Why German Gunners Trusted American Optics in WW2

Name: Why German Gunners Trusted American Optics in WW2
Uploaded: 2026-09-22T14:05:57+00:00
Duration: 47 min 49 s
Channel: WW2 Dossier

00:00On the 15th of April, 1945, a column of American infantrymen came up a wet street in the Thuringian

00:06town of Jena and slowed down in front of a wall. They were men of the 80th Infantry Division,

00:123rd Army. Two days earlier, the town had been taken, house by house, and the street still

00:17smelled of it. The wall on their right ran the length of a block. Above the gate, in plain

00:23letters, was a name, Carl Zeiss. Most of the column walked past it without looking up.

00:30A few did not. Because in that column were men who had been hunters before the war, and

00:35photographers, and surveyors, and gunners. And every one of them knew that name the way

00:40a carpenter knows the name of a good chisel. It was on the finest field glasses in the world.

00:46And here's the thing that makes that morning worth an hour of your attention. The German

00:50army those men had been fighting all winter, the army whose gunners had been killing them

00:55since Normandy, had spent that winter putting captured American optical instruments into

01:00the hands of its own gun crews. Not as souvenirs. Not as improvisation in some cut-off pocket.

01:07There was paperwork for it. A printed German army publication, catalogued and numbered,

01:14D-50, Part 7. Identification sheets for foreign equipment, observation and measuring instruments.

01:23Instructions in German, for German gunners, on how to use other people's glass.

01:29So on the 15th of April, American riflemen were walking past the Cathedral of World Optics,

01:35and the congregation had already left the building.

01:39If this is your kind of story, hit like and subscribe. It helps reach people who care.

01:45What the American soldier carried into Germany, and what it costs to build, deserves to be understood.

01:51Now, before we go one step further, something has to be said plainly. Because everything that

01:56follows collapses if you don't accept it first. German optics were better. Not marginally.

02:03Not arguably. Better. The gunner in a Tiger looked through a Zeiss telescope of two-and-a-half

02:11power, with a field of view that let him keep the whole fight inside his eyepiece while he laid the

02:16gun. The men who ground and centered those lenses had served apprenticeships measured in years,

02:22not weeks. Every element passed through inspection stages that most of the world's industry did not

02:28even possess the instruments to attempt. A German gunner in a good position,

02:33in good light, could put his first round into a target at a distance where the other side was

02:39still arguing about what it was looking at. And the Americans knew it. An American soldier who got

02:45his hands on a pair of Zeiss field glasses did not turn them in to the supply sergeant. He kept

02:51them,

02:51and he kept them quiet. And if he made it home, they sat on a shelf in Ohio for fifty

02:56years,

02:57and his grandchildren have them now. So the question in front of us is not which glass was

03:03clearer. That question was settled before the war started, and nobody on either side seriously argued

03:08about it. The question is stranger. What made a German gunner, a man trained on the best sighting

03:16instruments any army in history had ever issued to an ordinary soldier, start reaching for the other

03:22sides. I want you to hold on to one word for the next hour. Not clarity, not magnification, not resolution.

03:32Replace. Because two industrial nations looked at the same object, a tube with glass in it, bolted to a gun,

03:40and answered two completely different questions about it. Germany asked, how good can this be made?

03:46The answer was, better than anyone else on earth could make it. And that answer was correct. And it

03:53was arrived at honestly by serious men who were very good at their work. The United States, arriving late

03:59and badly behind, was forced to ask something else. Not how good can it be, how fast can it be

04:06replaced

04:06when it's gone? In 1940, that second question sounded like the question of a country that couldn't do the

04:13first one. And that's exactly what it was. In 1940, the American optical industry was, by any measure that

04:21mattered, a joke. A country with almost no capacity to make the glass a modern army runs on, buying much

04:28of what it had from Germany, right up until it couldn't. By 1945, that second question had rearranged

04:36the war. Here's where we're going. We're going to look at what the German gunner actually had, and why

04:43his confidence in it was completely justified. Because you cannot understand this story if you

04:49think he was a fool. Then we're going to look at what the American army had instead. Almost nothing.

04:56And at the decision it made in 1942 that looked at the time like an admission of defeat. And then,

05:02we're going to watch what happened when both systems met the same enemy. Not each other. The real enemy

05:09of every optical instrument ever built. A shell landing close. One last thing before the next part,

05:16and I want you to file it away. Because it comes back, and it explains more than any statistic in

05:22this

05:22story. Bolted inside every American Sherman that crossed into Germany was a small steel box near the gunner

05:29station. And there were more boxes in the hull, and a rack under the driver's hood. Between them,

05:35they held four complete spare periscopes and fifteen spare pieces of optical glass. Fifteen. No German tank

05:44in the war carried anything remotely like it. And the reason is not that Germany couldn't afford the glass.

