- 7 hours ago
Spring 1945 in collapsing Germany, American tanks rolled forward expecting ambushes — then German children ran straight toward them with empty hands. The answer to that shocking moment begins with hunger, indoctrination, and a war that had taught boys to fear the enemy while ordering them to fight to the death.
This historical narration follows the story from the orchards of Central Germany to the Allied policy of non-fraternization, where American soldiers were told not to show even a child kindness. It also traces how that rule broke in practice, as GIs slipped candy to starving children and began to see not enemies, but kids who looked like their own.
The story then moves to the Berlin Airlift, where Gail Halvorsen turned a small act of sharing gum into the famous “Chocolate Flyer” drops. It is a powerful World War II and postwar history story about military orders, propaganda, collective guilt, German children, and the human moments that changed both sides.
Created for listeners who enjoy WW2 stories, military history narration, historical documentary-style storytelling, and wartime human-interest stories. A strong choice for history podcasts, calm long-form listening, and anyone searching for World War 2 stories, German history, American soldiers in Germany, Berlin Airlift stories, and narrated history with emotional depth.
This historical narration follows the story from the orchards of Central Germany to the Allied policy of non-fraternization, where American soldiers were told not to show even a child kindness. It also traces how that rule broke in practice, as GIs slipped candy to starving children and began to see not enemies, but kids who looked like their own.
The story then moves to the Berlin Airlift, where Gail Halvorsen turned a small act of sharing gum into the famous “Chocolate Flyer” drops. It is a powerful World War II and postwar history story about military orders, propaganda, collective guilt, German children, and the human moments that changed both sides.
Created for listeners who enjoy WW2 stories, military history narration, historical documentary-style storytelling, and wartime human-interest stories. A strong choice for history podcasts, calm long-form listening, and anyone searching for World War 2 stories, German history, American soldiers in Germany, Berlin Airlift stories, and narrated history with emotional depth.
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LearningTranscript
00:00It is the 12th of April, 1945. A column of Sherman tanks from the American 4th Armored
00:06Division is grinding through the countryside of central Germany, east, deeper into the country,
00:12toward the heart of a Reich that is collapsing by the hour. The men riding the steel have learned
00:18to hate one exact part of this job. Not the open road. The towns. The places where the houses
00:27press in close, and a window becomes a firing slit. The lead gunner has his eyes on the rooftops.
00:34He has been told what to watch for. In the last weeks, the army has handed every man a small
00:40printed warning about this country. And the warning is specific. Be careful of the teenagers.
00:47Be careful of the boy, who looks too young to matter. Because in towns not far from here,
00:53boys exactly that age had knelt in doorways, with a tube of metal balanced on one shoulder,
01:00a panzerfaust, and waited for a tank, just like this one, to roll past the corner.
01:07So when a small figure breaks from a doorway up ahead and runs, not away from the column,
01:12but straight at it, every man on that lead tank goes cold. The gunner's hand is already moving.
01:18This is the half-second the whole war has trained him for. A running child, in this country,
01:24in this month, is not automatically a child. He could be the thing in the printed warning.
01:30He could be carrying a grenade under that coat. The state that owns this boy has spent 12 years
01:35telling him that the men on this tank are animals, and has spent the last six months telling him to
01:40die killing them. And the boy keeps running. Toward the gun. Toward the one place every instinct
01:47should be screaming at him not to go. He stops at the edge of the tread. He looks up.
01:52And he holds out his hand. Empty. Palm open. Hold on to that image. The empty hand,
01:59raised toward the barrel of a 30-ton machine built to kill his father.
02:04We are going to spend the next hour answering one question. And it is not the question you think
02:09it is. The question is not what the soldier gave him. The real question is harder. Why did this child
02:17run toward the gun at all? When everything he had ever been taught told him to hide? And everything
02:23his country now demanded told him to fight? If you want more stories like this, the small human moments
02:30the history books march right past, do me one favor. Tap the like button and subscribe.
02:37It tells the channel these stories matter. That's all I'll ask.
02:42To understand that raised hand, you have to understand what was happening to Germany in the
02:48spring of 1945. And you have to throw out the picture you probably carry. We imagined the children
02:55of the Third Reich hiding in cellars while the enemy came. Many did. But that is not the whole story.
03:02And it is not even the strangest part of it. Because the boys of Germany in that final spring
03:08had been handed a script, a precise, deadly script, by the men who ruled them.
03:16Here is the script. On the 9th of March, just weeks before our column reached those orchards,
03:23Josef Goebbels pinned the Iron Cross to the chest of a 16-year-old named Willi Hubna for helping
03:29defend a town against the advancing enemy. The message to every boy in Germany was unmistakable.
03:40Across the country, boys of 12, 13, 15 were pulled out of school, handed a panzerfaust and half a day
03:49of instruction, sewn into uniforms cut for grown men, and pointed at the nearest road. One of them,
03:57a 15-year-old from Leipzig named Heinz Schütze, got exactly that treatment. A single afternoon's
04:04training, an SS tunic, and a place at the front. And the voice in their ears never stopped.
04:12That April, a radio station calling itself Wehrwolf was broadcasting across the Dying Reich,
04:18opening each transmission with the recorded howl of a wolf, ordering every German, man, woman,
04:24and child, to fight on, to ambush, to kill any enemy soldier who set foot on German soil,
04:31and any German who dared welcome him. Surrender was treason. Kindness to the enemy was treason.
04:41For a boy raised entirely inside that voice, the American tank was not a machine. It was the wolf's
04:48prey. And he was supposed to be the wolf. And some of them did it. Some of them knelt in
04:55those doorways
04:55and fired. The danger was real enough that the Americans took it with deadly seriousness.
05:01That very summer, an American firing squad would execute two German teenagers,
05:05Heinz Petry and Josef Schroener, caught slipping behind the lines as spies.
05:11So the man on the tank could not afford to assume the running boy was harmless.
05:17That is the brutal fact sitting at the center of this story, the one we cannot skip.
05:22The German child in the American tank were, by official decree, supposed to be enemies.
05:29Berlin had ordered these children to destroy the very machines we just watched one of them run toward.
05:35So this is the collision. Two scripts, written for the same boy, arriving at the same corner at the
05:42same moment. One script, from his own government, said,
05:45This steel is the enemy. Kill it or die trying. The other script, the one he actually followed,
05:53sent him running into the open road with his handout.
