U.S Soldiers Had More Weapons and Supplies—So Why Were German Troops Still So Dangerous

In the last two weeks of the Second World War, in a city already lost, 45,000 of German soldiers killed roughly 78,000 Soviet troops and destroyed nearly 2,000 tanks. They knew they were going to die. They fought anyway. Every American veteran who came home from Europe said the same thing in the same quiet voice when their grandchildren finally asked.

The Germans were the hardest enemy they ever fought. This is why. And it begins in a forest in Belgium just after midnight. And it begins in a forest in Belgium just after midnight on December 16th, 1944. Thick, silent flakes drifting down through the black pines of the Schnee Eiffel, settling on the shoulders of American centuries.

Thick silent flakes drifting down through the black pines of the schne Eiffel settling on the shoulders of American centuries who stamped their frozen boots and blew warm breath into cupped hands. The forest was still too still. The kind of stillness that felt engineered, >> though no one on the American line yet understood what that meant.

At an outpost near the Belgian German border, a 22year-old private named Kurt Vonagut Jr. sat sat in a foxhole scraped from frozen dirt, his rifle across his knees, his fingers numb inside wool gloves that had long since stopped keeping anything warm. He was tall, 6’3, hollow cheicked with a mop of dark hair jammed under his helmet.

5 days ago, he had arrived at the front. He had never fired his weapon at another human being. He had never seen a man die. He was a scout for the 423rd Infantry Regiment, 106th Infantry Division, nicknamed the Golden Lions. The division had been in Europe for less than 2 weeks. Most of the men around him had been civilians eight months ago.

farm boys from Indiana, clerks from Ohio, a few college students who had traded lecture halls for rifle pits in a forest they could not pronounce. Their sector, they had been told, was the quietest on the entire Western Front, a rest area, a place to acclimate the veterans of the Second Infantry Division, whom the Golden Lions had relieved just days earlier, had joked about the uh assignment as they packed their gear.

Enjoy the vacation, they had said. Get some sleep. At 5:30 in the morning, the sky tore open. A thousand German artillery pieces opened fire along a front stretching 130 km. The shells came screaming out of the darkness. Howitzers, mortars, rocket launchers called nebbleworfer that produced a rising moaning shriek.

The Americans would soon call screaming mimis. The ground shook. Trees split lengthwise and toppled. Foxholes collapsed on the men inside them. Communications wires were shredded within the first minute. Field telephones went dead. Radios filled with static. Kurt Vonagut pressed himself against the frozen wall of his hole and listened to a world ending above his head.

90 kilometers to the west in a farmhouse outside the Belgian town of Spa, an American intelligence officer Spa, an American officer read the first fragmented reports coming in from the front and could not make sense of them. Contact everywhere. Contact along the entire line. That was impossible. The Arden was a rest sector.

There were no Germans in front of the Arden. American intelligence, backed by the ultra coderebreaking program that had been reading German radio traffic for years, had assured every commander from Eisenhower down that no major German offensive was possible in the West. The German army was broken, bleeding, retreating. They were wrong.

Behind the artillery barrage, 410,000 German soldiers were moving through the forest. They had assembled over 3 weeks in near total silence. Hitler had forbidden radio transmissions of any kind. Orders were carried by dispatch riders on motorcycles, by field telephones strung along wires that could not be intercepted from the air, by officers who rode from headquarters to headquarters, delivering sealed envelopes by hand.

Fuel trucks moved only at night. Tanks rolled forward on straw. laid down to muffle their tracks. Entire panzer divisions vanished from Allied air reconnaissance because they hid beneath camouflage netting during daylight and drove only in darkness [clears throat] through fog and low cloud. and Allied intelligence, so accustomed to reading every German transmission, had grown deaf to a silence they never thought to interpret.

At the head of the offensive, in a command post near the front stood a small, immaculately unformed man named Hasso von Manufel. He was 47 years old, barely 5’4, a career cavalry officer who had been commissioned into the German army in 1916 at the age of 19 and had never taken the uniform off. He had ridden horses in the Kaiser’s army, commanded tanks in France, fought Soviets across the endless plains east of Smolinsk, and now commanded the fifth Panzer Army, one of the two great armored fists Hitler had assembled for this last impossible gamble. Monteel did not

believe the offensive could win the war. Almost no one in the German high command believed it. The plan called for an armored dash across Belgium to seize the port of Antworp, splitting the American and British armies in half. But there was not enough fuel, not enough ammunition, not enough aircraft to protect the columns from Allied fighter bombers.