05:5017th of November, 1944. Shortly after dawn, on a bare slope of farmland outside a Rhineland village

05:58called Puffendorf. Two tank battalions of the 67th Armored Regiment, 2nd Armored Division, were drawn up

06:05on that slope, waiting for the order to attack toward the next village, Geryonsweiler, about two miles away.

06:11The ground was soft. It had rained for days. The mist was still lying in the low places. The men

06:18of the

06:191st Battalion saw the shells before they saw anything else. Not flashes. Not smoke. Furrows.

06:26Long, high-velocity rounds were coming in flat and plowing lines through the wet earth between their

06:31tanks. And the crews were watching soil turn over in front of them, and trying to work backward from

06:36the furrows to find where on earth they were coming from. They were coming from the woods on the western

06:42edge of Geryonsweiler. Two Tigers and four Panthers. Six tanks. By the time that day ended,

06:49the 2nd Armored Division had lost 38 medium tanks knocked out or destroyed, and 19 light tanks. 56 men

06:56killed. 281 wounded. 26 missing. Almost every one of those losses happened at Puffendorf.

07:05That night the surviving American tanks pulled back behind the stone buildings of the village,

07:10and inside those buildings men sat with their backs against walls, and did not talk much.

07:16I want to be careful here, because this is not a story about American tanks being beaten.

07:22The Germans lost at least 11 of their own that day. The 2nd Armored came back, and Geryonsweiler fell to

07:29it

07:29within the week. But something happened on that slope in the first minutes that has to be looked at

07:35honestly, because it is the foundation of everything else in this story. The German gunners were shooting

07:41first. Not because they were braver. Because they could see first.

07:48Put yourself in the Panther. The gunner had his forehead against a padded brow rest,

07:53and his right eye in a telescope built in Wetzlar. Two and a half power, with a 30 degree field

07:59of view,

08:00which sounds like a technical detail, until you understand what it actually buys a man.

08:05At 30 degrees, he could hold an entire tree line inside his eyepiece. He didn't have to search.

08:12He didn't have to take his eye out, look over the top, find the shape, and go back in.

08:18The whole battlefield he cared about was already in the glass, and when something moved in it,

08:23he was already looking at it. Then he flicked to the 5 power setting, and the target got bigger,

08:30and the reticle told him where to put it. The American gunner across that field, in that light,

08:36in that mist, was still asking his commander, where? This is the thing worth sitting with.

08:43Those six German tanks did not achieve what they achieved with thicker armor.

08:47They achieved it in the first 90 seconds, before the fight was fair. And the instrument that gave

08:52them those 90 seconds cost less than a track link. That is what the German optical industry had bought

08:59its army. Not a gadget. Minutes. And it had been bought the hard way, by men who served apprenticeships

09:06measured in years before they were allowed to touch a finished instrument, in factories where a

09:11single lens passed through inspection after inspection. So when a German gunner said he

09:17trusted his sight, he was not being sentimental. He had earned the right to say it, and the men on

09:23the wet slope outside Pufendorf could confirm it in writing. Now here is the part nobody in Jena or

09:30Wetzlar had any reason to worry about in 1941, and I want you to watch it carefully, because it is

09:36the

09:36crack in the whole structure. That telescope was not a part. It was a fitting. It had been matched to

09:42that gun, in that mount, and its zero, the agreement between where the crosshair says the round will go,

09:49and where the round actually goes, was the product of a process the crew could not perform.

09:56Look at the machine that stood behind him. A German tank company had a repair section,

10:02four NCOs and about 20 men, with trucks and half tracks, and it was allowed to take on jobs that

10:09could

10:09be finished in under four hours. Behind that sat the workshop company, roughly 195 men, working 15 to 20

10:18miles behind the fighting, handling repairs of up to about 12 hours. Anything beyond a day went

10:25rearward, to bases, to Germany, to a queue. Read that list again and notice what isn't in it. Engines,

10:34yes, tracks, transmissions, welding, radios, guns. There is no man in that structure who can grind glass.

10:44A shell does not have to penetrate a tank to end its usefulness. It has to land close. Blast lifts

10:51a

10:52mount a fraction of a millimeter. A splinter takes the head off a periscope. A jolt walks the reticle

10:59off its zero by an amount too small to see and large enough to miss with. And at that moment,

11:06the finest

11:06sighting telescope in the world becomes a tube full of very good glass that lies to you. That was the

11:14German gunner's real nightmare. Not being outshot. Putting his eye to the rubber cup one gray morning,

11:21and finding that the crosshair no longer told the truth. And knowing exactly how long it would be

11:27before anyone could do anything about it. Hold that word from the last part. Replace.

