- 9 hours ago
German sentries kept choosing artillery over American words because the words kept working. Outside Saint-Lô, a 25-watt loudspeaker truck rolled into range and spoke German to the men in the trenches, only to be met with rifle fire, machine guns, mortars, rockets, and artillery. That strange pattern became the heart of a World War II psychological warfare story about sound, surrender, and fear on the Western Front.
The narration follows the men behind the microphones: refugees from the Reich, German-speaking American soldiers, Glenn Miller broadcasting from London, and Arthur Hadley’s light tank fitted with loudspeakers instead of some of its ammunition. It also shows how leaflets, safe-passage passes, and the promise of treatment under the Geneva Conventions worked alongside music and battlefield broadcasts to persuade German troops to give up. From Normandy to Aachen, Hildesheim, and beyond, this is military history told through propaganda, surrender operations, and frontline psychology.
If you like WW2 documentary-style narration, military history, psychological warfare, and forgotten stories from the Second World War, this is for you. It also fits searches for WW2 stories, German surrender history, Battle of Normandy, Aachen siege, Glenn Miller WW2, and propaganda on the Western Front.
Created for listeners who enjoy WW2 stories, military history narration, psychological warfare documentaries, and historical storytelling about the Second World War. Ideal for background listening, history fans, and anyone searching for German surrender stories, battlefield propaganda, and WW2 documentary-style content.
The narration follows the men behind the microphones: refugees from the Reich, German-speaking American soldiers, Glenn Miller broadcasting from London, and Arthur Hadley’s light tank fitted with loudspeakers instead of some of its ammunition. It also shows how leaflets, safe-passage passes, and the promise of treatment under the Geneva Conventions worked alongside music and battlefield broadcasts to persuade German troops to give up. From Normandy to Aachen, Hildesheim, and beyond, this is military history told through propaganda, surrender operations, and frontline psychology.
If you like WW2 documentary-style narration, military history, psychological warfare, and forgotten stories from the Second World War, this is for you. It also fits searches for WW2 stories, German surrender history, Battle of Normandy, Aachen siege, Glenn Miller WW2, and propaganda on the Western Front.
Created for listeners who enjoy WW2 stories, military history narration, psychological warfare documentaries, and historical storytelling about the Second World War. Ideal for background listening, history fans, and anyone searching for German surrender stories, battlefield propaganda, and WW2 documentary-style content.
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LearningTranscript
00:00July 15th, 1944. The hedgerow country outside St. Lowe, Normandy.
00:06On the German side of a hedgerow, paratroopers are dug into the earth bank,
00:10the way they have been dug in for weeks. By now, they know every sound this war makes.
00:16The crack of a rifle. The tearing noise of an American machine gun.
00:20The short whisper a mortar round makes in the last second before it lands.
00:25This time, they hear a sound they do not know.
00:27A human voice. Huge. Speaking German.
00:33Coming from the American side of the field, less than 50 yards away.
00:38The paratroopers do what soldiers do with something they do not understand.
00:42They shoot at it. Rifle and machine gun fire rakes the American vehicle the voice is coming from.
00:49The rounds keep hitting it. And the voice keeps talking.
00:53That is the part worth holding onto.
00:56Nobody in that vehicle is shooting back.
00:59The men operating it are not there to kill anyone.
01:02Their job is to keep talking while they are being shot at.
01:05At a range where a decent German rifleman does not need a scope.
01:09Their equipment is not impressive.
01:11Their own company records complain about it.
01:13The set puts out 25 watts.
01:16That is less power than the bulb in a kitchen lamp.
01:19To be heard at all, the crew has to drive into the killing range of the men they are talking
01:24to.
01:25Then something happens that the German officers on that stretch of line have been working for weeks to prevent.
01:3218 German paratroopers climb out of their holes and walk toward the Americans.
01:37Not a battalion.
01:39Not a company.
01:4118 men.
01:42But these were paratroopers.
01:44Some of the hardest troops Germany had in Normandy.
01:47Men who had been holding the ground around St. Lowe against everything the American First Army could throw at them.
01:54And they walked out because of a voice.
01:57An American infantryman who had watched the whole thing and who had not believed in the idea for a second
02:03said out loud what a lot of G.I.s were thinking.
02:07I guess I was wrong, he said.
02:09Why the hell don't you guys bring that thing up here all the time?
02:14Keep that question in your head.
02:16Because the German army was asking a version of it too.
02:19And its answer was the opposite of his.
02:23If you want to see how the U.S. Army turned a 25-watt speaker into a weapon, hit like
02:28and subscribe.
02:30It helps this story find the people who want to hear it.
02:33Here is the strange thing about the next 10 months.
02:37Wherever those American voices appeared, German fire followed.
02:41It happened so often that the people who later studied these operations wrote that the loudspeaker vehicles became magnets for
02:49enemy fire.
02:50Direct and indirect.
02:52Rifles and machine guns, which you would expect from men who could see the truck.
02:57But also mortars.
02:59Rockets.
03:00Artillery.
03:02Now stop and think about what that means.
03:04A mortar round does not land on a loudspeaker by accident.
03:08Somebody on the German side had to hear it.
03:10Had to pick up a field telephone.
03:12And had to ask for fire on it.
03:14So picture that German soldier's position.
03:18American artillery had been killing his friends since June.
03:21His own side never had enough shells.
03:24And yet, here was a target it considered worth spending those shells on.
03:29Not a tank.
03:30Not a gun battery.
03:32Not an observation post.
03:33A man with a microphone.
03:37Why?
03:38That is the question this whole story turns on.
03:41Why would an army that was running short of nearly everything spend its ammunition on a voice?
03:47And why, by the spring of 1945, would one American lieutenant with a speaker bolted to the turret of a
03:54light tank bring in something like 5,000 German prisoners in a matter of weeks?
04:00To answer that, you first have to know who was holding the microphone.
04:05The men of the mobile radio broadcasting companies were not typical GIs.
04:10Many had been born in Europe.
04:12Many had fled it.
04:13They spoke German because it had been their first language.
04:16And they had gone through special training camps in Maryland and Pennsylvania before being shipped to France.
04:22One of them was Stefan Heim.
04:25Born in Chemnitz, Germany, he had been editing an anti-Nazi German-language newspaper in New York before the war.
04:32He came ashore in Normandy as an American sergeant about ten days after D-Day.
04:37And his job was to write the words that would be spoken into German ears.
04:42Think about what that job asked of a man.
04:44He had escaped the Third Reich.
04:47Now he was writing for crews who would lie 50 yards from its soldiers and talk to them in their
04:53own language.
04:54The routine these teams worked out had a strange courtesy to it.
04:58Before a single word went across to the Germans, the operator warned his own side first.
05:05Attention, attention, all American soldiers.
05:08You will now hear a broadcast in the German language addressed to the enemy, asking them to surrender.
05:13One man who studied these operations after the war called it hog-calling.
05:18Then came the German.
05:21Rarely more than 90 seconds of it.
05:23And it usually promised the listener nothing but facts.
05:26And the infantry around those teams often did not want them there.
05:30The company's own history admits that even supporting infantry units were hesitant about exposing the crews to the danger.