Once the weather cleared, Montaful had said so to Hitler’s face at a briefing 3 weeks earlier. Hitler had listened, nodded, and ordered the attack to proceed. Anyway, now the man who had questioned the plan stood watching his soldiers advance into the snow, doing his professional duty to the last. To the north of Manufel’s sector, driving hard through the pre-dawn dark, a different kind of officer led a different kind of unit.

His name was Yoakim Peeper. He was 29 years old, tall, dark-haired, strikingly handsome in the manner of Nazi propaganda posters, and he wore the black uniform of uh the Vafan SS. Piper commanded KFG group. Piper, a battle group of tanks, half tracks, and infantry drawn from the first SS Panzer Division, Livstand Darte Adolf Hitler.

He had served on Himmler’s personal staff before the war. He had fought on the Eastern Front and burned villages there. He was in every way that mattered the ideological opposite of Mantuful. Huh? Where Mantuful was a professional soldier who happened to serve Hitler, Peeper was a Nazi first and a soldier second. His orders were simple. Break through the American line.

Race for the Muse River. Do not stop for prisoners. Do not stop for wounded. Do not stop for anything. Back in the Schnee Eiffel, the artillery barrage lifted at 7:15 in the morning. For a moment there was silence, and then out of the fog and the falling snow, the first waves of German infantry appeared. Kurt Vonagut climbed out of his foxhole with his rifle in his hands and saw shapes moving between the trees.

Men in gray white winter camouflage spread in loose professional formations, moving in short rushes from cover to cover. They did not shout. They did not fire wildly. They advanced with an economy of motion that suggested every man knew exactly what every other man was doing without needing to be told.

They were Vulk grenaders. In theory, this meant they were second line troops hastily raised from Luftvafa ground crews and naval personnel after the catastrophes of the summer. given 6 or 8 weeks of training and sent forward with new weapons and old officers. In practice, it meant that the officers and non-commissioned officers leading them had been fighting since 1939.

Sergeants who had killed men in Poland. The lieutenants who had survived Stalin Grod captains who had learned in the ruins of Karkov that a squad moving fast and thinking for itself could destroy a company that waited for orders. The Golden Lions had been in combat for [snorts] approximately 90 minutes. By 900 in the morning, the two forward regiments of the 106th, the 422nd and the 423rd were being enveloped from north and south by pincers of German infantry moving faster than any American commander had believed possible. Radio

contact with division headquarters was intermittent. Requests for artillery support were answered slowly or not at all. The tanks that were supposed to reinforce the sector could not move in the fog. American officers who tried to reach their forward units by jeep found roads cratered, bridges blown, and unfamiliar figures in gray, already occupying villages they had passed through the day before.

Kurt Vonagut was on the run. His unit had been ordered to fall back to a low ridge, then ordered to hold, then ordered to fall back again. In the confusion of shifting orders and broken communications, entire platoon became separated, blundered into German patrols, and disappeared. He remembered later and would write about for the rest of his life the strange sensation of moving through a landscape that no longer belonged to his army.

Every path he took seemed to lead deeper into a forest that was now full of enemies. Every farmhouse might be occupied. Every ridge might hide a machine gun. The map in his officer’s hands became meaningless. The chain of command dissolved. The war became very quickly a matter of small groups of frightened young men trying to find somewhere that was not surrounded.

By nightfall on December 16th, over 7,000 men of the 106th Infantry Division were cut off in the hills of the Schnee Eiffel with no clear line of retreat, no reliable communications, and German armor closing behind them. Three days later on the morning of December 19th, having exhausted their ammunition and their food, uh, unable to break out, unable to be relieved, the remnants of the two regiments began to surrender.