11:35Because the German army had already seen this coming. In November 1943, in the middle of Panther

11:43production, it made a decision about the tank's gun sight that would have been unthinkable two years

11:48earlier. It deliberately took something away from the gunner, and every man in the industry knew the

11:55instrument would be worse for it. In November 1943, on the lines building the Panther, the gunner's

12:02telescope changed. Until then, he had looked through a binocular sight. Two eyepieces. Both eyes open,

12:09both eyes working, the way a man looks at the world. From that autumn, he got the binocular version instead.

12:16One tube. One eye pressed to the glass, the other eye shut, or staring uselessly at the inside of a

12:22steel box for as long as the fight lasted. That is not a small thing to do to a man

12:27who has to shoot

12:28accurately under stress. Ask anyone who has spent an hour behind a single eyepiece what it does to the

12:34eye that isn't working. So why do it? Do the arithmetic Wetzler had to do. A binocular sight is two

12:42complete

12:43optical trains that must agree with each other perfectly. Twice the elements, twice the grinding,

12:49twice the centering, twice the cementing, twice the inspection, and all of it done by hands that had

12:55been trained for years and could not be trained faster. In November 1943, the German army was not

13:02short of ideas about how good a sight should be. It was short of the only thing that made those

13:08ideas

13:08real. Skilled hours. This is the first move in a game that runs for the next 18 months, and I

13:15want you

13:16watching the board. Germany has just paid for production with quality. Remember that, because

13:22Germany will make that trade again, and each time the price goes up. Now, what was the other side doing

13:29in those same months? To answer that, we have to go back two years, and I have to tell you

13:35something

13:35about the United States that does not fit the picture most people carry of 1940s America.

13:42In 1942, the United States Navy went on the radio and into the newspapers and asked the American

13:49public to lend it their binoculars. Not as a stunt, as procurement. The campaign was called

13:55Eyes for the Navy. Ordinary people—yacht owners, bird watchers, school teachers, men who use them at

14:02racetracks, widows who found a pair in a drawer that had belonged to a husband—packed up their field

14:08glasses and mailed them to the government. Each instrument was tagged with its owner's name and

14:13address. The Navy paid one dollar for each one, which was not a price. It was a legal formality

14:20and a promise. The dollar meant the government now owned it. The tag meant the government intended to

14:26give it back. Think about what that transaction actually is. A government asking its citizens to

14:33send in the family's eyes and holding itself to remembering whose they were. 52,000 binoculars,

14:41telescopes, and sextants came in. Sit with that number for a second, because it tells you exactly

14:46where America stood. The largest industrial economy on Earth, at war with two of the most advanced military

14:52powers in history, was fitting out its lookouts with opera glasses and duck hunting glasses posted in from

14:59Iowa and Maine. That is what it actually means when a historian writes that a country lacked an optical

15:05industry. It doesn't mean a gap in a chart. It means a sailor standing a night watch in the North

15:11Atlantic

15:12with somebody's grandfather's field glasses. And inside the Army, it was worse. There was one place

15:20responsible for the design and testing of every optical fire control instrument the United States Army used.

15:26binoculars, telescopes, range finders, battery commander scopes, aiming circles, azimuth instruments,

15:35Frankfurt Arsenal in Philadelphia on the Delaware. In 1935, the department that did that work had 11

15:43people in it. 11. Germany at that moment had two towns doing the same work, Jena and Wetzlar, with tens

15:51of

15:51thousands of trained hands between them, and a century of accumulated craft standing behind every

15:57one of them. Richard Denton arrived at Frankfurt's optical production department early in 1942, and by the

16:04end of the following year, the department he had walked into numbered 1,100 people. That's the figure to

16:11hold onto. 11 to 1,100. Most of it inside three years. Now, most of those 1,100 had never

16:19touched an

16:20optical instrument in their lives. Many of them were women who, a year earlier, had been working in shops

16:26and kitchens and schoolrooms. You cannot hand those people the German method. The German method takes years

16:33to install in a human being, and Germany had spent a century installing it. So the Americans did something

16:39else, and it is the hinge of this entire story. And at the time, it looked like surrender. They stopped

16:45asking how good the instrument could be, and started designing it around the people who would have to

16:50build it, and around the men who would have to live with it in a hole in the ground. Everything

16:56got

16:56standardized. Tolerances were written so that a part made in one plant would fit an instrument assembled

17:02in another. Frankfurt wrote the glass and optical standards the rest of the country then worked to.