05:37There was a second reason nobody needed to write down.
05:41When the truck started talking, the fire that came back did not only land on the truck.
05:46It landed on every American dug-in around it.
05:50Here is a detail most people have never heard.
05:53On the sixth day after D-Day, American gunners fired their first shells packed with paper instead of explosive.
06:00Six rounds of leaflets.
06:02Six German prisoners walked in.
06:05By the end of June, the 1st Army had fired some 900 of those rounds.
06:10Somebody in the American Army had worked out very early that a German soldier could be reached with something other
06:16than steel.
06:16But the loudspeaker was still a hard sell.
06:19Most commanders saw it as a gimmick that drew fire.
06:22Some days it worked, the way it worked outside St. Lowe.
06:26Plenty of days, it did not work at all.
06:29Remember that 25-watt set?
06:31Because it tells you where this story started.
06:33By the time it ends, the American voice will be coming out of the turret of a tank.
06:38And the German side will no longer be dealing with a truck it can shoot at.
06:43Before the speakers got bigger, though, the Americans tried something else.
06:47Something that did not need to get within 50 yards of anybody.
06:51That autumn, in a recording studio in London, an American major in uniform would stand in front of a microphone
06:58holding a script written out phonetically in a language he did not speak.
07:03The German army could drop mortar rounds on a truck in a Normandy field.
07:07What that major was about to send across the front line could not be hit with anything at all.
07:13October 30, 1944. Studio One, Abbey Road, London.
07:18Glenn Miller is standing at a microphone in the uniform of a major in the United States Army Air Forces.
07:24He is 40 years old.
07:25He has one of the most famous dance bands in the world behind him.
07:30And in his hands is a script he cannot read.
07:33It is written in German.
07:35Not proper German, though.
07:38Somebody has spelled it out phonetically, sound by sound, so that a band leader born in Iowa can say words
07:45he does not understand to men he will never meet.
07:49Next to him is a woman the program calls Ilsa.
07:52That was not her real name.
07:54At least one of the women who spoke as Ilsa was an American broadcaster named Gloria Wagner.
08:00And more than one woman on the German desk used the name.
08:04Her job was to chat with Miller on the air, in fluent German, as if they were old friends.
08:10The audience for this recording is not in London.
08:13It is not in America.
08:15It is in foxholes, bunkers, and cellars on the other side of the front line.
08:20The program's name tells you exactly who it is for.
08:23Music for the Wehrmacht.
08:26Between now and November 20th, the band will record six of these shows.
08:31Johnny Desmond, the singer the troops called the G.I. Sinatra, will stand at this same microphone and sing one
08:37of the band's popular songs, My Heart Tells Me, in German.
08:42Stop for a moment and consider how strange that is.
08:45On October 12th, 1935, the man running German radio had announced a definitive ban on jazz across every German station.
08:54For nine years, the Nazi state had kept this kind of music off the air.
09:00Now, the United States Army was going to put it straight into the ears of German soldiers,
09:05with one of America's most famous band leaders introducing it himself.
09:10Why go to all this trouble?
09:12To understand that, you have to go back to Normandy.
09:16To a sunken road.
09:18Victor Brombert was 19 when the army trained him to question Germans.
09:23The son of Russian émigrés who had raised him in Paris,
09:26he spoke German well enough that he and one other man from his team were sent out on a special
09:31mission, more than once.
09:33They crawled down a sunken road, past German helmets lying in the mud with holes through them, toward the German
09:40line.
09:41Then they talked through a loudspeaker, coaxing, encouraging,
09:46telling the men on the other side that surrender was a way out.
09:50The Germans answered every time.
09:53Not with words.
09:54With mortar rounds, and with rockets from the multiple launchers the G.I.s called
09:59Screaming Mimis, coming down on the place the voice had come from.
10:05And here is the part Brombert never dressed up.
10:08Not a single German surrendered on those occasions.
10:12He wrote, many years later, that it humbled them about the effectiveness of their rhetoric.
10:18Put that next to Saint-Lô.
10:21One day, 18 paratroopers walked out.
10:24On other days, the only answer was rockets.
10:28So what made the difference?
10:30That is one of the pieces of this puzzle, so hold on to it.
10:34A loudspeaker at the front had one weakness nobody could engineer away.
10:38It spoke to everybody at once.
10:41The private, who might have wanted to listen, was lying in the same hole as his sergeant.
10:46The sergeant was a few yards from his lieutenant.
10:49Every man in that position heard the same words at the same moment.
10:52And every man knew the others had heard them, too.
10:56And somewhere in that position, there was always a man with a field telephone.
11:01A radio was different.
11:03A German soldier could listen to a radio in a dugout at night, with the volume turned low.
11:08Alone, or with one or two men he trusted, nobody else had to know.
11:13He was breaking the law when he did it.
11:15From the first day of the war, September 1st, 1939, the Reich had made deliberately listening to foreign stations a
11:23crime.
11:24Men had gone to prison for it.
11:26Men who passed on what they had heard had been executed.
11:30So the Americans were not only offering music, they were offering it across a line the German state itself had
11:36drawn.
11:37Every soldier who tuned in had already made one small decision on his own.
11:42Against orders.
11:44Think about that.
11:45Before a word of persuasion reached him, he had already disobeyed once.
11:51And the program did not lecture him.
11:53The policy at the American broadcasting station in Europe was to play it straight.
11:58American popular music.
12:00American entertainers.
12:02Very little that sounded like propaganda at all.
12:06Bing Crosby sang on those German programs.
12:09So did Dinah Shore.
12:11So did Marlena Dietrich, the Berlin-born star who had taken American citizenship and now wore an American uniform.
12:19Only now and then did Miller step to the microphone and say something more.
12:23Pay close attention to this sentence because it will come back near the end of this story.
12:28And when it does, it will mean something very different.
12:31I hope the day will soon come when German soldiers will be able to return to their homes and families,
12:37to be happy and listen to whatever they may please, especially to the voice of America, the voice of freedom
12:44and liberty.
12:46Listen to what that sentence does not say.
12:49It does not say surrender.
12:51It does not say the war is lost.
12:54It talks about home, family, a man choosing for himself what he hears.
13:01The Germans tried to jam the signal.
13:03Research done after the war concluded that most of the broadcasts got through anyway.
13:08So by November of 1944, the United States was reaching the German soldier in two ways.
13:14A voice at 50 yards that could be shot at, and music in the dark that could not.
13:20But neither of them solved the real problem.
13:23A soldier in a foxhole does not surrender to a song.
13:27He surrenders to a man with a rifle, at one exact moment, with his hands in the air and his
13:34back to his own lines.
13:35On every front of this war, men were shot in that moment.
13:39Every soldier knew it.
13:41And no amount of swing music could promise him he would live through the next ten seconds.
13:47The Americans' answer to that fear was a small piece of paper with one man's signature on it.
13:53The German answer to that piece of paper did not aim at the soldier at all.
13:58It aimed at his family.
14:01October 10, 1944.
14:05Triererstrasse, on the southeastern edge of Aachen.
14:09Three American soldiers are walking toward the German lines in the open.
14:13First Lieutenant Cedric Lafley.