It was the largest mass surrender of American American soldiers in the European theater of the war. Somewhere in that long defeated column uh walking with his hands raised in the cold was Private Curt Vonagut Jr. who was about to begin a journey that would take him east into a box car across a shattered Germany and finally into the basement of a slaughter house in the city of Dresden where he would survive by pure chance one of the most destructive air raids in human history.

But that is a story for later. For now, at the very moment Vonagut was being marched toward captivity, a different American soldier was climbing off a truck in a snow-covered Belgian town called Baston. His name was William Guanire. Everyone called him Wild Bill. He was 21 years old, dark-haired, wiry, from South Philadelphia.

He was a sergeant in easy company, second battalion, 56th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division. [clears throat] He had jumped into Normandy on the night before D-Day. He had jumped into Holland during Operation Market Garden. His older brother Henry had been killed at Mani Casino 10 months earlier and he carried that death inside him like a coal that would not cool.

Two nights ago, Guer had been on a weekend pass in a French town with a warm bed and hot food. Now he was standing in a foot of snow, watching retreating American soldiers stumble past his position in the opposite direction, their eyes empty, their weapons often abandoned. One of them shouted something at Guinire as he passed.

Huh? Something about running? Something about the Germans coming. Guardire spat into the snow and did not answer. The 101st airborne had been rushed to Baston in trucks over frozen roads with almost no cold weather gear, no ammunition beyond what each man carried and no clear picture of what they were being asked to do.

They were paratroopers, elite infantry. They had never trained to hold a fixed position against armor in a winter siege. But Baston sat at the junction of seven roads and Mantiful’s tanks needed those roads and someone had to stand in the way. Standing beside Guerare in the snow or nearby in the swirl of arriving units were men whose names would become famous decades later through books and television.

Dick Winters, Ronald Spares, Joe Toy, Buck Compton. In December of 1944, they were nobodies. Young men in dirty uniforms, cold hungry, unsure whether the next dawn would bring reinforcements or annihilation. Behind them in villages the Americans had abandoned, the SS was already killing. At a crossroads called Bognes near the town of Malmeti, roughly 80 American soldiers of an artillery observation battalion had been captured by comp group Peeper on the afternoon of December 17th.

Their fate would set the emotional temperature of the entire American campaign for the rest of the war. But the men in Baston did not yet know about Malmeidi. They knew only that they were surrounded, outnumbered, and expected to hold. And so the central question of the American war in Europe, the question that had been forming since the first bloody lessons of Cassarine Pass in 1943, now came due in the snow of the Ardens.

Why was this so hard? Why? Uh with more men, more tanks, more aircraft, more fuel, more food, more of everything that industrial civilization could produce. Were American soldiers still dying in numbers that shocked their commanders? Why did German units half their size hold ground they should not have been able to hold? Why did German counteratt attacks succeed against American positions that should have been unbreakable? Why, after almost 3 years of war, did the average German infantrymen remain, man for man, the

most dangerous soldier on the battlefield. The answer was not that Germans were braver. Americans when tested proved as brave as any soldiers in history. The answer was not that Germans were more fanatical. Fanaticism, as the Japanese demonstrated in the Pacific, could get men killed without winning battles.

The answer was not that Germans had better equipment. In many categories, they did not. The answer lay in something older and deeper. In how a soldier was made, in what he was taught to do when the radio went dead and the officer went down and the plan fell apart. In a philosophy of war that the German army had been refining quietly and continuously for almost a century.

And in the snowcovered forests of the Arden in the last full winter of the Second World War, that philosophy was about to teach the United States Army the most expensive lesson it had ever paid for. To understand what was killing American boys in the snow of the Ardens, you have to go back a decade and 800 miles east to a schoolyard in a small German town in the summer of 1935.

A 10-year-old boy stands in a line with other 10-year-old boys. He is wearing short pants and a brown shirt. In his hands is a small caliber rifle. An instructor in uniform walks down the line, correcting his grip, adjusting the angle of his elbow, teaching him to breathe out slowly before he pulls the trigger. The boy fires.

The bullet strikes a paper target 50 ft away. The instructor nods. The boy is learning to be a soldier, though no one has told him that yet. And the war he will fight in is still 10 years away. This was Hitler youth. By 1936, it was compulsory. By 1939, 1 and a half million German boys had received formal marksmanship training before they ever wore a uniform.