17:08And the result? Let's be honest about it, because the men who used them were honest about it,

17:13was an inferior sighting instrument. American gunners who compared them side by side with captured German

17:20glass had no illusions whatsoever. But something had changed that nobody in Jena had any reason to

17:27notice yet. An American sight was no longer a fitting. It was a part. Which brings us to the

17:34strangest object in this entire story. It isn't a lens. It costs nothing. It is a short length of

17:42ordinary string. And what an American tank crew could do with it in the field, alone, with no workshop and

17:50no specialist within 40 miles, was the thing the German gunner would come to envy most.

17:56Late July 1944, somewhere behind the hedgerows in Normandy, at the end of a day's fighting.

18:03A Sherman is parked in the corner of a field with its engine off, and its crew is doing something

18:08that

18:08looks, from a distance, like nothing at all. The loader has pulled the breech block out of the gun.

18:14The gunner is standing on the front of the tank with two short pieces of string. He lays them across

18:20the muzzle, crossing at the center of the bore, and holds them in place. Then somebody puts an eye to

18:27the open breech, and looks straight up the barrel, through the tube of the gun itself, until the cross

18:33of string is sitting dead on something a long way off. A church spire. A chimney. The corner of a

18:41stone

18:41barn a thousand yards away. Now the gun is aimed at that chimney. Truly aimed. Not according to any

18:49instrument, but according to the bore of the weapon itself. The gunner drops back into his seat, puts his

18:55eye to his telescope, and finds that his crosshair is not on the chimney. It might be a foot off

19:01at that

19:01range. It might be much more. Somewhere in the last few days a near miss, or a wall, or a

19:09thousand hammer

19:09blows of track on cobbles has moved it. He reaches for two knobs and turns them until the crosshair sits

19:16on the chimney too. Then he does the same with the periscope. Ten minutes, maybe fifteen. Five men, no workshop,

19:25no specialist, no instruments except a gun barrel, a length of string, and a building on the horizon.

19:32Nothing in that procedure required a single trained optician. And the tank's eye is telling the truth

19:38again. I want you to hold that scene next to the one from two parts ago. The German repair chain.

19:46The

19:46four-hour section. The twelve-hour workshop fifteen miles back. The queue that ran all the way home to

19:52Germany for anything worse. Not one man in that chain was needed here. The crew restored its own

19:59eyesight. In a field. In the dark. In the rain. Between meals. That is the string. Now here is the

20:09box. Go back to the fifteen pieces of glass I asked you to file away in the first part. Here

20:15is what they

20:16actually were. The gunner's periscope in a Sherman was not one thing. It was two. A body that lived

20:24down inside the turret with the optics in it. And a head that stuck up above the armor and did

20:29the

20:29looking. The head was designed to come off. Open a pair of knobs at the side and the damaged glass

20:36lifts out. A new head drops in. The whole periscope could be pulled from its bracket and swapped just as

20:44fast. And they were everywhere in that tank. A rack under the driver's hood held four complete spare

20:51periscopes and six spare heads. A box in the turret held another periscope and three more heads. Two

20:59more boxes in the hull held the same. Fifteen spare heads in all riding around inside one tank.

21:07Now put a man in it. A burst of machine gun fire crosses the turret roof or a splinter comes

21:13off a

21:14wall. And the gunner's periscope head is gone, sheared away. And he is looking at nothing, with

21:20fragments of his own optics on his knees. He has perhaps four seconds of total blindness in the

21:26middle of a fight. Then his hand goes to the box by his shoulder. The ruined body comes out of

21:31the

21:31bracket. A fresh one goes in. The hook lifts. The knurled roller tightens. He is looking again before the

21:39German gunner opposite has finished traversing. Nobody wrote him up for it. Nobody logged it.

21:45It was not an event. And here is the part that is easy to read straight past. That head was

21:51meant to

21:52be destroyed. It was a sacrificial eye. The cheap piece deliberately put where things get hit so the

21:59expensive piece could stay down under the armor where it was safe. Nobody in Jena would have designed

22:05an instrument that way. Because to a man raised in that tradition, the idea is close to obscene.

22:11You do not build a fine optical instrument in order to have it shot off. Unless what you are building

22:17is not an instrument at all. It's ammunition. Multiply it. Across an armored division on a bad afternoon,

22:25dozens of periscopes are wrecked. On the German side, that arithmetic ends with tanks pulled out of the

22:32line. Or with crews fighting half-blind and knowing it. On the American side, it ends with a man reaching

22:39sideways. But be careful here. Because we still have not answered the question this film asked.

22:46None of it, the string, the box, the sacrificial head, ever appeared in front of a German gunner.

22:52He never sat in a Sherman. He never read an American manual. He had no way of knowing any of

22:59it existed.