14:15First Lieutenant William Boehm.
14:17Private First Class Ken Kading.
14:20One of them is carrying a white flag.
14:23Another is carrying a sheet of paper.
14:26Aachen is the first major German city the Allies are about to take.
14:30It is nearly surrounded.
14:31The paper in the Americans' hands says so, in plain words.
14:35The city of Aachen is now completely surrounded by American forces.
14:39If it is not promptly and completely surrendered unconditionally, the American army's ground and air forces will proceed ruthlessly with
14:48air and artillery bombardment to reduce it to submission.
14:52The garrison has 24 hours.
14:55And the Americans did not trust one piece of paper to carry the message.
14:59The same terms went out over loudspeakers.
15:02They went out over Radio Luxembourg.
15:04They were packed into leaflet shells and fired into the city itself.
15:08Every man inside Aachen who wanted to know what was being offered could know it.
15:14Now look at what this moment really is.
15:17For the first time in this story, the choice in the title stops being a figure of speech.
15:23On one side, American words.
15:26On the other, American artillery.
15:29The Germans could have either one.
15:31They only had to choose.
15:33The German commander rejected the ultimatum.
15:36His orders, coming down from Hitler himself, were to fight for the city to the last.
15:42So the Americans kept their word.
15:46When the deadline ran out on October 11th, around 300 fighter bombers came in over Aachen and dropped more than
15:5360 tons of bombs.
15:56American guns fired 4,871 rounds into the city over two days.
16:03Hold that picture next to the loudspeaker truck at St. Lowe.
16:07The German army had chosen artillery again.
16:10Only this time, it was American artillery landing on German heads.
16:15Why would men choose that?
16:17Part of the answer was in the pockets of the German soldiers themselves.
16:22Since September, Allied aircraft had been dropping a small leaflet over the German lines.
16:27It was called a Pussiaschein, a safe conduct pass.
16:31It carried a printed signature, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Commander, and a promise in German and in English.
16:40The German soldier who carries this safe conduct is using it as a sign of his genuine wish to give
16:45himself up.
16:47He is to be disarmed, to be well looked after, to receive food and medical attention as required,
16:53and to be removed from the danger zone as soon as possible.
16:58The main version of that pass was printed in more than 67 million copies.
17:03More than 65 million were dropped.
17:06And here is the number worth remembering.
17:09An official report in October of 1944 found that 77% of German prisoners had read at least one Allied
17:17leaflet.
17:18On the Brest Peninsula, about 80% of prisoners had leaflets on them when they were taken.
17:22So the words were getting through.
17:25The German soldier knew what was being offered.
17:27He knew the Americans would honor it.
17:30Many of them were carrying the proof in their tunics.
17:34So why were so many still in their holes?
17:37Because the German army had understood something very early.
17:41It could not stop the pass from falling.
17:44It could not jam every broadcast or shoot every loudspeaker truck.
17:49What it could do was change what that piece of paper would cost.
17:54On August 2nd, 1944, an order went out from Hitler's headquarters down to the level of every division.
18:01All soldiers were to be thoroughly and repeatedly informed that any soldier who placed himself in the service of the
18:08enemy had forfeited his life and the life of his family.
18:13Then the commanders on the Western Front started asking for more.
18:16On September 26th, the general commanding the German corps defending Aachen, the very city those three Americans walked into, complained
18:24that shooting deserters was not enough of a deterrent.
18:26He asked for reprisals against their families, concentration camps, confiscation of property.
18:34Five weeks later, the commander-in-chief in the West, Field Marshal von Rundstedt, asked his subordinates to consider placing
18:41the relatives of deserters in concentration camps as well.
18:45On November 5th, the commander of Army Group G told his troops directly,
18:50If a man deserted or failed to do his duty, the arrest of his family was ordered.
18:57On November 19th, the high command in Berlin put its own name to the same threat.
19:03Stop and think about what those orders mean for our question.
19:07The German army was no longer arguing with the American voice.
19:10It had given up on winning the argument.
19:13Instead, it was trying to make sure every soldier who heard it would think of his mother first.
19:18Now go back to Aachen, October 21st, 1944.
19:23American infantry have fought their way through the city block by block,
19:27and they are closing on the bunker where the garrison's new commander, Colonel Gerhard Vilk, has his headquarters.
19:34The men who walk out of that bunker under a white flag are not German.
19:38They are two American engineers who had been captured,
19:42Staff Sergeant Ewert Padgett and Private First Class James Haswell.
19:47The Germans are sending American prisoners out to arrange their own surrender.
19:52At five minutes past noon, Brigadier General George Taylor accepts it.
19:57Around 1,600 German soldiers are taken in the city.
20:00Then, American interrogators sit down with Colonel Vilk.
20:04And what he tells them explains why Aachen burned.
20:08At first, he had refused to sign anything that used the word unconditional.
20:13When he finally broke down, he admitted he was no Nazi.
20:17He had been a close friend of Field Marshal von Witzeleben
20:20and of other officers from the July plot against Hitler.
20:23The interrogator wrote that he had acted as he did out of fear for his family.
20:27He believed, as definite knowledge, that the families of those officers had been executed.
20:33Keep that sentence in mind.
20:35A German colonel, a man who did not believe in the regime,
20:39held the city against the United States Army
20:42because of what he was sure had happened to other men's wives and children.
20:47That was the real enemy of the American voice.
20:50Not rifles. Not mortars.
20:52A picture inside a German soldier's head of what would happen at home.
20:57In February of 1945, American interrogators in the 7th Army
21:02questioned a German sergeant named Rooster.
21:05He had been captured with Eisenhower's pass in his pocket.
21:08He had never used it.
21:10What kept it in his pocket is one of the strangest facts in this whole story.
21:15Because the threat he feared was very real, on paper.
21:19Whether it was real anywhere else is a different question.
21:22February 15th, 1945.
21:25An interrogation cage of the American 7th Army in eastern France.
21:30The prisoner in front of the American interrogator is a German sergeant named Rooster.
21:35When he was searched, the men who took him found a folded piece of paper in his pocket.
21:40Eisenhower's safe conduct pass.
21:43He had carried it.
21:45He had never used it.
21:47The interrogator wanted to know why, and Rooster told him.
21:51The report puts it in one flat line.
21:54He had been deterred from using the pass by the thought of what might happen to his family.
21:59Rooster was not unusual.
22:01That same day, the intelligence staff of the 7th Army
22:05summed up what they were hearing from prisoners in general.
22:08Many of them, the report said, were seriously afraid of having their families suffer.
22:14Over the next weeks, the American interrogators kept building the picture.
22:18One prisoner told them he had stood in the room while his own commanding officer wrote a letter
22:23to the local Nazi party leader back home about two men who had deserted.
22:27The purpose of the letter, as the prisoner understood it, was that action could be taken against their families.
22:35On February 24th, another 7th Army report listed everything German units were now doing to keep men from walking across
22:42the line.
22:44Roll calls by the sergeants, barbed wire, pay books taken away so a man had no identity papers if he
22:51ran,
22:51and cases in which the families of deserters had been arrested, with the punishment made known to the men.