They learned map reading. They learned fieldcraft. They spent summers in camps where they crawled through mud through dummy grenades and were taught by veterans of the First World War how to move in small groups without being seen. Now consider the American boy who would face them. In 1943, a 19-year-old from Kansas reported to a training camp in Georgia. He had never held a rifle.

His father had fought in France in 1918 and never spoke about it. For 17 weeks, he learned to march, to shoot, to salute, to obey. He was taught his role in the squad. rifleman, assistant gunner, ammunition [clears throat] bearer. He was taught to follow the orders of his sergeant. His sergeant was taught to follow the orders of his lieutenant.

His lieutenant was taught to request instructions from his captain. And then after 17 weeks, he was put on a ship. The German soldier had been preparing for war since he was 10 years old. The American soldier had been preparing for war since August. But time was not the only thing that separated them. What they were taught mattered more than how long they were taught.

And here we come to a German word that most Americans have never heard, though it killed a great many of them. Alfrak’s tactic mission tactics. The idea was born in the Prussian officer Corps in the years after Napoleon shattered their armies at Vienna in 1806. A general named Helmouth vonmolka refined it over decades. It rested on a single radical conviction.

In war, no plan survives contact with the enemy. Therefore, the commander does not tell his subordinates how to fight. He tells them what to accomplish. The how is left to the man on the ground because the man on the ground is the only one who can see the ground. By 1944, this philosophy had been drilled into every German sergeant, every corporal, every private for four generations.

The American army did the opposite. Its doctrine was hierarchical. Its officers were trained to control. Its enlisted men were trained to wait. The difference sounds abstract. On a battlefield, it was measured in minutes, and minutes were measured in lives. Picture a village in Normandy in July of 1944. The stone houses lean against each other under a low gray sky.

An American squad advances up a narrow street, rifles ready, boots crunching on shattered slate. From a second floor window, a machine gun opens up. Two men fall in the first burst. The rest dive behind a low garden wall. Their sergeant, a 23-year-old from Michigan, presses himself into the dirt and reaches for his radio handset.

Lieutenant M machine gun, second floor, requesting instructions. The lieutenant is 200 yd back. He cannot see the building. He radios the captain. The captain unfolds a map. He decides to call for artillery because artillery is what the American army has and artillery is what the American army uses. He radios battalion.

Battalion radios the fire direction center. Coordinates are checked. Shells are loaded. 15 minutes pass. In those 15 minutes, the German machine gun crew has repositioned, called for support, and set up a second gun to cover the first. Now, picture the same village on the same day, but a German squad in the American place.

The machine gun opens up. Two men fall. The sergeant, 31 years old, three years on the Eastern Front, does not reach for a radio. He scans the building. He sees a basement window half hidden by weeds. He points at two of his men. They move. He fires at the upper window to hold the enemy’s attention. 9 seconds later, a stick grenade goes through the basement window.

3 minutes, not 15. Multiply that difference by every firefight in every hedro across every mile of France. The gap became a river. The river filled with American dead. American commanders saw it in the afteraction reports. German units half the expected size were holding positions they should not have held.

German counterattacks were arriving before American units had finished securing captured ground. The reason was not mysterious once you looked for it. It was doctrine. Now add the weapons. The German Infantry Squad was built around a machine gun called the MG42. It fired 1,200 rounds per minute. It did not sound like a rifle or even like an American machine gun.

It sounded like fabric being torn very fast or like a chainsaw. American soldiers called it Hitler’s buzzsaw. When it opened up, individual shots were indistinguishable. It was a wall of lead. The American squad was built around the Browning automatic rifle. It was a fine weapon. [clears throat] It fired five to 600 rounds per minute, half the rate of the MG42.

And where the German squad organized itself to feed and protect its machine gun, the American squad organized itself around the riflemen with the Browning as support. One German sergeant with an MG42 could produce more sustained firepower than an entire American rifle squad. That is not opinion. That is arithmetic.

But before we go further, we have to kill a myth. Because if you have watched documentaries about the Second World War, you have almost certainly heard someone say that it took five Sherman tanks to knock out one German Tiger. It is the most famous statistic of the American ground war in Europe and it is not true.