23:00So how did any of this reach him? It reached him the way things reach a soldier. Through what arrived

23:07and what didn't. He did not learn that the American system was better. He learned, month by month,

23:13that his own instruments were not coming. And that other people's were lying all over the ground.

23:20In the last stretch of the war, the German army placed an order with the Light's Works at Wetzla

23:24for 4,208 gun sights of a new pattern for the Panther. In the next part, I'll tell you exactly

23:33how many of

23:33those sights were ever delivered. It is a single-digit number. And once you hear it, that German publication

23:40from Part 1, D-50, Part 7, stops looking strange and starts looking inevitable.

23:474,208 gun sights ordered. Two delivered. One in October 1944. One in January 1945.

23:58Two. That was the entire production run of the new articulated telescope the Panther was supposed to

24:04receive. Designed by Leitz at Wetzla, one of the two towns on earth capable of building such a thing.

24:11Two units, four months apart, against an order for over 4,000.

24:17Let that land properly, because this is not the story of a failed design. The design was fine. The

24:24men were there. The drawings were there. What was not there was everything else.

24:31Wetzla, by 1944, was a town under air attack, and its optical production had gone into tunnels.

24:38Think about what that sentence actually contains. Optical work is the most environmentally

24:43fussy manufacturing that exists. Dust ruins it. Vibration ruins it. Temperature swings ruin it.

24:50And the polishing and testing of a lens is done to tolerances finer than the things floating in the

24:55air of an ordinary room. And Germany was moving that work into holes in the ground. At the same time,

25:03the men were leaving. Skilled optical workers were steadily pulled away into work classified as more

25:09militarily important. One of the quiet, self-inflicted wounds of the German war economy. Because the

25:16thing they were being pulled away from was the thing the army could not fight without. And in their

25:22place came something else. Between 1940 and 1945, 8,081 forced laborers worked at the Zeiss plant in Jena.

25:328,000 people who had not chosen to be there, doing work whose entire quality rested on care,

25:39in a factory that had built its reputation on men who spent seven years learning to care about it.

25:45Whatever else is said about the German optical industry, this is where the tradition died. Not

25:51under bombs, but at the moment the state decided the hands doing the work no longer had to consent to

25:56it.

25:57Now watch what the German army did next, because it is one of the strangest echoes in the whole war.

26:03It went to its own civilians and asked them for their hunting scopes. The program had a name,

26:10the Jägerspende, the hunter's donation. Ordinary Germans were asked to turn in commercial sporting optics,

26:17collis, ajak, hensolt glass off deer rifles in Bavaria and Thuringia, to be converted, mounted on

26:25service rifles, and handed to soldiers. You have heard that story already in this film. It was called

26:31Eyes for the Navy, and it happened in the United States in 1942. Same act, opposite direction.

26:39America begged its citizens for binoculars on the way up, while it was growing a department of 11 men

26:44into 1100, while it was writing the standards, while the plants were being tooled. That borrowing

26:51was a bridge across a gap that was closing. Germany begged its citizens for hunting scopes on the way

26:57down, while its factories were going underground and its craftsmen were being marched off to other work.

27:04That borrowing was not a bridge to anywhere. It was the last of the glass. And it produced exactly what

27:10you would expect. Over 100,000 of one compromised sight went out to the German infantry, a small,

27:17one-and-a-half power optic, and the men who had to use it held a low opinion of it,

27:22and said so.

27:24Now come back down to the gunner, because all of this only matters as it arrives at one man in

27:29one

27:30hole. He is not reading production reports. What he knows is smaller and much worse. His instrument goes

27:38down. A sight cracked. A reticle walked off at zero. A periscope head gone. And he sends the request back.

27:46And what comes back is nothing. Not a refusal. Nothing. Weeks pass. And he begins to understand

27:55something no German soldier of 1941 could have imagined. He is not going to be re-equipped.

28:01What he has now is what he will have for the rest of the war.

28:06And every time a shell lands near him, that inventory only moves one way.

28:12And he is a professional. He knows precisely what a sight knocked off at zero does to his first round.

28:18And he knows he no longer has a first round to spare.

28:23Meanwhile, the ground he is fighting on is covered in the other Army's equipment.

28:38In the Ardennes in December 1944, one German brigade alone took sixty to seventy jeeps and about as many

28:47trucks in usable condition, along with everything that was inside them. A soldier who has waited three

28:53weeks for an instrument that is never coming will pick up the one lying in the mud in front of

28:58him.

28:59He does not have to admire it. He has to see. Stay with me, because this is where the answer

29:06starts to form.

29:07There is one more thing that has to go into it. And without it, we are being unfair to the

29:12German gunner.