05:57Something overrode twelve years of teaching in the space of a single afternoon.
06:01Something was stronger than the Iron Cross. Stronger than the Panzerfaust.
06:06Stronger than the voice on the radio howling like a wolf.
06:10And here is the part I want you to hold onto, because we will come back to it.
06:15The thing strong enough to do this was not a weapon, and it was not a speech.
06:20It was, on paper, against the rules.
06:24Because the men on that tank were under a direct order.
06:28An order signed at the very top of the American command.
06:31An order that made the small act we are about to watch,
06:34a soldier reaching into his pocket for a child. A punishable offense.
06:40And the document that spelled it out was written,
06:43of all the people on earth, by a man whose words you have almost certainly read aloud to your own
06:48children at bedtime.
06:50The man bent over the desk was an army captain, 41 years old, named Theodore Geisel.
06:55You know him by the name he signed on his children's books, Dr. Seuss.
07:00But in 1945, he was not writing about red fish or striped hats.
07:05He was writing the narration for a War Department film called Your Job in Germany.
07:11And folded inside that film was an order.
07:14An order aimed at every American soldier about to set foot in the Reich.
07:19Picture the room where they watched it.
07:22A requisitioned hall somewhere behind the lines,
07:25or the blacked out hold of a transport ship.
07:28Rows of young men on folding chairs, helmets in their laps, a projector clattering behind their heads.
07:35Most of them had never been to Germany.
07:38Almost everything they thought they knew about the enemy's homeland,
07:41they were about to absorb in the next 12 minutes, in the dark.
07:46And the voice that came off that screen did not tell them they were going to liberate anyone.
07:51It told them the opposite.
07:53The film had been shaped under Frank Capra, the same director who built the Army's famous Why We Fight series.
08:00Its message was iron, and it was built to be.
08:04Trust no German, the film said.
08:07The friendly farmer, the polite shopkeeper, the woman who smiles, the child who waves.
08:13Every one of them had cheered this war while it was winning.
08:16Do not argue with them.
08:18Do not take their hand.
08:20Do not, above all, go soft.
08:23The German hunger for conquest was not dead, the narration warned.
08:27It was only hiding behind a pleasant face, waiting for you to lower your guard.
08:33This was not just a movie.
08:35It was policy, signed at the very top of the supreme headquarters of the Allied forces,
08:40before the first American units crossed the border.
08:43The official word for the forbidden thing was fraternization, and the order banned all of it.
08:50The editorials pressed into the troops' hands put it in blunter language.
08:54Don't get chummy with Jerry.
08:57And remember that printed warning from a moment ago?
09:00The one telling the gunner to watch the teenagers most of all?
09:04That came from the same source.
09:06The Army's own pocket guide to Germany told its men to fear the young ones first.
09:12And the order drew the line absurdly wide.
09:16To fraternize did not only mean romance or friendship.
09:20Under the rules as written, an American was not to share a meal,
09:24with a German.
09:25Not to shake a hand.
09:27Not to offer a ride, or a seat, or a kind word.
09:31Not to crouch down and play with a child in the street.
09:34He could be punished for any of it.
09:37More than three million Americans would eventually serve in occupied Germany under some version of this order.
09:43And each of them carried, in his pocket and in his instructions, the same command.
09:49Hold the line.
09:51Even against a five-year-old.
09:54Now, the Army was not being cruel for sport.
09:57There was a hard logic underneath.
10:00Back home, Americans were frightened that their boys would reach Germany,
10:04look into ordinary German faces, and begin to forgive.
10:09That fear spiked in the spring of 45, when newspapers reported American officers socializing amiably with captured Nazi leaders.
10:19The policy had a doctrine behind it, and the doctrine had a name.
10:23Collective guilt.
10:25The idea was simple and total.
10:27There are no innocent Germans.
10:30Not the soldier, not the housewife, not the boy.
10:33All of them built this.
10:35All of them owe.
10:37And a soldier who slips that boy a candy bar is letting one of the guilty off the hook.
10:43I want you to sit with how strange this is, because we are so used to the picture, the grinning
10:50G.I., the chocolate bar, the children swarming the tank, that we forget it was forbidden.
10:57The image you carry in your head of American generosity in Germany?
11:01At the start, it was contraband.
11:04The first soldier who did it was breaking a direct order from Dwight Eisenhower himself.
11:10It was, on paper, a crime against the rules of his own army.
11:15And it happened anyway, tens of thousands of times, because of something those rules had not counted on.
11:23So understand precisely what this order did.
11:27It took the most ordinary reflex a human being has, to be gentle with a child, and made that reflex
11:34a punishable act.
11:35A man could be fined for it, stripped of rank for it.
11:41The United States Army, the most powerful military force on earth, had written down a rule against being kind to
11:49children.
11:50Keep that fact close, because it shapes everything that follows.
11:56Kindness, in the spring of 1945, was against regulations.
12:01The men on that tank were not supposed to reach into their pockets.
12:05They had been told, in a darkened room, by the gentle voice of the man who would one day write,
12:11Green Eggs and Ham, that the small figure in the road was not a child at all, but an enemy
12:17in miniature.
12:19They had been ordered to believe it.
12:21And then they met the actual child.
12:25For most of the population, the order held.
12:28It held against the shopkeepers.
12:30It held against the old men.
12:32The commanders read their reports and saw a policy that was, in their own words, fairly well observed.
12:39The men stayed hard.
12:41Right up until the instant a small figure broke from a doorway and ran toward the steel with an empty
12:47hand out.
12:49And there, in exactly one place, the whole iron structure cracked.
12:55The generals saw the crack coming, and they did something that tells you how seriously they took it.
13:01They argued about it, on paper, straight up the chain of command,
13:06until the question landed on the desk of General George Marshall himself, the most powerful soldier in America.
13:13The argument was not about tanks or fuel or bridges.
13:17It came down to a single, almost childish question.
13:21A question Marshall turned over in his mind and could not answer.
13:25And the way that question finally got answered would quietly begin to pull apart everything the army believed about the
13:32people it had come to conquer.
13:34On the 2nd of June, 1945, General Dwight Eisenhower sat down to report to General George Marshall on how the
13:41non-fraternization order was holding.
13:44His assessment was steady, almost satisfied.