22:59Allied intelligence even got hold of a German army leaflet from early 1945.
23:04It announced that two deserters from the 980th Volksgrenadier Regiment had been punished,
23:10and it made a point of saying that retribution would also fall on both men's families.
23:16So here is the German soldier at the start of 1945.
23:20The American pass in his pocket.
23:22The American voice across the field.
23:25And in his head, a picture of his wife, or his mother, being taken away.
23:30Now here is the question almost nobody asks.
23:34How often did that actually happen?
23:37The honest answer surprised the historians who went looking.
23:40A historian named Robert Leffel went through what survives.
23:44One study of German military court records in the Austrian archives
23:48looked at a sample of 3,001 cases.
23:51Only 35 of them, about 1%, even possibly involved punishment of a soldier's family.
23:58In many of those, nobody can tell whether the punishment was ever carried out.
24:02And in the surviving Gestapo files of three German cities,
24:07Düsseldorf, Speyer, and Würzburg, not a single case of it turned up.
24:12It was not a pure bluff.
24:13Some families were arrested, above all the families of men from territories Germany had annexed,
24:19like Luxembourg and Alsace.
24:21But for an ordinary soldier from inside Germany,
24:23the thing he feared most was, far more often than not, a threat on paper.
24:30Now remember Colonel Wilk in his bunker in Aachen.
24:33He held that city because he was certain the family of his friend,
24:37Field Marshal von Witzleben, had been executed.
24:41Leffel found no sign that Witzleben's relatives had even been detained.
24:46The German regime itself knew the rumors had grown bigger than the reality.
24:51On December 14, 1944, the head of the Nazi security police, Ernst Kaltenbühne,
24:57sent out a memo trying to calm them down.
25:00He complained about bloodthirsty fantasies and rumors of children being liquidated
25:05and old women being exterminated.
25:07Ten days later, on Christmas Eve,
25:10a captured German major from the 17th Panzer Division
25:13was secretly recorded in a British prisoner-of-war camp.
25:17He had just heard that a relative of one of the July plotters was still alive.
25:22His reaction was pure surprise.
25:24Wasn't he killed?
25:26I thought all those families had been liquidated.
25:29Leffel's conclusion fits in one sentence.
25:32Terror in a modern state can rely as much on myth and rumor as on reality.
25:39Think about what that means for the American voice.
25:42It was not fighting a regiment.
25:44It was fighting a rumor.
25:46And you cannot shell a rumor.
25:49You cannot drop a leaflet that disproves it,
25:52because the man reading the leaflet assumes that's exactly what the enemy would say.
25:57A rumor like that loses to only one thing.
26:01What a man sees with his own eyes.
26:05Meanwhile, the music was still getting through.
26:08In February of 1945,
26:11a German war reporter noted something his superiors would not have wanted to read.
26:17Wehrmacht soldiers were still listening to Allied radio stations,
26:21and partly because they preferred the music the Allies were playing.
26:25Hundreds of German prisoners told Allied interrogators the same thing about Soldaten
26:29Zender West, a station run jointly by the American Office of Strategic Services and the British.
26:36The music, they said, was the main reason so many of them tuned in.
26:41But the man who had put his own name on music for the Wehrmacht was no longer there to hear
26:46any of it.
26:47On December 15, 1944,
26:51Glenn Miller climbed into a small, single-engine UC-64 Norseman
26:56at an airfield called Twinwood Farm, north of London.
27:00The weather was cold and foggy.
27:02The pilot was Flight Officer John Morgan.
27:05The only other passenger was Lieutenant Colonel Norman Basel.
27:10The aircraft took off toward France, flying low under the clouds, and was never seen again.
27:17The next morning, the German army attacked through the Ardennes.
27:22Three days later, Miller's band landed at Orly Airport outside Paris.
27:27He was not there to meet them.
27:29His sentence was still out there, somewhere in the dark over the German lines.
27:33German soldiers going home to their families and listening to whatever they may please.
27:39It could make a man want to go home.
27:42It could not get him out of his hole.
27:45So by early 1945, the United States had three ways to reach a German soldier.
27:51Music he could hear.
27:53Paper he could carry.
27:56A voice he could hear from 50 yards away.
28:00And against all three, the German side had a rumor and a field telephone to its guns.
28:06What the Americans still did not have was a way to prove the promise in the next 60 seconds,
28:12in front of a man's own eyes.
28:15A lieutenant who had gone into the army straight out of school in 1942 was about to find one.
28:21He did not ask anyone's permission.
28:24And his method put the choice in the title, words or artillery,
28:28straight into the German soldier's ear.
28:30March 27th, 1945.
28:33The 2nd Armored Division crosses the Rhine.
28:36In the next two weeks, its columns will run more than 200 miles across the heart of Germany,
28:41all the way to the Elbe.
28:43And somewhere in those columns, over those three weeks of fighting,
28:47is one American light tank that the division will later credit with something like 5,000 German prisoners.
28:54It does not look like much.
28:56A light tank, smaller than a Sherman.
28:58But look at the front of the turret.
29:00Bolted onto the forward slope,
29:02under a metal casing thick enough to stop light machine gun fire,
29:05there is a loudspeaker.
29:07Now look inside, because this is the detail worth remembering.
29:11To make room for the amplifiers,
29:13the crew had pulled out some of the tank's ammunition racks.
29:16The amplifiers were fastened to the bare steel,
29:19where shells used to sit.
29:21Think about that for a second.
29:22In a story about German soldiers choosing between American words and American artillery,
29:28here is an American tank that had literally traded some of its ammunition for words.
29:34The crew was small.
29:36A driver up front,
29:38an electrician in the assistant driver's seat,
29:40keeping the equipment alive,
29:41and in the turret,
29:43the man who did the talking,
29:45Sergeant Walter Freund.
29:47The officer who had put this machine together
29:50was First Lieutenant Arthur Hadley.
29:52He had enlisted at 18,
29:54straight out of school,
29:55in 1942,
29:56and he had served in tank destroyers
29:59before the army sent him into psychological warfare.
30:02By 1945,
30:04he was a liaison officer,
30:05and his proper place was at a corps headquarters,
30:08well behind the fighting.
30:11Hadley did not stay at corps headquarters.
30:13For about a week,
30:14he simply disappeared.
30:16His commanding officer,
30:18reasonably enough,
30:19assumed he had gone absent without leave,
30:22and filed charges against him.
30:23What Hadley had actually done
30:25was attach himself and his talking tank
30:27to the armored columns racing east.
30:30Whenever the tanks ran into resistance,
30:33they would send Hadley's tank up to the head of the column,
30:35and Sergeant Freund would start talking.
30:38Later,
30:39Hadley gave his explanation
30:40with a perfectly straight face.
30:43I just interpreted my orders to mean
30:45that I should do as much psychological warfare as possible.
30:48Now,
30:49you can't do much of that at corps headquarters,
30:51can you?
30:52Remember that line.
30:54Because the way Hadley broke his orders
30:56is exactly the reason the tank worked.
30:59Go back to what we learned in the last part.
31:02The German soldier's real fear
31:04was not the American rifle.
31:05It was a rumor.
31:07A picture of his family paying for what he did.