29:13Because if American glass had still been the inferior article it was in 1942, no amount of

29:20desperation would have made a trained man reach for it. By 1944, nearly every lens leaving an American

29:28factory carried something on its surface that you cannot see and cannot feel. A film a few millionths of an

29:35inch thick.

29:37Germany discovered it first, years before the war. In the next part, I'll show you why that invisible film

29:43is the exact point where the two curves cross. Take an ordinary piece of glass and hold it up.

29:49You can see your own reflection in it. That reflection is light that went in and came back out instead

29:55of

29:55going through. About four percent of it at every surface where glass meets air.

30:01Now count the surfaces in a gun telescope. Objective, erectors, reticle, eyepiece. A dozen

30:08air-to-glass boundaries, sometimes more. Each one quietly stealing four percent. And, worse,

30:15bouncing it around inside the tube as a milky haze that washes out precisely the thing the gunner is

30:21straining to see. A dark shape against a dark background. In good midday light, none of this matters much.

30:28At last light in a Rhineland winter, it decides everything. And a Rhineland winter is mostly last

30:35light. The fix is a film of magnesium fluoride, evaporated onto the lens in a vacuum under heat,

30:42so thin it is measured in millionths of an inch. It is not a lens. It is a skin on

30:49a lens. You cannot

30:50see it. You cannot feel it. And it hands back most of what those surfaces were stealing.

30:56Germany found it first. That work was done in Germany in the mid-1930s, years before the war,

31:02by people who understood the physics perfectly well. By 1944, most American optical instruments

31:09were leaving the factory with it as standard. Not as a premium feature on a special instrument,

31:15as the ordinary condition of ordinary equipment issued to ordinary men.

31:21That sentence is the whole war in miniature. And notice its shape. Because you have now seen it

31:27three times. Germany invents it. America issues it. Now the volumes. And these are worth hearing slowly.

31:36Of one single model of 7x50 binocular, Daush and Lamm built at least 340,000. Another model,

31:47from Westinghouse, ran to 53,412. In 1945 alone, one plant on the Allied side, Research Enterprises,

31:57in Canada, turned out nearly 50,000 pairs of 6x30s and 25,000 7x50s. Not models. Not prototypes. Instruments.

32:09In crates. On ships. Three years earlier, the country south of that Canadian plant had been mailing

32:16school teachers a dollar for their opera glasses. Now put the two industries side by side in the same

32:23month, say, January 1945. In Jena and Wetzlar, dispersed shops, tunnels, air raids, conscripted labor,

32:34in order for 4,208 sites that produced two. And a gunner's telescope that had been cut from binocular

32:42down to monocular a year earlier, because the skilled hours weren't there. In Rochester and Philadelphia,

32:49and Ontario, coded, standardized, interchangeable instruments, coming off in the hundreds of thousands,

32:58every one of them fitting every mount of its type. Here is the point I have been building toward for

33:03five parts,

33:04and it is not the point most people expect. The German instrument was still, in the abstract,

33:11the finer object. Take the two apart on a laboratory bench in 1945, and the German glass will still be

33:18beautiful.

33:19But which industry can build the better telescope, and which telescope is in my hands, working,

33:25tonight, are not the same question. And only one of them can kill you.

33:30By 1945, those two curves had crossed. Not because American optics became German optics.

33:37Because German optics stopped arriving, and American optics stopped being bad.

33:43Now, I am going to be careful here, because what comes next is deduction rather than a document,

33:49and you deserve to know which is which. Nobody has handed me a diary in which a German gunner writes,

33:55I prefer the American glass. What we have is what he was issued, what he could get, and what was

34:02physically in front of him. Put yourself in the position, and the arithmetic is not complicated.

34:07One instrument is yours. It is superb. It is three years old. It has been shaken by 200 near misses.

34:15Its zero is a rumor. And nothing is coming to replace it.

34:19The other one is lying in a wrecked half-track 200 yards away. It is coated. It is sealed. It

34:26is

34:26younger than the war. And there are thousands more where it came from, because the people who made it

34:32built it expecting to lose it. A professional takes the one that works. That is not disloyalty.

34:39That is gunnery. And on the ground, the consequences arrived fast. On the 23rd of February, 1945,

34:47the American 9th Army went over the roar. And among the formations pushing out across that plain was

34:53the 2nd Armored Division, back on the same open farmland where six German tanks had cut it to pieces

34:59in the November mist. This time, it did not stop. Within days, its leading elements were standing on the

35:06Rhine. The 2nd Armored had learned nothing magical about tanks between November and February.

35:11It was fighting the same enemy, on the same ground, with much the same equipment.