13:48Across occupied Germany, he wrote,
13:51the rules were being fairly well observed.
13:53The men were staying hard.
13:55The line was holding.
13:58Except, he added, in one case.
14:01Except with small children.
14:04That single exception is what this whole story turns on.
14:08And Eisenhower knew it was dangerous.
14:11Not because a soldier sharing gum with a six-year-old threatened the occupation,
14:15but because of what it might lead to.
14:18If the order broke at the child, it could break anywhere.
14:23A man who bends the rule for a little boy today
14:26talks to the boy's mother tomorrow,
14:28and to the whole town by the end of the week.
14:32Eisenhower told Marshall plainly that this was the commander's real fear.
14:36That the collapse of the order with respect to the child would, in the end,
14:42eat away at discipline itself.
14:45So the brass tried to fix it the way armies fix things, with a definition.
14:49If kindness to children was unstoppable, then at least draw a boundary.
14:54How old is a child?
14:56Eisenhower proposed a line.
14:58Twelve years.
14:59Under twelve, a soldier could be gentle.
15:02Over twelve, the enemy.
15:04And it was here that Marshall, the most powerful soldier in America,
15:08a man who moved millions of men across the planet like pieces on a board,
15:13put his finger on the absurd little question at the heart of it.
15:17How, Marshall asked,
15:19is a soldier supposed to tell the age of a child
15:21before he decides whether to be kind to it?
15:25Read that again,
15:26because it is the moment the doctrine of collective guilt quietly died.
15:31You cannot card a child in the road.
15:34A hungry boy does not carry papers.
15:37By the time you are close enough to guess his age,
15:39you have already looked at his face.
15:42And the looking is the thing the order could not survive.
15:45Nine days later, on the 11th of June, 1945,
15:49Eisenhower gave up.
15:51He lifted the ban on fraternizing with German children.
15:55The following month,
15:56he allowed his men to speak with German adults in public.
16:00By the 1st of October,
16:02the entire non-fraternization order,
16:04the iron policy written by Dr. Seuss,
16:07signed at the top of the Allied command,
16:09drilled into 3 million men in darkened rooms,
16:12was simply gone.
16:14And I want you to notice the direction it fell.
16:17The most powerful army on earth
16:19did not abandon its order because it lost a battle
16:23or changed its strategy.
16:24It abandoned it from the bottom up,
16:27starting with the smallest,
16:29weakest,
16:30least powerful person in all of Germany.
16:34The policy of a victorious empire was undone,
16:37first,
16:38by children.
16:40But here's what you have to understand.
16:43The generals were only catching up to their own men.
16:47Long before Eisenhower signed anything,
16:50the soldiers on the ground had already broken the order,
16:53quietly,
16:53by the tens of thousands.
16:55We have their letters.
16:58A sergeant named Gerald Raftery
17:00wrote home to his wife
17:01that the temptation to share something with the children
17:04was everywhere around him
17:06and,
17:07he admitted,
17:08not always resisted.
17:10A private named Richard Mullen confessed that
17:12when the German children looked at him,
17:14he found it hard not to smile back.
17:17One officer put the truth bluntly in writing.
17:20No threat of a fine,
17:22no threat of losing his stripes,
17:23was going to keep an American soldier's candy
17:26from reaching a kid
17:27who looked like he wanted some.
17:29The men had already voted.
17:31They voted with their pockets,
17:33against orders,
17:34before the orders ever changed.
17:37Now,
17:38the easy explanation is the one
17:39you are probably reaching for right now.
17:42You can't be hard on a kid.
17:44Soldiers are human.
17:45Children are children.
17:47Of course they cracked.
17:48And there is truth in that.
17:50But it is not enough.
17:51And I'll tell you why it is not enough.
17:54These were not soft men.
17:58Many of them had come up through Normandy,
18:00through the frozen forests of the Ardennes,
18:02through towns where their friends had been killed
18:04in the doorway next to them.
18:06And in early April of 1945,
18:09just days before our tank column
18:10rolled down that orchard road,
18:12soldiers of that same 4th Armored Division
18:15had walked through the gates of a place called Ordruf,
18:18the first Nazi camp liberated by the American army,
18:21and seen what the Reich did to human beings.
18:25They had every reason on earth
18:27to look at a German child
18:28and feel nothing but cold.
18:31The doctrine of collective guilt
18:33was not invented by fools.
18:35It was built by men
18:36who had just seen the evidence.
18:38And these men,
18:40hardened,
18:41grieving,
18:42fresh from the camps,
18:43holding every justification to hate,
18:45these were the men
18:47who reached into their pockets anyway.
18:50Whatever cracked them
18:51was strong enough to override
18:53Omaha,
18:54the Bulge,
18:55dead friends,
18:56and Ordruf
18:57all at once.
19:00You can't be hard on a kid
19:02does not survive contact
19:04with that.
19:05Something far more specific
19:07was happening on those roads.
19:09Because it was not the chocolate.
19:11I need you to let go of the chocolate.
19:13Because the chocolate is the end of the story,
19:15not the cause of it.
19:17A candy bar is what a soldier does
19:19after something has already broken inside him.
19:22The real question is,
19:24what broke?
19:25And the answer is sitting in plain sight
19:27in every one of those encounters.
19:29In a detail,
19:30the training films
19:30had carefully never shown these men.
19:33Frank Capper's movie
19:34had told them
19:35what a German child was.
19:37An enemy in miniature.
19:39A future stormtrooper.
19:41A small unit of the guilty.
19:44But when the soldiers
19:45actually got close,
19:46close enough to read a face,
19:48close enough to guess an age,
19:50they saw something
19:51the film had left out.
19:53They saw what the spring of 1945
19:55had done to the children
19:56of the people who started the war.
19:59And it did not look like guilt.
20:01It looked like the thing
20:02the Reich had spent 12 years promising
20:05would never happen to its own.
20:07By the spring of 1945,
20:09a German child's entire world
20:10had shrunk to the size of his own stomach.
20:13Consider a boy named Otto Sinnram,
20:15who lived in a small town
20:17near Bad Keuznach
20:18in the country's West.
20:20He was an ordinary child
20:22of an ordinary family.
20:23And in that season,
20:25his daily life had been reduced
20:26to a single arithmetic problem.
20:28How to make one slice of bread
20:30last a whole day.
20:33When he was lucky,
20:34he found a little mustard
20:35to smear on it.