31:11And a rumor like that
31:12loses only to what a man can see for himself,
31:15right now,
31:16with his own eyes.
31:18A leaflet dropped from a plane could not do that.
31:21A radio station in London could not do that.
31:24A 25-watt truck that had to be pulled back
31:26the moment the mortars found it
31:28could not do it either.
31:30A tank,
31:31at the head of an armored column,
31:32could.
31:33Here is how Hadley described the method
31:36he and his sergeants worked out.
31:37Listen to the order of the three steps,
31:40because the order is the whole secret.
31:43We would first outline the German position.
31:46Then describe the weight of artillery and air power
31:48that was about to fall on them.
31:51Then end with assurances
31:52that those troops who surrendered
31:54would be well treated under the Geneva Conventions.
31:58Step 1.
31:59The voice tells the German soldier
32:01exactly where he is.
32:03Which hedge?
32:04Which farmhouse?
32:06Which crossroads?
32:07Think about how that lands in a foxhole.
32:10The Americans are not guessing.
32:12They can see you.
32:15Step 2.
32:16The voice tells him what is coming.
32:19Not in general,
32:21the weight of the artillery and aircraft
32:23that are about to fall on the ground
32:24he is lying on.
32:26And step 3.
32:28The way out.
32:29Do you see what just happened
32:30to the choice in our title?
32:32Up to now,
32:34the German side had always chosen artillery
32:36on its own terms,
32:37by picking up a field telephone
32:39and calling fire onto the American voice.
32:42Now the American voice
32:44was offering the choice itself,
32:46out loud,
32:47to every man in the position
32:48at the same moment.
32:50American artillery on your heads
32:52or
32:53American words
32:54and a way home.
32:56And this was not a bluff
32:58that could be called later.
32:59The column was right there.
33:01The guns were right behind it.
33:03When a broadcast failed,
33:05the attack went in
33:06and the Americans
33:07held back the final phase
33:09to broadcast one more time
33:10before mopping up.
33:12The Germans who stayed in their holes
33:14learned within minutes
33:15whether the voice
33:16had been telling the truth.
33:18Hadley understood that part
33:20better than almost anyone.
33:21Before he ever climbed
33:23into that tank,
33:24he had set up
33:25the artillery section
33:26of the 9th Army's
33:27Psychological Warfare Detachment,
33:29the men who fired
33:31leaflets from guns.
33:32His whole argument then
33:33was that the artillery
33:34had to fire those leaflets
33:36accurately
33:36at the exact German units
33:38they were written for.
33:40Headquarters gave him
33:41a formal commendation for it.
33:43He had learned early
33:44that words and shells
33:46worked best
33:47when they landed
33:47on the same spot.
33:49Now watch the method work.
33:52During the fight
33:53to break out
33:53through the Teutoburger Wald,
33:55the wooded ridges
33:56where the German army
33:57made one of its last stands
33:58in that part of Germany,
34:00an American infantry platoon
34:02was pinned to the ground
34:03by German automatic fire.
34:05Nobody could lift his head.
34:07Hadley's tank
34:08swung around the flank
34:09of the German position.
34:11It did not fire.
34:12It broadcast.
34:14The German fire stopped
34:15and the American riflemen
34:17who had been pressed
34:18into the dirt
34:19a few minutes before
34:20got up off the ground
34:22and accepted
34:23the German surrender.
34:25Just think about the men
34:26behind that German machine gun.
34:28A few minutes earlier,
34:29they were doing
34:30exactly what German soldiers
34:31had been doing
34:32to American loudspeakers
34:33since Normandy.
34:35Shooting.
34:37What changed
34:38was not their courage
34:39and not their weapons.
34:40What changed
34:41was that the voice
34:42now came from the same direction
34:43as the tanks.
34:45It knew where they were.
34:47It told them
34:48what was coming.
34:49And for once,
34:50the way out
34:51was in plain sight.
34:53Over the week
34:54of his unofficial absence,
34:56Hadley made more
34:56than 100 broadcasts.
34:58By his own estimate,
35:00only five of them
35:00brought in no prisoners at all.
35:03Five out of a hundred.
35:05Hold that number up
35:06against Victor Brombert
35:07in his sunken road
35:08in Normandy,
35:09where not a single German
35:11came out.
35:12Same language,
35:14same promise.
35:15Often the same
35:16Geneva Conventions.
35:18Something else
35:19had changed.
35:20Part of that change
35:22was simply the calendar.
35:23By April of 1945,
35:25the German army
35:26in the West
35:26was collapsing,
35:27and any honest account
35:29has to say so.
35:30But collapse alone
35:31does not explain
35:31a machine gun crew
35:32that stops shooting
35:33in the middle
35:34of a firefight.
35:36Something happened
35:36in those few minutes
35:37that the German threat
35:39against their families
35:40could not beat.
35:42And the most striking proof
35:43came at a town
35:44called Hildesheim.
35:46There,
35:47Hadley's voice
35:47did something
35:48no gun in the American army
35:50could have done.
35:51It saved a bridge
35:52from being blown.
35:54And it did it
35:55by talking to people
35:56who were not soldiers
35:57at all.
35:57March 22nd, 1945,
36:00Hildesheim
36:01in Lower Saxony.
36:03In the space
36:04of about 15 minutes,
36:06some 250 British
36:08and Canadian bombers
36:09drop more than
36:10a thousand tons
36:11of high-explosive
36:13and incendiaries
36:14on the old town.
36:15The cathedral goes.
36:17St. Michael's church goes.
36:19By the end
36:20of the raids
36:20that March,
36:21nearly three-quarters
36:22of the city's buildings
36:23have been destroyed
36:24or damaged
36:25and around 1,500 civilians
36:27are dead.
36:29Keep that picture
36:30in mind for a moment.
36:31That is what
36:32the other choice
36:33looked like
36:34when it came
36:34to a German town.
36:36Not words.
36:38Steel from the sky.
36:40About two weeks later,
36:41an American light tank
36:42with a loudspeaker
36:44bolted to its turret
36:45rolls up to the outskirts
36:46of the same city.
36:48Hadley's tank starts
36:49where it always starts.
36:51It talks to the German soldiers
36:52on the edge of town.
36:54Roughly 200 of them
36:55come out
36:56and give themselves up.
36:57Then the crew
36:58runs into the kind
36:59of problem
37:00artillery cannot solve.
37:02There is a bridge.
37:03The Germans have laid
37:04explosive charges under it.
37:06If it goes up,
37:07the column stalls,
37:08and the fight
37:08for Hildesheim
37:09gets longer
37:10and bloodier
37:11for everybody.
37:13So the voice
37:13does something new.
37:14It stops talking
37:15to soldiers.
37:17Hildesheim,
37:18like every German city
37:19in 1945,
37:20was full of foreign workers.
37:22Men and women
37:23brought into Germany
37:24from across occupied Europe
37:25to keep the factories
37:26and railways running,
37:27most of them
37:28against their will.
37:29The tank broadcasts
37:31to them.
37:32It asks them
37:33to take the explosive charges
37:34off the bridge.
37:36And they do.
37:37Word comes back
37:38that the charges are gone.