35:16What had changed was that the army holding that ground could no longer see the way it used to,

35:21and could no longer get the instruments to put it right. Which brings us to a square in Cologne,

35:27days later, and to an American cameraman running across it, shouting up at a tank commander.

35:34On the far side of that square sat a panther, and a German gunner who knew his trade completely,

35:40with good Zeiss glass in front of his eye. What happened in the next 20 seconds answers the

35:46question this film has been asking. And, unusually for this war, all of it was filmed.

35:526th of March, 1945. Cologne. The city is rubble with streets cut through it,

35:58and the cathedral still stands over all of it, scorched and holed and impossible to miss.

36:03Somewhere near its base, in the open ground where the streets run out,

36:07a panther is waiting with its gun laid down one of them. Its commander is a lieutenant named Wilhelm

36:13Bartelborth. Around the corner comes an American Sherman. One of the men in it is Carl Kellner,

36:19from Wisconsin. He had won a silver star and been commissioned from the ranks two weeks earlier.

36:24A lieutenant for 14 days. The panther fires. The Sherman is hit and burning almost at once.

36:32Three of its five men do not get out. Kellner is one of them.

36:36Now stop the film there, because that shot matters to our question. The German gunner did everything

36:42right. He was in a good position, his optics were German optics, his sight worked, he saw first,

36:49he fired first, and he killed. In March 1945, in the sixth year of the war, with his industry in

36:57tunnels and his replacements not coming, that man could still do the thing he had been trained to do.

37:03Whatever else this story is, it is not a story about German gunners becoming bad.

37:08What happens next is the story. An army cameraman named Jim Bates comes up through the wreckage with

37:16his camera, and he runs, physically runs, to an American tank and shouts up at its commander that

37:24there is an enemy tank out there covering the square. The tank is a Pershing, called Eagle 7,

37:30of the 3rd Armored Division. Its commander is Sergeant Bob Early. Its gunner is Corporal Clarence

37:38Smoyer. Early takes it around by another street to come at the Panther from the flank, and Smoyer does

37:45not wait for a clean stop and a careful lay. As the tank swings out, he fires. And he puts

37:52three rounds

37:53into the side of the Panther, and it burns. The Panther's crew had seconds to understand what

37:59had happened to them. It was over before their traverse could catch up. Bates filmed all of it.

38:05Weeks later, Americans sat in movie theaters at home and watched it happen. It is one of the very

38:11few tank duels of the Second World War that you can simply sit down and watch. Now look at what

38:17actually decided that fight, because it was not the quality of anybody's glass. The German lieutenant had

38:24one gun, in one place, with one sight, and nothing behind him. Everything he needed had to be right the

38:32first time. It was right the first time. And it still wasn't enough. The Americans lost a tank and

38:40three men, and within minutes they had another gun on the same square with another gunner and another

38:45working sight. That is not tactics. That is what an army looks like when its equipment is a flow instead

38:53of a possession. And notice who else was on that corner. A cameraman. An army that can afford to

38:59send a man with a camera into a street fight is an army that has stopped worrying about whether the

39:04essentials will arrive. So let's answer the question this film opened with. Not in a sentence about

39:10lenses. In the way the war itself answered it. By that last winter, the German army had put the answer

39:18into print. That publication from the first part, D-50 part 7, the identification sheets for foreign

39:25observation and measuring equipment, is not a curiosity. Think about what a document like that

39:30actually is. Somebody in the German ordnance system sat down in the country of Zeiss and Leitz and

39:38decided that enough of its own gunners were now looking through other army's instruments that the

39:43business needed to be standardized, printed, catalogued, numbered, issued. An army does not print a manual

39:53for a rarity. It prints one for a routine. And that is the answer. A gunner does not trust an

40:01instrument

40:01the way a collector admires one. He trusts what he can count on. He trusts the site he can replace

40:08when it

40:08is smashed, re-zero himself when it drifts, hand on to a replacement crew when he is killed, and find

40:15again on the ground when everything else is gone. By 1945, in Germany, that instrument was very often

40:23American. Taken off a wreck, pulled out of an abandoned half-track, lifted from a prisoner,

40:30listed in a German pamphlet with a German number on the cover.

40:34Not because America had learned to make better glass than Zeiss. It hadn't, and it wouldn't for

40:40years. It is because in 1942, with almost no optical industry and no time to grow a German one,

40:48the United States made a decision that looked at the time like the lesser choice. It decided that an

40:55optical instrument would be a supply item, something ordinary, something you could ask for and be given,

41:02something built to be broken and replaced by the man holding it. Germany built optics that deserved

41:09to be trusted. America built optics that could be. And there is one more turn in this, which I have

41:15saved, because it is the reason those American infantrymen from the very first scene were standing

41:22in that Thuringian street at all. The 80th Division did not come to Jena for the buildings.

