sellers. The transport system was broken. The currency was worthless and the real economy ran on cigarettes. American cigarettes which functioned as the actual medium of exchange in occupied Germany for 3 years. Professionals sold their libraries for them.

Farmers would not take Reich’s marks for eggs. An entire national economy had reverted to barter with a tobacco standard. And on top of a wrecked country came 12 to 14 million people expelled from the east, from Silicia, from East Prussia, from the Sudatan land arriving in a place that could not feed the people already in it. Which brings you to the food.

And the food is the reason this part of the story matters. Official ration levels in the western occupation zones in 1945 and 1946 ran at various points between about 1,00 and500 calories a day. That is not a diet. That is a slow decline. Adults lost weight steadily for 2 years. Tuberculosis and ricketetts came back.

Infant mortality rose. And then came the winter of 1946 into 1947. One of the coldest European winters of the 20th century in a country with no coal distribution, no glass in the windows, and no fuel. Germans call it the hunger winter. And men who had come home from Texas and Nebraska 2 months earlier, where they had eaten three meals a day and thrown food away spent it watching their families go hungry.

People froze to death in unheated rooms in cities, and the death toll from that winter has never been counted precisely because the recordeping had collapsed along with everything else. City dwellers rode out to the countryside on the roofs of trains, hamster farting, hoarding trips to trade a wedding ring or a winter coat for potatoes and came back to find the coal cellar still empty.

Now put yourself back in the mind of the man who laughed in Mississippi. He is home. His country is rubble. His currency is cigarettes. His ration is a thousand calories. His government does not exist. American soldiers are forbidden to fraternize with him. The occupation directive says explicitly that nobody is coming to rehabilitate his economy.

Factories that survived the bombing are being dismantled and shipped away as reparations. Machine tools crded up and put on trains east and west in front of the workers who had operated them. And in the winter of 1946, his children are cold in a way that a certain kind of parent never forgets. He was told in a prison camp in America that this would not happen.

It is happening. There is no dishonest way to narrate this part. The men who laughed were right, and the men who made the promise had been talking past their own government. And for 2 years, the score was prisoners one, American idealism, nothing. What changed it was not a change of heart. It was a change of situation and it is worth being completely cleareyed about that because this channel does not sell inspiration.

Part four, what happened? Three things converged between 1946 and 1948 and only one of them was generosity. The first was arithmetic delivered by a Republican former president with a reputation for hard-headedness. Herbert Hoover, who had run food relief in Europe after the First World War, was sent to Germany in 1947 to assess the situation.

And his report demolished the pastoral Germany idea with a single argument. You cannot turn Germany into an agricultural state, Hoover said in substance. Unless you first remove or exterminate some 25 million people because the land will not feed the population living on it. The industry was not a luxury Germany had built for aggression.

It was the mechanism by which Germans ate. Destroy it permanently and you are not punishing a country. You are conducting a famine. That is the finding that killed Morgan thou’s idea for good. And it was made not by a sentimentalist but by an engineer with a slide rule. The second was Europe. By 1946, it was clear to American planners that the entire European economy was seizing up and that Germany’s corpse was sitting in the middle of it.

Germany had been the industrial heart of the continent. The coal, the steel, the chemicals, the machine tools that everyone else’s factories depended on. France could not recover while the ruer was dark. The Netherlands could not recover. Nobody could. Keeping Germany prostrate meant keeping Europe prostrate. And a prostrate Europe could not buy American exports and could not stand on its own feet.

The third was the Soviet Union, and it was decisive. Eastern Europe was disappearing behind a line. Communist parties were pulling strongly in France and Italy. And American policymakers reached the conclusion that a starving, humiliated, resentful Germany in the middle of that map was the single most dangerous object in the world because desperate populations do not stay democratic and because a Germany that could not feed itself would eventually be fed by somebody.

So the policy turned and you can date the turn precisely. On the 6th of September 1946, the American Secretary of State James Burns went to Stoutgart and gave a speech in the ruins of the opera house to an audience of Germans who had come expecting another lecture. Instead, he told them that America would not withdraw from Europe, that the German people would be helped to work their way back into the family of peaceloving nations, and that the reconstruction of German life would be permitted.

Germans called it the speech of hope and they called it that at the time not afterward. It was the first official statement by any occupying power that Germany had a future. Germans who were in that hall described the effect afterward in almost identical terms. Not gratitude exactly, but the physical sensation of a door that everyone had assumed was bricked up, turning out to have a handle on it.

In July 1947, the directive that had governed the American occupation was replaced. JCS 167 gave way to JCS 1779 and the new document opened from the opposite premise that an orderly and prosperous Europe required the economic contributions of a stable and productive Germany. two years of official policy inverted in a paragraph.