37:40The tank rolls across
37:41into the town itself,
37:42and 50 more German soldiers
37:44surrender.
37:45Now,
37:46this story would be a lie
37:47if it stopped there,
37:48so here's the rest.
37:50Deeper in the town,
37:51the tank ran into
37:52heavy machine gun fire,
37:53and it had no support
37:55around it.
37:55It pulled back.
37:57Not every German listened.
37:59Some of them kept doing
38:00exactly what German soldiers
38:02had done since Santlo.
38:03They fired at the voice.
38:05But think about what happened
38:07on that bridge.
38:08The German army
38:09could still shoot
38:10at a speaker.
38:12What it could not do
38:13was stop a whole town
38:15from hearing it.
38:16The workers under
38:17that bridge
38:18were not in anyone's
38:20chain of command.
38:21No threat against
38:22their families
38:23would hold them.
38:24The voice had found
38:25listeners that no
38:26German officer controlled.
38:29A few days later,
38:30on April 10th,
38:31American tanks
38:32of the 66th Armored Regiment
38:34were filmed
38:34rolling through
38:35the ruined streets
38:36of Hildesheim
38:37on their way east.
38:38Now come west again,
38:40a little earlier
38:41in that same run
38:42across Germany,
38:43to two small towns.
38:45The first is Bad Piemont.
38:47Before the war,
38:48it was a spa town,
38:49the kind of place
38:50Germans went
38:51to take the waters.
38:52By 1945,
38:54its hotels and guest houses
38:55had been turned
38:56into military hospitals.
38:58The town was full
38:59of wounded German soldiers.
39:01The second is Blomberg,
39:03a small old town
39:05in the hills of Lippe.
39:06In both towns,
39:07the German commanders
39:08did something
39:09that would have been
39:09unthinkable
39:10a year earlier.
39:12They came out
39:13and personally surrendered
39:14their swords
39:15to the commander
39:16of the talking tank.
39:18And they guaranteed
39:19that the soldiers
39:20in their towns
39:21would not fire
39:22a single shot.
39:24I want you to stop
39:25on that for a moment,
39:26because this is the turn
39:28in the whole story.
39:30Go back through
39:31everything we have seen.
39:33At St. Lowe,
39:34it was privates
39:35and paratroopers
39:36who walked out,
39:36while somebody behind them
39:38tried to kill the voice.
39:40In Normandy,
39:41Brombert's broadcasts
39:42brought mortar rounds
39:43and rockets,
39:44which means an officer
39:45somewhere had picked
39:47up a telephone.
39:48At Aachen,
39:50the commander chose
39:50American artillery
39:51over American words
39:53and let his city burn.
39:55All through the autumn
39:56and winter,
39:57it was the German officers
39:58and generals
39:59who wrote the orders,
40:00called in the fire,
40:01and threatened the families.
40:04In Badpirmont
40:05and Blomberg,
40:06the voice had reached
40:07the officers.
40:07The men whose job
40:09had been to call fire
40:10onto the American speaker
40:11were now walking up to it
40:13and handing over
40:14their swords.
40:15The last line
40:16of German resistance
40:17to the voice,
40:18the chain of command itself,
40:20had started to give way.
40:22Hadley later counted
40:24it all up.
40:25Counting the garrisons
40:26of towns
40:26and the men
40:27in their hospitals,
40:28over 5,000 prisoners
40:29of war were taken.
40:31The 2nd Armored Division
40:33credited the talking tank
40:34with about 5,000 surrenders
40:36in three weeks of fighting
40:37beyond the Rhine.
40:39Here is a way
40:40to feel that number.
40:41At St. Lowe,
40:42in July,
40:43a 25-watt truck
40:45brought in 18 men,
40:46and an infantryman
40:47was so surprised
40:48he said he had been wrong.
40:505,000 is nearly
40:52300 times that,
40:53and every one
40:54of those 5,000
40:55was a German soldier
40:56the Americans
40:57did not have to shoot at,
40:59and who did not
41:00shoot at them.
41:01On April 15, 1945,
41:04the story reached
41:05Stars and Stripes,
41:07the Army's own newspaper.
41:08The records that survive
41:09say very little
41:10about what became
41:11of the absence-without-leave charges.
41:13They say a great deal
41:15about the prisoners.
41:16The 12th Army Group,
41:18the headquarters
41:18over the American armies
41:20in the North,
41:21wrote its own verdict
41:22on the loudspeakers
41:23when the fighting was over.
41:25The combat loudspeakers
41:27were responsible
41:27for the capture
41:28of thousands of prisoners,
41:29for the surrender
41:31of strong points
41:31and roadblocks
41:32held by enemy rear guards,
41:34and for the capitulation
41:36of many towns
41:37without a shot being fired
41:38by their garrisons.
41:40Without a shot being fired.
41:42Think about how many
41:43American lives
41:44are folded
41:45inside that phrase.
41:47Every roadblock
41:48that surrendered
41:49was a roadblock
41:50no American rifle company
41:52had to assault.
41:53Every town that gave up
41:55was a town
41:56no American tank crew
41:58had to fight through
41:59street by street
42:00the way the infantry
42:01had fought through Aachen.
42:03So now we are close
42:04to the answer
42:05to the question
42:06we asked at the very beginning.
42:07Why did the German side
42:09spend its shells
42:10on a voice?
42:11You have most
42:12of the pieces already.
42:13The rumor about families,
42:15the field telephone,
42:17the pass that stayed
42:18in a sergeant's pocket,
42:19the music men
42:20kept listening to
42:21against orders,
42:22the tank that told men
42:23where they were
42:24and what was coming.
42:25But one piece
42:26is still missing
42:27and it is the one
42:29that makes all
42:29the others fit.
42:30It is a single sentence.
42:33Hadley said
42:34he and his sergeants
42:35repeated it over and over
42:36from Normandy
42:37to the Elbe
42:38in tanks
42:39and in foxholes.
42:41It was not a threat.
42:43It was the most dangerous
42:44thing the Americans
42:45said to the German army
42:46in the entire war.
42:48You will be well handled
42:49according to the
42:50Geneva Conventions.
42:52That is the sentence.
42:54Hadley and his sergeants
42:55said it in German
42:56so many times
42:57from Normandy
42:58to the Elbe
42:59that he remembered it
43:00for the rest of his life.
43:01It is not dramatic.
43:03There is no threat in it.
43:04It sounds like something
43:06a clerk would say.
43:07And it was the one sentence
43:09the German army
43:09had no answer to.
43:11Here is why.
43:13Everything the German command
43:14did through the autumn
43:15and winter
43:16rested on one idea.
43:18The German soldier
43:19must not believe
43:20that it was safe
43:21to cross the line.
43:23Every order about families,
43:25every rumor about executions,
43:28every roll call
43:29and every confiscated paybook
43:31was built on that one foundation.
43:34If the man in the hole
43:35thought surrender meant a bullet
43:36or a broken life
43:38or his mother in a camp,
43:40he would stay in the hole
43:41and fight.
43:42The German side
43:44even tried to fight
43:44the promise head on.
43:46Its propagandists
43:48printed a parody
43:48of Eisenhower's pass.