20:36Not for the taste,
20:37he remembered,
20:38but just to have something different
20:40in his mouth.
20:41That was the childhood
20:43the thousand-year Reich
20:44had delivered to its own.
20:46This is the part
20:47the training films never showed.
20:49Frank Capra's movie
20:50had told 3 million American soldiers
20:52that a German child
20:54was an enemy in miniature,
20:56a future stormtrooper,
20:57a small unit of the guilty.
21:00But when the men on the tanks
21:02actually got close,
21:03close enough to read a face
21:05the way General Marshall
21:06said they always would,
21:07they did not see a stormtrooper.
21:10They saw a skeleton
21:11in short trousers.
21:13They saw what four years
21:15of total war
21:16and a collapsing state
21:17had done to the bodies
21:19of the children
21:19of the people who started it.
21:21And whatever else
21:22collective guilt was,
21:24it could not survive
21:25the sight of a child's ribs.
21:28Here is the thing
21:29the Reich had failed at,
21:31the simplest test
21:32a state can be given.
21:34It could not feed its children.
21:36The government
21:37that pressed a panzerfaust
21:38into a 15-year-old's hands
21:40could not put bread
21:41into his little brothers.
21:43The voice on the radio
21:44that screamed at every German
21:46to fight to the death
21:47had nothing to offer the hungry
21:49except more death.
21:51And meanwhile,
21:53grinding down the same road,
21:54came the enemy.
21:55And the enemy
21:57was the best-fed thing
21:59for 50 miles
22:00in any direction.
22:01A single American tank
22:03carried,
22:04in the pockets of its crew,
22:06more sugar
22:06than a German child
22:08had seen in a year.
22:09So at one level,
22:11the running makes
22:12a brutal, simple sense.
22:14The boy ran toward the tank
22:16because the tank had food,
22:17and his own country
22:18no longer did.
22:20Think of another child,
22:22Wolfgang Samuel,
22:2410 years old that spring.
22:26Fleeing west
22:26with his mother
22:27and little sister
22:28across a Germany
22:29that was coming apart
22:30at the seams,
22:31hunger following them
22:32like a shadow.
22:34For children like Wolfgang
22:35and Otto,
22:36the arithmetic
22:37was not complicated.
22:39One side starved you.
22:41The other side,
22:42the side you had been
22:43taught to fear,
22:44had chocolate
22:45in its pockets.
22:47And I want you to hold
22:48those two objects
22:49side by side,
22:51because they are
22:51the whole argument
22:52of this story
22:53in miniature.
22:55The Panzerfaust
22:56and the candy bar.
22:58Two gifts
22:59from two systems
23:00offered to the same boy
23:02in the same spring.
23:04His own government
23:05handed him a weapon
23:06and took away his bread.
23:08The enemy he had been
23:09ordered to kill
23:10reached into a pocket
23:11and gave him
23:12something to eat.
23:14A child of seven
23:15cannot explain economics
23:17or ideology
23:18or the doctrine
23:19of collective guilt.
23:22But a child of seven
23:23knows,
23:24with perfect
23:24and merciless clarity,
23:26who feeds him
23:27and who does not.
23:30The running
23:31was a verdict.
23:33And it was rendered
23:34not by the mind,
23:35but by the body.
23:36If the story ended there,
23:38it would be sad
23:38and simple
23:39and you could turn it off.
23:40But it does not end there,
23:42and I need to show you why.
23:44Because hunger,
23:45by itself,
23:46does not explain
23:47what these children
23:47actually did.
23:49Think it through.
23:50Hunger explains
23:51why a child
23:52would want the food.
23:53It does not explain
23:54why he would trust
23:55the hand that held it.
23:57Because everything,
23:59everything,
24:00that boy
24:01had ever been told
24:02said that the hand
24:04was a trap.
24:05The radio said
24:07the enemy was an animal.
24:08His teachers said
24:09surrender was treason.
24:11His whole short life
24:13had been spent
24:13inside a single story
24:15in which the men
24:16on that tank
24:17were coming to do
24:17terrible things to him.
24:19A starving child
24:21who truly believes
24:22the stranger is a monster
24:23does not sprint
24:24toward the monster
24:25with his hand out.
24:27He runs the other way.
24:29Or,
24:30if he is one of the boys
24:31with the panzafost,
24:32he tries to kill it.
24:34So the hunger is real,
24:36and it matters.
24:37But it is only
24:38half of the engine.
24:40The other half
24:41is stranger,
24:42and it is the half
24:43nobody talks about.
24:44Because for the boy
24:46to run toward that tank,
24:47two things had to be true
24:49at once.
24:50He had to be hungry enough
24:52to need what the soldier had,
24:54and he had to stop believing,
24:57in the space of a few seconds,
24:59the thing he had been taught
25:01his entire life
25:02about who that soldier was.
25:05The first half, hunger,
25:07the Reich built over years of ruin.
25:10The second half collapsed
25:12in about 30 seconds,
25:13on a roadside,
25:15the first time a real American
25:17looked back at a real German child.
25:20And that is where this story
25:22stops being about food.
25:24Because the next question
25:26is the one that should be
25:27impossible to answer.
25:29What exactly had they told
25:31these children was coming for them?
25:33And how could one
25:34tired, unshaven,
25:36unremarkable American
25:38face,
25:39a face attached to a man
25:41under orders
25:41to give the child nothing,
25:44undo 12 years
25:45of the most total indoctrination
25:47ever aimed at human beings,
25:49before the child
25:50had any reason on earth
25:52to believe a word of it?
25:53So what had they told
25:54these children was coming?
25:56Everything.
25:57That is the only honest answer.
26:00Everything.
26:01Take a German boy of 10
26:03in that final spring.
26:04He had been born in 1935,
26:07which means he had never,
26:08for one single day
26:09of his conscious life,
26:11lived in a country
26:12that was not the Third Reich.
26:13There was no before
26:15for him to remember,
26:17no other world
26:18to compare this one to.
26:20At 10,
26:21he had already been folded
26:22into the Deutsches Jungvolk,
26:24the junior branch
26:25of the Hitler Youth.
26:27By 14,
26:28he would graduate
26:29into the Hitler Youth proper.
26:31He had marched
26:32and sung the songs
26:33and recited the oaths
26:35and sat through school lessons
26:37built on a single message
26:38repeated a thousand ways.