The claim comes from a single book written in 1998 by a former ordinance officer named Belton Cooper. It is a memoir, not a study. When the United States Army actually studied the question, drawing on ballistic research laboratory data from 1946, historians examined 30 tank versus tank engagements between Shermans and Panthers.

According to that study, the Sherman won those engagements at a rate of 3.6 6 to1 in favor of the Sherman. There is more. The Tiger tank, which loomed so large in American memory, was rare. Only 1347 Tiger ones were built in the entire war. Plus, fewer than 500 of the heavier Tiger Twos. Most German tanks encountered by American forces in the west were panzer fors and assault guns called storm gashutz which the Sherman fought on roughly even terms. The truth is this.

The Sherman was not a bad tank. It was reliable. It was fast. It could be produced by the tens of thousands. Its crews often survived when it was knocked out. American armor doctrine did not call for frontal duels with German heavies. It called for flanking, for calling in air support, for using tank destroyers. The Americans fought smart, not fair, and they won.

But doctrine and weapons alone did not explain everything. Behind them stood one more thing. Experience. 80% of all German casualties in the Second World War occurred on the Eastern Front. 80%. The men fighting Americans in France [snorts] and Belgium in 1944 were in many cases the survivors of a slaughterhouse. the American mind can barely comprehend.

They had endured Stalenrad. They had bled at Kursk. They had walked out of the collapse of Army Group Center in the summer of 1944 when the Soviet offensive called Begration destroyed 28 German divisions in 6 weeks. The American infantrymen who waited ashore at Omaha Beach on June 6th of 1944 had in most cases never been shot at.

His first day of combat was the day he stepped off the landing craft. The German waiting for him in the bunker had in many cases killed men in three countries. And yet for all their skill, the Germans were also being betrayed by something they could not fight, their own supply lines. By the winter of 1944, the American army in Europe was consuming 650 tons of supplies per division per day.

ammunition, fuel, food, cigarettes, boots, chocolate, everything. A German division survived on 200 tons. The German soldier moved lighter and moved faster. But when he ran out, no truck was coming. When KF group peeper driving hard for the muse in the first days of the Arden offensive ran out of gasoline at a village called La Glies, Piper had to abandon 135 armored vehicles on the night of December 23rd and lead his surviving men out on foot through the No.

American abundance won the war, but American abundance also made American units slow. A German column could travel with what its men could carry. An American column dragged its logistics behind it like an anchor. You could beat the Germans in the morning and they would counterattack in the afternoon. uh because their afternoon required no trucks. And then there was the weather.

The winter of 1944 into 1945 was the coldest in Western Europe since 1890. In the Arden, temperatures fell to 10° below zero. Men slept in holes scraped from frozen ground. Wet boots stayed wet. Wet feet in freezing temperatures over days and days became something called trench foot. The flesh turned white, then blue, then black.

Nerves died. Sometimes toes came off in the boot when the boot was finally pulled off. Sometimes the whole foot had to be amputated. Roughly 15,000 American soldiers became trenchfoot casualties in the Arden campaign alone. Across the entire European theater that winter, the number climbed toward 45,000. The Germans, who had been fighting winter warfare since 1941 in Russia, knew how to prevent it.

They rotated men out of forward positions. They changed socks daily. They dried boots by fires. The Americans learned these things while their feet rotted. And there was one more thing quieter than machine guns and colder than snow that pressed on the American soldier as he tried to kill his enemy. The enemy looked like him.

The supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force was named Dwight David Eisenhower. His grandfather had come from Germany. The commander of the Pacific Fleet was named Chester Nimttz. His father had come from Germany. The commander of American strategic bombing was named Carl Spots. His grandfather had come from Germany. Millions of American soldiers carried German surnames.

They looked into the faces of captured German prisoners and saw uncles, cousins, themselves. A veteran of the 28th Infantry Division said it plainly decades later in an interview he could barely finish. He said, “What made it hard was they looked like me. Killing a man who looks like you is not the same as killing a man who does not.