43:50Surrender,
43:51it told the soldier,
43:52meant ten years
43:53in captivity
43:54and coming home
43:55a broken old man.
43:57It sneered
43:59that no German soldier
44:00would let himself
44:01be lured into surrender
44:02by ham and eggs.
44:05Think about that.
44:06The Reich
44:07had to print leaflets,
44:09arguing with a leaflet.
44:12Now go back to the pass itself.
44:14One German soldier
44:16walked into the American lines
44:17and announced
44:18that he had a document
44:19bearing General Eisenhower's
44:21personal signature,
44:22as if it were a ticket.
44:25In one single day,
44:2644 men of the German
44:29256th Volksgrenadier Division
44:31came over to an American unit
44:33and nearly all of them
44:35were carrying that pass.
44:37Why did the piece of paper
44:39work for them
44:39and not for Sergeant Rooster?
44:42The paper was the same.
44:44What differed
44:45was whether the man
44:46holding it
44:46believed the Americans
44:47would keep their word
44:49and whether he could see,
44:50right in front of him,
44:52that they already had.
44:54And this is where
44:55the promise
44:55had something behind it
44:56that no propaganda
44:58could fake.
44:58The Americans kept it.
45:00German prisoners
45:01taken by the U.S. Army
45:02were disarmed,
45:03fed,
45:04treated for their wounds
45:05and moved back
45:06from the fighting.
45:07Hundreds of thousands
45:08of them were shipped
45:09across the Atlantic
45:10to camps inside
45:11the United States
45:12where they were held
45:13under the rules
45:14of the Geneva Convention
45:15of 1929.
45:17Word of that
45:18got back to the German lines
45:19in the way word
45:20always travels
45:21in an army.
45:22Through the men
45:23who had seen it.
45:25So now,
45:26put every piece
45:26of this story together
45:27and the answer
45:28to our question
45:29comes into focus.
45:31Why would German outposts
45:33spend precious shells
45:34on a speaker
45:35instead of on the American
45:36guns that were killing them?
45:38Because a German soldier
45:40could live with artillery.
45:42He had been living
45:43with it since June.
45:44Artillery kills some men
45:46and terrifies the rest.
45:48And the rest
45:49stay in their holes.
45:50That is exactly
45:51what a German commander
45:52needs from them.
45:53He can hold a line
45:55with frightened men
45:56who stay put.
45:57The voice
45:58did the opposite.
45:59It killed nobody.
46:01And it emptied the holes.
46:03To a German officer
46:04holding a position,
46:05American shells
46:06were a problem.
46:07An American promise
46:09that his men believed
46:10was the end
46:11of his command.
46:13Shells could take away
46:14some of his soldiers.
46:15The voice
46:15could take away
46:16all of them
46:17and leave the position
46:18standing
46:19with nobody in it.
46:21That is why
46:22the field telephone
46:22rang the moment
46:23the speaker started talking.
46:25That is why rockets
46:26came down on
46:27Victor Brombert
46:28in his sunken road.
46:29And why machine guns
46:30raked the truck
46:31at Saint-Lô
46:32and why the heavy guns
46:33at Hildesheim
46:34opened up
46:35on Hadley's tank.
46:37From the German
46:38side of the line,
46:39the voice was more dangerous
46:40than anything else
46:41the Americans
46:41could put in front of them.
46:43And the only defense left
46:44was to try to destroy it
46:46before the men
46:47heard too much.
46:48And the music?
46:50The music
46:51was the part
46:51that could not be shot at.
46:53Glenn Miller
46:54never promised
46:55the German soldier safety.
46:57He promised him
46:58something harder
46:58to put down.
47:00That there was still
47:01a world
47:01on the other side
47:02of all this.
47:03Families.
47:05Home.
47:06A man choosing
47:07for himself
47:08what he listened to.
47:10Every soldier
47:10who tuned in at night
47:11against the law
47:12had already heard
47:14that the other side
47:15was not what
47:15his officers said it was.
47:17When the voice
47:18finally came
47:19from the head
47:19of an armored column
47:20and told him the rest,
47:22part of him
47:23was already listening.
47:24This is the whole picture.
47:27The music
47:27opened the door
47:28in a man's mind.
47:30The pass
47:30put the proof
47:31in his pocket.
47:33The artillery
47:34made the choice real.
47:35And the voice
47:36put all of it
47:38in front of him
47:39at one moment.
47:40While the German command
47:41was left with a rumor
47:43and a telephone.
47:45Now listen to how
47:46that moment played out
47:47the way the 12th Army group
47:49recorded it
47:49for towns
47:50across Germany.
47:51The American troops
47:53hold their fire.
47:54The tank moves up
47:55and talks to the garrison.
47:57It tells the Germans
47:58where they are.
47:59It tells them
48:00what is about
48:01to fall on them.
48:02It tells them
48:03how they will be treated.
48:05If the talk fails,
48:07the attack goes in.
48:08And before the last phase,
48:10before the mopping up,
48:11the attack stops.
48:13And the voice speaks
48:14one more time.
48:16Picture the German soldiers
48:17in that town
48:18during the pause.
48:19They have just been hit
48:20by exactly what the voice
48:21said would hit them.
48:23Now the same voice
48:24is back,
48:25saying the offer
48:25still stands.
48:27Everything it has told them
48:28has come true so far.
48:30That is where the choice
48:31in our title
48:32finally came down
48:33to a single man
48:34in a single hole.
48:35Keep taking American artillery.
48:37Or,
48:38believe the American voice.
48:40And in town after town
48:42in the spring of 1945,
48:44German soldiers
48:45chose the voice.
48:46The Americans
48:47who ran this campaign
48:48drew their own conclusion
48:50when it was over.
48:51One of them,
48:52Daniel Lerner,
48:52wrote the history
48:53of the psychological
48:54warfare division's
48:55work against Germany.
48:56His verdict on the loudspeakers
48:58was not that they
48:59had been overrated.
49:00It was the opposite.
49:02A primary lesson of the war,
49:04he wrote,
49:04was that they were
49:05not used enough.
49:07Think back to that
49:08infantryman at St. Lowe
49:09in July.
49:10Why the hell don't you guys
49:11bring that thing up here
49:12all the time?
49:14Nine months later,
49:15the army's own history
49:16came to the same conclusion
49:18he had reached in a hedgerow
49:19in one afternoon.
49:21But the answer
49:22is not quite complete.
49:24There is one more thing
49:25the German command
49:26could not see
49:27from its side of the line,
49:28and it only shows
49:30when you follow
49:30the Americans home.
49:32Because the men
49:33who carried that voice
49:34paid for it.
49:36One of them
49:37came back from the war
49:38with a silver star
49:39and a purple heart.
49:40One of them
49:41never came back at all.
49:43And Glenn Miller's sentence,
49:45the one you were asked
49:46to remember,
49:47still had one more meaning
49:49waiting for it.
49:50Go back one last time
49:51to where this began.
49:53July 15th, 1944.
49:57A hedgerow
49:58outside St. Lowe.
50:00A truck
50:00with a 25-watt speaker
50:02less than 50 yards
50:04from German paratroopers.
50:05Rounds hitting its sides.