26:40Your enemies are subhuman.
26:43Your fiever is your father.
26:45And to surrender to the men
26:47coming from the West
26:48and the East
26:48is the worst betrayal
26:50a German can commit.
26:52The radio wolf
26:54howled it at night.
26:55His teachers carved it
26:56into his days.
26:58This was not
26:59ordinary patriotism.
27:01It was the most complete,
27:03most deliberate,
27:04capture of a generation's mind
27:06that any government
27:07had ever attempted.
27:09Now here is the paradox
27:11that should stop you cold.
27:12If indoctrination worked
27:14the way the Nazis
27:15believed it worked,
27:16then the children
27:17should have been
27:17the hardest of all.
27:19Not the softest.
27:20The hardest.
27:22The grown German
27:23had memories
27:24of the years before Hitler.
27:25the child
27:26had nothing else.
27:27The grown German
27:29could privately doubt.
27:31The child
27:32had been programmed
27:32from the cradle.
27:34By every theory
27:35the Reich operated on,
27:37the boy in the road
27:38should have been
27:38the last German on earth
27:40to trust an American.
27:41A perfect little fanatic,
27:43sealed against the enemy.
27:44And yet,
27:46you already know
27:47what happened.
27:48Go back to part three.
27:50When Eisenhower's
27:51iron order
27:52finally cracked,
27:53where did it crack first?
27:55Not with the old men.
27:57Not with the shopkeepers.
27:59With the children.
28:00The most thoroughly
28:02indoctrinated
28:03human beings in Germany
28:04were the very first
28:05to break ranks
28:06and run
28:07toward the enemy.
28:09The Reich's masterpiece
28:10failed exactly
28:11where it should have
28:12been strongest.
28:13Why?
28:14And this is the answer
28:15the whole video
28:16has been building toward,
28:17so stay with me.
28:19It failed because
28:20indoctrination
28:21is made of abstractions
28:23and a child
28:24does not live
28:25in abstractions.
28:26The American
28:27is an animal,
28:28is an idea.
28:30It is a category,
28:31a label,
28:32a thing that lives
28:33in the head.
28:34But a child of seven
28:36does not navigate
28:37the world
28:37through categories.
28:39He navigates it
28:40through faces,
28:41through tone of voice,
28:43through whether
28:43the big stranger
28:44crouches down
28:45to his level
28:46or looms over him.
28:48A child reads people
28:50and a label,
28:51however many times
28:52it is repeated,
28:53has nothing to grip onto
28:55the moment
28:55the abstract enemy
28:57stops being a poster
28:58and becomes
28:59one specific
29:00tired man
29:01on one knee
29:03in the dirt
29:04holding something out
29:05and not making
29:06any sudden moves.
29:09Watch it happen
29:10through the eyes
29:10of one American.
29:12An infantryman
29:13named Ray Thuy
29:14was fighting his way
29:15across Germany
29:16in March of 1945.
29:19Back home in the States,
29:20he had little boys
29:21of his own
29:22and their handmade
29:23valentines
29:23were in his pack.
29:25And when he wrote
29:25to his wife
29:26from the front,
29:27he told her something
29:28that quietly demolishes
29:30the entire doctrine
29:31of collective guilt
29:32in a single sentence.
29:34He told her,
29:35the German children
29:36loved gum and candy.
29:38Exactly the way,
29:39he said,
29:40little American boys
29:41and girls did.
29:43He was supposed
29:44to be looking
29:44at the enemy.
29:45Instead,
29:46a father looked
29:47at a German child
29:48and saw his own sons.
29:50The label dissolved.
29:52The category
29:53could not survive
29:54a man who missed
29:55his kids
29:55meeting a kid
29:56who missed being fed.
29:58That is the deepest layer
30:00of why those children ran.
30:02It was not only
30:03that they were hungry,
30:04though they were,
30:05it was that the lie
30:06they had been raised inside
30:07was a lie
30:08about an abstraction.
30:10And the moment
30:11the abstraction
30:11took human form
30:12on a roadside,
30:13the child's instincts,
30:15the oldest instincts
30:16we have,
30:17simply overruled
30:18twelve years of teaching.
30:20A propaganda state
30:22can own
30:22a child's lessons.
30:24It cannot own
30:25the thing in a child
30:26that knows,
30:27on sight,
30:28the difference
30:29between a person
30:29who means him harm
30:30and a person
30:31who is reaching
30:32for chocolate.
30:34The purest test
30:35of any system of lies
30:36is whether it survives
30:37a child meeting
30:38the enemy face to face.
30:40The Reichs did not.
30:42It collapsed on contact,
30:44thousands of times,
30:45on thousands of roads,
30:47in about thirty seconds each.
30:49So we have our answer,
30:51or we have half of it.
30:53Because something else
30:54was happening
30:55in those thirty seconds
30:56that we have not
30:56talked about yet.
30:58Something that did not
30:59stop at the child.
31:01Look again at Ray Thuy.
31:02When he saw his own sons
31:04in a German child's face,
31:06the child was changed,
31:07yes.
31:07He got fed.
31:09He was no longer afraid.
31:10But so was Thuy.
31:12The doctrine he had been handed
31:14in a darkened room
31:15did not just fail
31:16to convince the German boy.
31:18It failed inside
31:19the American soldier.
31:20The encounter ran
31:22both directions.
31:23The child was disarming
31:25the conqueror
31:25at the very instant
31:26the conqueror
31:27was feeding the child.
31:29And that mutual undoing,
31:31the conquered child
31:33and the conquering soldier
31:34each breaking the other's orders
31:36at the same moment,
31:37did not end on the roadside.
31:39It climbed.
31:40It worked its way upward,
31:42out of the dirt,
31:43and into the policy
31:44of a victorious nation.
31:46And eventually,
31:47it lifted one particular American
31:49so high
31:50that three years later,
31:52he would be doing
31:53this very same thing
31:54from 2,000 feet in the air.
31:56The undoing climbed,
31:57and you can watch it
31:59climb in the dates.
32:00On the 11th of June, 1945,
32:02the ban on kindness
32:03to children fell.
32:04In July,
32:06soldiers were permitted
32:06to speak with German adults
32:08in public places.