It takes something out of you that does not come back. Um and in the villages of Belgium um in the last winter of the war um American boys were killing men who could have been their neighbors. and um they were doing it in numbers that would haunt them for the rest of their lives. But whatever hesitation still lived in the American heart in the middle of December of 1944 was about to be burned out of it.

Because on the afternoon of December 17th, at a snowy crossroads outside a Belgian town called Malmeti, something happened that would change the war. The place was called Bognes. It was not a town, only a crossroads where five roads met in an open field two miles southeast of Malmedi. On the afternoon of December 17th, 1944, a convoy of American trucks rolled into that field carrying men of battery B of the 285th Field Artillery Observation Battalion.

They were not frontline troops. They were surveyors and radio men sent to help direct artillery for a division fighting somewhere to the south. They rounded a bend at about a quart 1 in the afternoon. They saw tanks in the field ahead. The tanks had crosses on them. The first shells hit the lead trucks within seconds.

Men jumped from the tailgates and ran for the ditches. Machine guns cut some of them down in the road. The rest threw up their hands. They were disarmed, searched, and marched into an open pasture beside the crossroads. Roughly 130 American soldiers standing in the snow with their hands behind their heads watched the armored column of conf group Piper continue west along the road.

Then without a shouted command that any survivor could later identify, someone in one of the halted German vehicles opened fire. A pistol first, then machine guns from the halftracks. The Americans in the field ran. Most of them did not get far. They fell in rows in the snow. and the SS soldiers walked among the bodies afterward, firing pistol rounds into any man who moved or moaned.

Some of the Americans played dead and were shot. Some played dead and were not. When the last vehicle rolled away, 43 men rose from among the corpses and ran for the trees. 84 Americans lay dead in the field at Bnes. The survivors reached American lines by nightfall. Their story moved along the front faster than any radio message. By the morning of December 18th, every American soldier in the Arden knew what had happened at Malmedi.

By nightfall on December 17th, the story had reached First Army headquarters. By December 24th, it had crossed the Atlantic and appeared in American newspapers. Something changed in the American soldier that week. The hesitation that had lived in him, the small internal pause that came from killing a man who looked like his neighbor went out of him.

Orders were issued in some units unofficially that no SS prisoners would be taken. Some of those orders were obeyed. The war in the west, which had been fought within recognizable rules for six months, entered a colder place. And here we come to a distinction that matters. And that has been blurred by the passage of 80 years.

The men who fought at Maldi were not the Vermacht. They were the Vafan SS. The Vermat was the regular German army. Its soldiers wore field gray. Most of them in the west treated me American prisoners according to the Geneva Convention. Many of them at the end of the war walked west specifically to surrender to Americans rather than to Soviets.

The Vafan SS was something else. It was the armed wing of the Nazi party. It was ideological. It had committed atroadis across Europe from Poland to Ukraine to France and now it was committing them in Belgium. Yokim Piper who commanded the column that day was tried after the war and sentenced to death. His sentence was commuted.

He was released in 1956. He moved to a small village in eastern France and lived there quietly until the night of July 14th, 1976 when someone set his house on fire and shot him as he tried to escape. He was 51 years old. No one was ever convicted. Manufel, the professional soldier who had told Hitler the offensive would fail, surrendered his army to the British in May of 1945.

He served a short prison sentence, was released, and later sat in the West German Parliament from 1953 to 1957 as an elected representative. He died in 1978. The difference between those two men, the SS ideologue and the army professional, is the difference between two Germanis. And it is the difference the American soldier learned to see at great cost in the winter of 1944.

Now the question, if the German soldier was man for man more effective than the American soldier, why did Germany lose the war? The answer has three parts. The first was Adolf Hitler. 9 months before the Ardan’s offensive in March of 1944, Hitler had declared the Ukrainian city of Turnipil a fortress. 4,600 German soldiers were ordered to hold it against a Soviet army group.

Their commander, a major general named Egon von Nondorf, sent messages back saying the position was hopeless. Hitler refused to authorize withdrawal. The garrison fought for nearly a month. Von Nondorf himself was killed on April 15th, 1944. When it was over, 4,545 of his men were dead or wounded. 55 escaped.