50:08A voice
50:08that keeps talking.
50:11Eighteen men
50:12climbing out of their holes.
50:13And an American infantryman
50:15who had not believed
50:16in any of it,
50:17asking out loud
50:18why they didn't bring
50:19that thing up there
50:20all the time.
50:22We never learn his name.
50:24The records kept his question
50:26and lost the man.
50:28We do not know
50:29the names of the crew
50:30in that truck, either.
50:32What we know
50:33is what they did.
50:34They drove into rifle range
50:36on purpose.
50:37They stayed there.
50:39And they kept talking
50:41while they were being shot at.
50:43That is the part
50:44of this story
50:45the German side
50:46of the line
50:46could never see.
50:48From across the field,
50:49the voice was a weapon,
50:51something to be silenced
50:52with a mortar round
50:53or a machine gun burst.
50:55From the American side,
50:56it was a handful
50:56of soldiers
50:57who chose,
50:58day after day,
50:59to make themselves
51:00the target
51:00so that the men
51:01in front of them
51:02would have a way out
51:03and the men behind them
51:04would have one less
51:05position to storm.
51:07Arthur Hadley
51:08was one of them.
51:10The charges for absence
51:11without leave
51:12did not end his war.
51:13Something else did.
51:15In the final stages
51:16of the fighting in Germany,
51:18he was severely wounded.
51:19He came home
51:20with the Purple Heart
51:21and the Silver Star,
51:22and he left the army
51:23as a captain.
51:25Then he did what a great
51:26many young Americans
51:27did in those years.
51:28He went back to school.
51:30He finished Yale
51:31in three years
51:32and graduated in 1949,
51:35magna cum laude.
51:36He joined Newsweek.
51:38He covered the Pentagon
51:39during the Korean War
51:41and the White House
51:42under Truman and Eisenhower.
51:44He became assistant executive editor
51:46of the New York Herald Tribune.
51:48He wrote ten books,
51:50one of them
51:50about the American
51:51armed forces themselves,
51:53called The Straw Giant.
51:54He gave land
51:55on Martha's Vineyard
51:56for a wildlife refuge
51:57at Long Point.
51:59Arthur Hadley died
52:01on November 25, 2015.
52:03He was 91.
52:05He left six children
52:06and six grandchildren.
52:08When he looked back
52:09on that tank,
52:11what stayed with him
52:12was not the 5,000 prisoners.
52:14It was the sentence.
52:16Over and over,
52:18from Normandy to the Elbe,
52:19in tanks
52:20and in foxholes,
52:21my sergeants and I
52:22would say in German,
52:24you will be well handled
52:25according to the
52:26Geneva Conventions.
52:28He said it
52:29because it was true.
52:30That was the whole secret.
52:32It is also the reason
52:34it worked.
52:35And Glenn Miller
52:36never came back at all.
52:39The small Norseman
52:40that lifted off
52:41from Twinwood Farm
52:42into the fog
52:43on December 15, 1944
52:45was never found.
52:47No wreck
52:48has ever been identified.
52:50No grave.
52:51His band played on
52:53without him
52:53through the last months
52:54of the war.
52:57Now it is time
52:58for the sentence
52:58you were asked to remember
52:59back at Abbey Road.
53:00I hope the day
53:01will soon come
53:02when German soldiers
53:03will be able to return
53:04to their homes
53:05and families
53:06to be happy
53:07and listen to
53:08whatever they may please.
53:10When Miller
53:11read those words
53:12off a phonetic script
53:13in October of 1944,
53:15they were a piece
53:16of psychological warfare.
53:18Words aimed
53:19across a front line
53:20at men who could be
53:20jailed for listening to them.
53:22Then the war ended.
53:24Most of the German soldiers
53:26who had walked
53:26toward those American voices
53:28did go home
53:29to their families.
53:30And within months
53:31of the surrender,
53:32the American forces network
53:34was on the air
53:35from inside Germany itself,
53:37playing the same kind
53:38of American music
53:39the Reich had banned
53:40from its radio in 1935.
53:42A great many Germans
53:44tuned in.
53:45Nobody came
53:46to arrest them for it.
53:47The day Miller
53:48hoped for came.
53:50He did not live
53:51to see it.
53:52But the promise
53:53in that sentence
53:54was kept,
53:54the same way
53:55the promise
53:56in Hadley's sentence
53:57was kept.
53:58That is the thread
53:59running through
54:00this whole story.
54:01The Americans said
54:02what would happen
54:03and then it happened.
54:04So here is the answer
54:06to the question
54:06we started with.
54:07Why did German soldiers
54:09turn their guns
54:10on American voices
54:11and American music
54:12instead of on the American guns
54:14that were killing them?
54:16Because shells
54:17could only kill them.
54:19A promise the Americans kept
54:21could bring them home.
54:23And no army
54:25can hold a line
54:26against that.
54:27That is what the German side
54:29feared about the voice.
54:30Not its volume.
54:32Not its words.
54:33The fact that
54:34time after time
54:36it turned out
54:37to be telling
54:37the truth.
54:39But the last word here
54:40does not belong
54:41to the men
54:42who fired
54:43at the voice.
54:44It belongs to the men
54:45who carried it.
54:47A German-speaking sergeant
54:49in a truck
54:49at St. Lowe,
54:5050 yards
54:51from the paratroopers,
54:52a 19-year-old
54:54named Victor Brombert
54:56crawling down
54:57a sunken road
54:58past dead men's helmets
54:59knowing the rockets
55:01would come.
55:01A lieutenant
55:02who walked away
55:03from a safe headquarters
55:04so he could sit
55:05in the front
55:05of an armored column
55:06with a speaker
55:07instead of a gun.
55:09A bandleader
55:10from Iowa
55:10reading German
55:11he could not understand
55:12into a London microphone
55:14because someone thought
55:15it might end the war
55:16a little sooner.
55:18None of them
55:19won their part
55:20of this war
55:20by killing.
55:21They won it
55:22by being believed
55:23and the reason
55:25they were believed
55:25is that the army
55:26behind them
55:27the American soldiers
55:29who held their fire
55:30while the tank talked
55:31who fed the prisoners
55:32and bandaged
55:33their wounds
55:34and moved them
55:35back from the danger zone
55:36kept every word
55:38those voices promised.
55:40At St. Lowe
55:41an American infantryman
55:43asked why they didn't
55:44bring that thing up
55:45all the time.
55:46By the end of the war
55:48the answer was
55:49in the towns
55:49that surrendered
55:50without a shot
55:51and in the American soldiers
55:53who came home
55:54because of it.
55:56Thank you for watching
55:57all the way to the end.
55:58If this story
55:59of the American soldiers
56:01who went into battle
56:02with a microphone
56:03meant something to you
56:04please hit like.
56:05It genuinely helps
56:06stories like this one
56:07reach people
56:08who have never heard them.
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56:12the next one.
56:13And tell me in the comments
56:14where you're watching from.
56:15If your father,
56:17grandfather,
56:18or uncle
56:18served with the allied forces
56:20in the Second World War
56:21write his name
56:22and the unit
56:23he served in.
56:24Let's make sure
56:25they are remembered.