32:09And on the 1st of October,
32:10the entire non-fraternization order,
32:13the Iron Doctrine
32:15written by Dr. Seuss,
32:16signed at the summit
32:17of the Allied command,
32:18drilled into 3 million men,
32:20was quietly abolished.
32:23Notice once more
32:24the direction of the collapse.
32:25It did not start at the top
32:27and trickle down.
32:28It started at the bottom,
32:30at the smallest hand in Germany,
32:32and it rose.
32:33The doctrine of a victorious empire
32:35was rewritten
32:36from the level of a 7-year-old upward.
32:38The historian Petra Goethe,
32:41who studied these encounters closely,
32:43argues something that sounds
32:44almost too neat
32:46until you sit with the evidence.
32:48The fraternization ban
32:49did not die
32:50simply because the army
32:51couldn't enforce it.
32:53It died because
32:54the fraternizing itself
32:55changed the minds
32:57of the men doing the occupying.
33:00Soldiers who handed candy
33:01to children,
33:02who saw hunger
33:03instead of guilt,
33:05slowly stopped believing
33:06in collective guilt at all.
33:09And once the men on the ground
33:10stopped believing it,
33:12the policy built on it
33:13could not stand.
33:15The Germans went,
33:16in the American imagination,
33:19from villains to be punished
33:20into people to be helped.
33:23And the first crack in that wall,
33:26the place where villain
33:27first became human,
33:29was a child
33:30running toward a tank.
33:33But I owe you honesty here
33:35because this is not a greeting card
33:37and the audience for this story
33:39is too smart for one.
33:41The change was real,
33:43but it was slow
33:44and it was ugly in places.
33:47There was misconduct
33:48on the American side
33:49that the warm photographs leave out.
33:52The army's own indoctrination materials
33:55kept preaching hatred of Germans
33:57well into 1946.
33:59So insistently
34:00that the Chicago Tribune
34:02publicly accused the army
34:04of still teaching its men to hate.
34:07Reconciliation between Germans
34:09and Americans took years,
34:11not weeks,
34:12and it was argued over
34:13the whole way.
34:15The chocolate from the tank
34:16was not the end
34:17of a beautiful friendship.
34:19It was the first loose thread
34:20in a doctrine
34:21pulled by a child's hand,
34:23and the unraveling
34:24took a long time.
34:25But unravel it did,
34:28and you can see
34:29the whole reversal
34:30in a single object,
34:31in a single boy's life.
34:34Remember Otto Zinram,
34:36the child near Bad Koitsnach
34:38making one slice of bread
34:39last all day?
34:41The army that had been forbidden
34:43by direct order
34:44to so much as smile at him.
34:46That same army,
34:48once the war was over,
34:50did something extraordinary.
34:52The men of the 8th Infantry Division
34:54began providing lunches
34:56to the schools around them
34:57so that the German children
34:59in their zone
34:59would not starve.
35:01Otto carried an empty lunchbox
35:03to school in the morning,
35:04and at midday,
35:06the Americans filled it.
35:07Grits,
35:08or rice pudding,
35:09or chocolate milk
35:10from relief packages
35:11shipped across an ocean.
35:13Look at what happened
35:14to that lunchbox.
35:15It went out empty
35:16under a government
35:17that demanded the boy's death
35:19and could not feed him,
35:21and it came home full
35:22from the hands of the enemy
35:24he had been raised to fear.
35:26The order against kindness
35:28had not just been cancelled.
35:30It had been turned
35:31completely inside out
35:32into an institution
35:34whose entire purpose
35:35was kindness.
35:37So now,
35:38we can finally answer
35:39the question on the screen,
35:41the one we put up
35:42an hour ago,
35:43in full.
35:44Why did German children
35:45run toward American tanks
35:47instead of hiding?
35:49They ran because,
35:51in a world that had
35:52collapsed around them,
35:53the steel coming down the road
35:55was the one thing
35:56both able and willing
35:58to keep them alive,
35:59when their own state
36:00had become only able
36:02to send them to die.
36:04They ran because hunger
36:06is older than ideology.
36:08And they ran,
36:10above all,
36:10because the lie
36:11they had been raised inside
36:12was a lie about
36:14a faceless enemy,
36:15and it could not survive
36:17the first real face.
36:19The child did not just
36:21take the chocolate.
36:23In running toward the gun
36:24with an open hand,
36:26he handed the men
36:27who came as conquerors
36:28a way to stop
36:29being conquerors at all.
36:31It was, in the end,
36:33a mutual rescue.
36:36The soldier fed the child's body.
36:38The child gave the soldier
36:40back his conscience.
36:43That should be the end.
36:44But it isn't,
36:46because of the promise
36:47I made you a few minutes ago.
36:48The man lifted
36:502,000 feet into the air.
36:52So let me jump forward.
36:54The war ends in May of 1945.
36:58Three years pass.
36:59And in that time,
37:01the very alliance
37:01that crushed the Reich
37:02falls apart,
37:04until the Americans
37:05and the Soviets,
37:06who once raced each other
37:07across Germany,
37:08are now enemies,
37:09with the ruined city of Berlin
37:11caught between them.
37:14In the summer of 1948,
37:16the Soviets seal the city off,
37:18every road,
37:19every rail line,
37:20and try to starve
37:21two million Berliners
37:23into surrender.
37:24The same children.
37:26The same hunger.
37:28The same impossible test
37:30handed to America
37:31a second time.
37:34And at a barbed wire fence
37:36at the edge
37:36of a Berlin airfield,
37:38a young American
37:39transport pilot,
37:40a man with no orders
37:42to do any such thing,
37:43a man whose only job
37:45was to land,
37:46unload,
37:46and leave,
37:48stops to talk to a crowd
37:49of German kids
37:50pressed against the wire.
37:52He has exactly
37:53two sticks of gum
37:54in his pocket.
37:55There are about
37:5630 children.
37:58What he notices
37:59in the next few moments,
38:00something none
38:01of the other pilots
38:02had stopped long enough
38:03to see,
38:03is about to turn
38:05the quiet roadside mercy
38:06of 1945
38:07into something
38:09the entire world
38:10would look up
38:11and watch.
38:12The pilot's name
38:13was Gail Halverson,
38:14a farm boy from Utah,
38:1627 years old,
38:18flying transport runs
38:19into the blockaded city.
38:21He was not supposed
38:22to be standing
38:23at that fence.