The professional skill of the German soldier had been used to write a suicide note. It happened again and again in Stalingrad, in Churkasi, in Falz, in the Arden itself where Montufol’s tanks ran out of gasoline in a Belgian village because Hitler had ordered them to reach a river they could not reach. The second was American production.

On the west coast of the United States in Kaiser’s shipyards, a merchant ship called a Liberty ship was launched on average every 42 days. In November of 1942, uh, one of them, the Robert E. Piri was built in 4 days and 15 hours as a demonstration of what American industry could do.

At the Willow Run factory outside Detroit, Ford Motor Company was rolling a 4 engine B24 bomber off the assembly line every 63 minutes. Germany could not match those numbers. No country on earth could match those numbers. And the German soldier, however skilled, was fighting a war whose arithmetic had already been decided in factories he would never see.

The third was replacement. In 1944, Germany was losing an average of 5,500 soldiers a day across all fronts. The dead could not be replaced. The wounded could not be replaced. The captured could not be replaced. Every German casualty was permanent. Every American casualty was made up within weeks by young men crossing the Atlantic. Quality had a floor.

Quantity did not. And even at the very end, when everything Germany had built was collapsing, the professional skill of the German soldier did not vanish. In April of 1945, in the ruins of Berlin, approximately 45,000 German defenders, most of them Vulk Storm militia and Hitler youth boys, held the city against 2.5 million Soviet soldiers with 6,200 tanks. They lost.

They knew they would lose. And in 2 weeks of street fighting, they killed roughly 78,000 Soviet soldiers and destroyed nearly 2,000 Soviet tanks. That is the German army in one final statistic. Losing the war, winning individual battles right up to the last hour in the snow outside Baston on the 3rd of January 1945. Sergeant William Guarnire was moving through a stand of pines called the Bua Jacqu [clears throat] when a German artillery barrage came down on his platoon.

A friend of his named Joe Toy was hit and fell in the open. Guireire ran out to drag him back. A second shell landed. When the smoke cleared, Toy had lost a leg and Guarnire had lost one, too. He was carried to an aid station, then evacuated. He never fought again. He came home to Philadelphia, learned to walk on a prosthetic, married a girl named Franny, raised a family, worked, drank with the men from easy company at every reunion for the rest of his life and died on the 8th of March 2014 at the age of 90. Oh, Kurt Vonagut, the private

who had been captured on the ridge in the Schne Eiffel, was transported east in a box car to the city of Dresdon. He was working in an underground meat locker beneath a slaughter house on the night of February 13th, 1945 when American and British bombers set the city on fire. He survived because he was underground.

When he came up the next morning, he walked through a landscape of ash and corpses that never left him. Oh. He came home. He wrote about it in a novel he could not finish for 23 years until he found the right way to say it. He called the book Slaughterhouse 5. Huh. He died in New York in 2007. Huh.

After the war, the United States Army did something remarkable. It went to school on the enemy it had defeated under a program called the foreign military studies program. More than 500 former Vir Mach generals were interviewed and paid to write monographs on German doctrine and tactics. Those documents were read at Fort Levvenworth for decades.

In 1982, the Army published a new field manual called FM 100-5, which introduced a concept called airland battle. At its heart was decentralized command. mission type orders initiative at the lowest possible level. Two decades later in 2003, the army formally adopted the term mission command as its official philosophy.

It was altru tactic translated into English, given a new name, and made the doctrine of the United States its army. It is still the official doctrine today. Every American officer trained in the last 40 years has been taught, whether he knows it or not, by the ghosts of the men his grandfathers fought. The German soldier lost his war.

He lost it because his leaders were criminals and his strategy was madness and his enemies could build more of everything than his country could dream of. But the way he fought, the way he was trained to think when everything around him collapsed, that survived him. It crossed the Atlantic in the notebooks of American officers who who had faced him and lived.

It became the way the strongest army in the world learned to fight. Quality lost to quantity in the Argadens. But the quality was real. and the American soldiers who fought through that winter, the ones who came home to raise families in Ohio and Pennsylvania and Kansas, never forgot it. They spoke of the German soldier when they spoke of him at all with something that was not admiration and was not hatred. It was recognition.

the recognition of one professional for another across a field of snow at the end of the worst war the world has ever seen. Thanks for watching.