41:28There was something in that town the United States wanted badly enough to move it out of the Soviet

41:34zone before the boundary came down. And it was not machinery. And it was not glass.

41:41In the last part, I'll tell you what the Americans took out of Jena in June 1945, and what happened,

41:47in the end, in the end, to 52,000 pairs of binoculars belonging to private citizens.

41:54Go back to that wet street in Jena on the 15th of April, 1945, and the column of the 80th

42:00Division

42:01walking past the long wall with the name on it. Most of those men had no idea they were passing

42:08the

42:08thing this whole story is about. They were watching upper windows for snipers. Behind that wall stood

42:15the century of craft that had produced the finest sighting instruments any soldier ever carried,

42:21and out in the countryside beyond it was an army that could no longer get hold of them.

42:27The Americans stayed in Thuringia for about two months. Under the agreements carving up occupied

42:33Germany, Jena was going to the Soviet zone, and everyone knew the date was coming. So,

42:40through that spring, American teams worked inside the Zeiss and Schott works with a very specific

42:46shopping list. They were not there for the lens grinding machines. In June, when the Americans pulled

42:53back to their own zone, they took people with them. Accounts differ on the count. Some say 77 scientists

42:59and engineers, others put the total from the two firms at more than 120, including most of the

43:05senior management, along with the documents. They were held first at Heidenheim under Brentz. In 1946,

43:13the Zeiss men began building a new optical works in a small town called Oberkochen. The Schott people

43:19eventually built again at Mainz. Behind them, the works at Jena carried on under Soviet occupation

43:25as the East German Carl Zeiss. For the next 45 years, there were two Carl Zeisses, on two sides

43:32of a line, suing each other in courts around the world over which one was the real one. But sit

43:38for

43:38a moment with what the Americans actually carried out of Jena in the back of those trucks. Not glass,

43:44not machines. Knowledge. In the form of the men who had it. The country that won by deciding an optical

43:51instrument should be an ordinary, replaceable, mass-produced supply item, that country, the first

43:58moment it had the chance, went and collected the people who knew how to do it the other way.

44:04It had never believed its own instruments were better. It had only understood, earlier than anyone

44:10else, that better is not the same thing as enough. And the German gunners? They finished the war the way

44:18soldiers do, with whatever was in their hands on the last morning. Some of it was Zeiss. A good deal

44:26of it, by then, had been made in Rochester and Philadelphia and had somebody else's language

44:31stamped on the housing. As for the men in the street in Cologne, Clarence Smoyer, the gunner who

44:37put three rounds into that Panther, went home to Pennsylvania and spent his life doing ordinary work

44:43and not talking about it much. In September of 2019, at 95, he was given a bronze star in person.

44:52His commander Bob Early and John de Riggi, William McVeigh and Homer Davis received theirs posthumously.

45:0174 years is a long time to wait for a piece of ribbon. Carl Kellner never had the wait. He

45:09was killed in that

45:10street, 14 days into the commission he had earned in the field. And then there are the binoculars.

45:1852,000 instruments came in when the Navy asked for them in 1942. Off shelves, out of drawers, out of

45:27attics, mailed in by people who would never see the ocean they were going to. Each one tagged with a

45:34name

45:34and an address. Each one bought for a dollar, which was not a purchase, but a promise.

45:42When the war ended, the Navy started sending them back. Not symbolically. Actually. Instrument by

45:50instrument. Address by address. A government working down a list of private citizens, returning their

45:57property. It got nearly all of them home. What was left, after 12 years of correspondence,

46:0412 years of letters going out to addresses that had changed, families that had moved,

46:09people who had died, was 697 pairs of binoculars, 295 telescopes, and 9 sextants, whose owners the Navy

46:21had never managed to find. 12 years. For binoculars. That is the same country that packed 15 spare pieces

46:31of glass into every tank and told the crews to expect to lose them. There is no contradiction in

46:38it. It was one instinct working in both directions. Things are for using, and people are for keeping.

46:47So, what made German gunners trust American optics over their own? Not the glass. Never the glass.

46:55It was the one quality that matters to a man who has to see and shoot again tomorrow morning.

47:01The American instrument was the one that kept arriving. The Germans won the argument about how

47:07to build a lens. The Americans won the argument about what a lens is for. Thank you for staying to

47:13the end of this one. If it was worth your time, leave a like. That's what puts a story like

47:18this

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47:37or your uncle served in the Second World War, put his name and his unit in the comments. The GIs

47:43in this

47:44story are remembered by name. So should he be. I read them all.

Why German Gunners Trusted American Optics in WW2

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