38:24His job
38:25was to land
38:26his C-54,
38:27dump 10 tons of flour,
38:29and take off again,
38:30as fast as possible.
38:33One plane
38:33in an endless
38:34conveyor belt
38:35feeding 2 million people
38:37through the air.
38:38But on a July day
38:40in 1948,
38:41he wandered over
38:42to a crowd
38:43of German children
38:44pressed against
38:44the barbed wire
38:45at the edge
38:46of Tempelhof airfield,
38:47and he reached
38:48into his pocket,
38:49and all he had
38:51was two sticks of gum.
38:53Two sticks
38:54for about 30 children.
38:57He braced
38:58for what any adult
38:59braces for,
39:00the scramble,
39:01the grabbing,
39:02the bigger kids
39:03shoving the small ones aside.
39:05And it did not come.
39:07Instead,
39:08the children
39:09broke the two sticks
39:10into tiny fragments
39:11and passed them around
39:13so that as many
39:14as possible
39:15got a taste.
39:16And the ones
39:17for whom
39:18there was nothing left
39:19did not cry
39:20or fight.
39:21They asked,
39:23quietly,
39:23if they could just
39:24have a piece of the wrapper
39:25to hold,
39:27to smell.
39:28That is what stopped
39:30Gail Halverson
39:31at that fence.
39:32Not their hunger.
39:33Their dignity
39:35in the middle
39:35of their hunger.
39:37And I want you to feel
39:38the full weight
39:39of who these children were.
39:41Three years earlier,
39:43children of this same city
39:44had been handed
39:45panzerfausts
39:46and sent to die
39:47against tanks.
39:49The radio wolf
39:50had howled at them
39:51to fight to the end.
39:53Now here they stood
39:54at a wire fence
39:55starving a second time
39:57in a city
39:58the war had ground
40:00to powder
40:00and they shared.
40:03Halverson looked
40:04through that fence
40:05and saw,
40:06plainly,
40:07the same thing
40:08the G.I.s
40:08on the tanks
40:09had seen in 1945.
40:11Not an enemy.
40:13Not even only a victim.
40:15A child.
40:17Behaving better
40:17than the grown world
40:19that had wrecked
40:19his life.
40:21So he made them
40:22a promise.
40:23Come back tomorrow,
40:24he said,
40:25and I will drop gum
40:27to you from my airplane.
40:29One of the children
40:29asked the obvious question.
40:31There were hundreds
40:32of planes a day.
40:33How would they know
40:34which one was his?
40:37Halverson told them
40:38to watch for the plane
40:39that rocked its wings.
40:41Wiggle the wings.
40:43That would be him.
40:45The next day,
40:46on his approach
40:47into Tempelhof,
40:48he tipped his wings
40:49back and forth
40:50and out the flair chute
40:52went little bundles
40:53of gum and chocolate,
40:54lowered on parachutes
40:55he had made
40:56from handkerchiefs.
40:58Notice what he did next,
40:59because it is the whole
41:01pattern of this story
41:02repeating itself.
41:03He did it in secret.
41:06Just like the G.I.s
41:07of 1945
41:08who slipped candy
41:09to children
41:10against a direct order,
41:11Halverson knew
41:12the brass might not approve.
41:14So for weeks,
41:15he simply didn't tell them.
41:17The kindness was,
41:19once again,
41:21a small act
41:22of quiet rule-breaking.
41:24But this time,
41:25it could not stay small.
41:27The crowds of children
41:29at the fence grew.
41:30The German press
41:31named the planes
41:32the Rosenenbomber,
41:34the Raisin Bombers.
41:36They called Halverson
41:38the chocolate flyer
41:39and Uncle Wiggly Wings.
41:42When the story
41:43finally reached
41:44his commanders,
41:45they made a decision
41:46the army of 1945
41:47could never have made.
41:48They made it official.
41:51It became
41:51Operation Little Vittles.
41:55Candy companies
41:55back in the States
41:56donated tons of sweets.
41:58School children
41:59in America
42:00tied the little parachutes.
42:02And by the time
42:02the blockade
42:03was broken in 1949,
42:05American crews
42:06had dropped
42:07some 23 tons
42:08of candy
42:09over the city of Berlin.
42:11Now hold the two
42:13images together,
42:13because this is
42:15the payoff of everything.
42:171945,
42:19a single soldier
42:20on a tank,
42:21breaking an order,
42:22reaching into his pocket
42:23for one hungry child
42:25on a roadside.
42:271948,
42:28an entire nation,
42:30openly,
42:31deliberately,
42:32flying tons of chocolate
42:34through a Soviet blockade
42:35to feed the children
42:36of its former enemy.
42:38The exact same
42:39human reflex,
42:41the one Eisenhower's order
42:42tried and failed to outlaw,
42:43had in three years
42:45grown from a crime
42:46committed in secret
42:47into something close
42:48to the official character
42:49of a country.
42:51The hand that came out
42:53of the tank
42:53had not closed.
42:54It had opened wider
42:56and risen into the sky.
42:58And the verdict
42:59between the two systems
43:00was now complete
43:01and total.
43:03One system
43:04had handed its children
43:05weapons
43:05and let them starve
43:06and had vanished
43:08from the earth.
43:09The other had been ordered
43:10to treat those same children
43:12as enemies
43:12and had instead chosen,
43:14in the end,
43:15to drop them candy
43:16from the clouds.
43:18Ask yourself
43:19which system
43:20the children believed in.
43:21They answered that question
43:23the first time,
43:24on the roads,
43:25with their feet,
43:26running toward the steel.
43:28They were answering it still,
43:30three years later,
43:31faces turned up to the sky,
43:33watching for the plane
43:34that wiggled its wings.
43:37There was one little girl
43:38in Berlin
43:38who could never
43:39quite catch a parachute.
43:42She lived near the airfield
43:43and the planes
43:44terrified her chickens.
43:45So,
43:46she wrote the chocolate flyer
43:47a letter,
43:48half complaint
43:49and half thanks.
43:51Her name was Mercedes.
43:54Halverson could not
43:55aim a parachute
43:55at one rooftop,
43:57but he could
43:58read an address.
44:00So,
44:00he put candy
44:01in an envelope
44:02and mailed it
44:03to her door.
44:04A pilot
44:05and a German child,
44:06strangers
44:07on opposite sides
44:08of the most destructive
44:09war in history,
44:11connected by a letter
44:12and a handful of sweets.