And a month before that, on the 5th of June, 1947, George Marshall had stood up at Harvard and made a short undramatic speech proposing that the United States finance the recovery of Europe. What became the European Recovery Program put something on the order of $13 billion into Europe over four years, an enormous figure then, and one that included deliberately and controversially the Western zones of Germany. That decision was not popular.

There were Americans who had buried sons in Europe two years earlier and now read that their taxes were rebuilding German factories, and they said so loudly in letters to their congressmen. There were French officials who regarded it as insanity. The argument that won was the unscentimental one.

A Germany that works is less dangerous than a Germany that starves. And we have just spent four years learning what the second kind does. It is worth being clear about what the Marshall Plan actually did because the popular version overstates it in one direction and the revisionist version overstates it in the other.

It did not rebuild Germany by itself. German labor did that and the sums involved were modest against the size of the economies. What it did was break specific bottlenecks, dollars to buy raw materials and machinery that nobody could otherwise pay for. And more importantly, it removed the fear. An economy in which nobody invests because everybody expects the occupiers to strip the next factory is an economy that stays dead.

The plan’s real product was the credible statement that the stripping had stopped. Alongside the official money came something less formal that Germans of that generation talk about more. Care packages. Parcels sent by American organizations and private individuals to European families. Millions of them arriving in a country where the sender had every reason to hate the recipient.

There are Germans still alive who can describe the contents of a care package they opened in 1947 in the order the items came out of the box. Then in June 1948, the Western Allies introduced a new currency, the Deutsche Mark, and the black market economy collapsed almost overnight as goods that had been hoarded for years appeared in shop windows.

And the Soviet Union responded by cutting the surface routes into West Berlin. The Berlin blockade is where this story stops being about policy and becomes something you can see. Two and a quarter million people in the western sectors of a ruined city a 100 miles inside the Soviet zone cut off from food, coal, and medicine in the expectation that the West would abandon them within weeks.

It was a reasonable expectation. Supplying a city of that size by air had never been done, and the planners who ran the numbers in June 1948 mostly concluded it could not be done. The West flew in supplies instead for 11 months. The scale of it still does not look real. Around a quarter of a million flights, something over 2 million tons of cargo, food, medicine, and above all, coal hauled in sacks in the bellies of transport aircraft.

At the peak, aircraft were landing in Berlin every few minutes around the clock in all weather on runways that had to be built and rebuilt while the operation ran. 70 odd men, American, British, and German, were killed in crashes doing it. And notice what the operation actually was underneath the drama because it is the same finding this channel keeps arriving at from different directions.

The Berlin Airlift was not an act of courage that happened to involve aircraft. It was a logistics problem solved by people who were extremely good at logistics. Load planning, turnaround times, ground handling, maintenance cycles, a landing slot every few minutes held to the second by air traffic control. The men who had spent the war moving 12,000 tons a day to the front on the Red Ball Express and building an airfield in Normandy in a week applied exactly the same skills to keeping 2 million Germans alive. The Soviets had assumed it was

impossible because they were measuring the aircraft. They should have been measuring the system. Now hold that image against the one from 3 years earlier. The same air forces, in some cases the same squadrons and the same crews that had spent 3 years reducing German cities to ash were now flying around the clock to keep a German city alive.

The bomber streams had become a supply line, and the people underneath them had gone from targets to responsibilities inside a single presidency, and there was a young American transport pilot named Gail Halverson, who noticed the children standing at the fence at the end of the runway at Templehof watching the aircraft.

He started dropping candy to them on parachutes made from handkerchiefs, wagging his wings so they would know it was him. When his commanders found out, they did not stop him. They expanded it. Something like 20 odd tons of sweets went out of the backs of American aircraft over Berlin. The Germans called him the candy bomber and he died in 2022 at the age of 101 and there are streets and schools in Germany named after him.

What he understood and what a good many policy documents did not was that the children at that fence were going to be the German electorate of 1970 and that they were forming their opinion of the United States right there in the noise looking up. If your family has a connection to any of this, an airlift crew, a ground handler at Rym or Templehof, a Marshall plant administrator, a relative who packed care parcels, or a German family that opened one, put it in the comments.

This part of the story has almost no monuments, and it is disappearing with the people who lived it. Part five, the verdict. So, render the verdict on the promise, and it has to be rendered honestly, which means giving the cynics their due first. The rebuilding of Germany was not charity. It was strategy.

The Marshall plan was designed to stabilize Western Europe against communism, to create markets for American exports, and to bind West Germany into a Western block. And every one of those objectives was stated openly at the time by the people who wrote it. The occupation’s high-mindedness had limits. Dennazification was botched, wound down early, and left a great many people who should have been prosecuted in positions of responsibility because the Americans decided they needed functioning German institutions more than they needed clean ones. Judges who had served the Reich

went back on the bench. Industrialists who had used slave labor ran companies again. The men who ran the camps in the east were in very large numbers never tried by anybody. The generosity that ended the hunger years arrived in 1947 and not in 1945. And the reason it arrived was that the map had changed, not that anybody’s conscience had.

And underneath all of it sits the thing that no amount of reconstruction settles. Germany was fed and rebuilt by the countries it had invaded in the same decade in which it had murdered six million Jews and tens of millions of other people. The men who came home from Mississippi and Nebraska to a starving country had collectively been the instrument of something that no rebuilding balances.

Nothing in this hour is an argument that the ledger came out even. It did not and it cannot. All of that is true. Now the other half it happened anyway. That is the finding and it is not diminished by the self-interest that produced it. No victorious coalition in the history of the world had ever done anything like it.

The standard treatment of a defeated aggressor for the entire recorded history of warfare up to that point ran from reparations through dismemberment to extermination. And the Germans in those camps in 1945 knew that history and predicted accordingly. Within four years of the surrender, the principal victor was spending its own money to rebuild the losers industry and flying coal into the losers capital around the clock at the risk of war.

And the result is the part that is easy to stop noticing because it has been true your whole life. Germany and France have not fought each other since. That sentence would have been received as a joke in any European chancellory at any point in the previous four centuries. Whatever mixture of calculation and decency produced the policy, that is what the policy bought.

The men who laughed were not wrong about the past. They were wrong about the future. for the first time in about 3,000 years of precedent and they became without ever organizing themselves into anything one of the reasons it held. Several hundred,000 men went back into German life in 1946 and 1947, who had personally lived in the United States for 2 or 3 years, who had seen the farms and the factories and the shops, who had been treated decently by people with every reason not to, and who could say so at a kitchen table when a neighbor started explaining what the

Americans were really after. That is not a policy instrument. It is something better. a very large number of ordinary people who could not be told a particular kind of lie ever again. And here is the payoff, which is why we started in a hut in Mississippi. Walter Hullstein, the law professor who ran a university behind barbed wire in the Delta, went home, became recctor of Frankfurt University in 1946, and was pulled into the new West German Foreign Service.

He became one of the principal architects of European integration, a central figure in the negotiations that produced the European coal and steel community, the arrangement that took the coal and steel of France and Germany, the industries every war between them had been fought over, and placed them under a shared authority so that another war would be, in the phrase used at the time, not merely unthinkable, but materially impossible.

In 1958, Walter Holstein became the first president of the Commission of the European Economic Community. The institution he led is the direct ancestor of the European Commission, a German prisoner of war held in Mississippi, ended up running the executive body of the European project. And those two young men from the newspaper at Fort Carney, Alfred Andersh and Hans Verer Richter, who edited Derof in an American camp in Rhode Island, they went home and in 1947 they founded a literary circle that met to figure out how to write in German

after what German had been used for. It was called Group of 47 and it became the defining institution of postwar German literature. Hinrich Bo and Gunter Grass read there. The rebuilding of the German language as something that could be trusted again began with two prisoners of war putting out a newspaper in a camp in New England. Nobody planned that.

There is no memo in any archive proposing that the special projects division should incubate the future leadership of European integration and the postwar German literary establishment in the same handful of compounds. It happened because the United States decided for a mixture of decent and self-interested reasons to treat a few hundred,000 enemy prisoners as people who would one day be citizens of somewhere and then four years later made that guess true.

That is what happened. Not a conversion, not a miracle. a set of hard-headed decisions taken for mixed motives landing on several hundred thousand men who had already spent two or three years watching a country that did not behave the way conquerors behave. The last word should go to the arithmetic because it always does on this channel.

In 1945, the Germans in those camps ran the numbers on their own future and got the right answer for every previous case in history. What they could not model was a victor that had decided for reasons of interest and reasons of decency mixed together in a proportion nobody has ever fully separated to do the thing that had never been done.

They laughed at an empty promise. They were right that it was empty. They were wrong about who was going to fill it. If this audit gave you something to think about, hit the like button. It keeps this channel in front of the viewers who want the history with the self-interest and the decency both left in.

Because the real version always has both. Subscribe if you want the next chapter because there are more of these. More predictions that were correct until the world changed under them. More quiet people who made promises their own governments had not authorized. More of the parts of this story that happened after the shooting stopped, which is where most of the 20th century was actually decided and where the documentaries almost never go.

And remember this, 3 years after the last American bomb fell on a German city, American aircraft were over Berlin again in numbers around the clock. And what was coming out of them was coal and flour and a young pilot’s chocolate on a handkerchief parachute falling toward children standing at a fence.

Somewhere down there were men who had sat in a hut in Mississippi in 1945 and laughed at an American officer for saying it out loud. They had been the better analysts. They had the documents, the precedents, and the personal experience of how conquest works. And they used all three correctly.

And it took the world four years to make fools of them. Very few people in history have ever been so glad to have been wrong.