44:14And the circle
44:16that small kindness started
44:17would not finish closing
44:19for another 40 years.
44:21Long enough
44:22for us to find out
44:23what became
44:23of all of them.
44:24The children
44:25who ran toward the tanks.
44:27The soldiers
44:28who broke their orders.
44:30And the one small boy
44:32we left standing
44:33at the edge
44:35of the tread
44:35in the spring
44:36of 1945
44:38with his empty hand
44:40still raised.
44:41Go back.
44:42One last time
44:43to the Orchard Road.
44:45The spring of 1945.
44:47The column
44:48of the 4th Armored Division
44:50grinding east,
44:51the gunner
44:52with his eyes
44:52on the rooftops,
44:53and the small figure
44:55breaking from a doorway
44:56to run toward
44:5730 tons of steel
44:58with an empty hand raised.
45:01We never learned
45:02that boy's name.
45:03He was one
45:04of countless thousands
45:05on countless roads
45:07in the last weeks
45:08of a collapsing country.
45:10But we know
45:11what happened
45:11in the next second
45:12because it happened
45:14tens of thousands
45:15of times.
45:16The gunner's hand,
45:18the one that had been
45:18drifting toward the trigger,
45:20changed course.
45:22It went into
45:23a pocket instead.
45:24And it came back out
45:25holding something
45:26for the child.
45:28That is the whole war
45:29in a single gesture.
45:31A hand that could
45:33have ended a life,
45:34reaching instead
45:35for a chocolate bar.
45:37But I owe you
45:38the other children too,
45:40the ones who did not run.
45:42Because the choice
45:43in this story was real,
45:44and a choice is only real
45:46if the other path
45:47was real as well.
45:49Remember the two scripts.
45:51Some German boys
45:52took the one
45:53Berlin handed them.
45:55They knelt in the doorways
45:56with the Panzerfaust
45:57on their shoulder,
45:58and they fired.
45:59And many of them
46:00died doing it.
46:02Children,
46:03in oversized uniforms,
46:05defending positions
46:06that no longer mattered
46:07for a country
46:08that was already gone.
46:11There is a film
46:12Germans still know well
46:13called The Bridge
46:15about a handful
46:16of schoolboys
46:17ordered to hold
46:18a worthless little bridge
46:19in the last days
46:20of the war.
46:22It was made by a man
46:23who had lived
46:24almost exactly that,
46:25sent as a teenager
46:27to fight for nothing.
46:28And it ends the way
46:29those stories really ended,
46:32with boys dead
46:33on the planks of a bridge
46:34that the army itself
46:35had already written off.
46:38While those children bled,
46:40the men who had given
46:41the orders
46:41were busy saving themselves.
46:44That was the final gift
46:45of the system
46:46that raised them.
46:48It put a weapon
46:49in a boy's hands,
46:51pointed him
46:51at an oncoming tank,
46:53and called it honor.
46:55Now set the two endings
46:57side by side,
46:58because this is the verdict
47:00the whole story
47:01has been building toward.
47:03One road led a child
47:04to a bridge,
47:05to die for men
47:06who were already
47:07running away.
47:08The other road
47:09led a child
47:10to an open hand,
47:11and to a chocolate bar,
47:13and to tomorrow.
47:15The Reich buried its children.
47:17The enemy fed them.
47:20When people ask
47:21which system was better,
47:22they can argue about
47:23factories and ideologies
47:25and economics forever.
47:27But the children
47:28answered it first,
47:30and they answered it
47:30with their feet,
47:31and the answer
47:32has never been improved upon.
47:35So what became of them all?
47:37The soldiers
47:38mostly went home
47:39and mostly did not speak
47:40of the terrible things.
47:42But more than a few of them
47:43asked decades later
47:45what they remembered,
47:46reached back
47:47past the beaches
47:48and the frozen forests
47:49and the camps,
47:50and what they reached for
47:52was the children
47:53on the roads.
47:55Otto Zinram,
47:56the boy who made
47:57one slice of bread
47:58last all day,
47:59carried his memory
48:01the rest of his life.
48:02The candy from American hands,
48:04he said,
48:05had meant the world to him
48:06because it had helped him
48:08stay alive.
48:09And the Germany
48:10those children inherited
48:11was rebuilt,
48:12in no small part,
48:14by the very nation
48:15whose tanks
48:16had once come down
48:17its roads.
48:18Within a single generation,
48:20the enemy of 1945
48:22had become one of America's
48:24closest friends on earth.
48:26The children who ran
48:28toward the steel
48:29were the ones who grew up
48:31and built that friendship.
48:32The children who stayed
48:34on the bridge
48:35never got the chance.
48:37And the chocolate flyer?
48:39Gail Halvorsen
48:40kept dropping candy
48:41to children
48:42for the rest of his long life,
48:43in one troubled corner
48:45of the world
48:45after another.
48:47The little girl
48:48with the frightened chickens,
48:49Mercedes,
48:50kept the letter
48:51he had mailed her.
48:53And 40 years later,
48:54the two of them met,
48:56the German child
48:57and the American pilot,
48:58both grown old,
49:00sitting together,
49:01the small circle
49:02that a handful of suites
49:03had drawn,
49:04finally closing.
49:07Halvorsen died
49:08in the year 2022,
49:10at the age of 101,
49:12and he was mourned
49:13in two countries
49:14that had once tried
49:14to destroy each other.
49:16German children
49:17had given him his name.
49:19They never forgot him,
49:21and he never forgot them.
49:23So here,
49:24at the very end,
49:25is the answer
49:26to the question
49:27we started with
49:27an hour ago.
49:29Why did German children
49:30run toward American tanks
49:32instead of hiding from them?
49:35Not because of the chocolate.
49:37The chocolate was never the reason.
49:39It was only the proof.
49:41They ran because
49:42the oldest thing
49:43inside a human being,
49:44the part of a small child
49:46that knows on sight
49:47the difference
49:48between the hand
49:49that arms him
49:50and the hand
49:51that feeds him,
49:52turned out to be stronger
49:53than the most total lie
49:55ever poured into a generation.
49:57A government spent
49:5812 years teaching those.
50:01Children to hate.
50:03It was undone
50:04in about 30 seconds
50:05by one tired man
50:07on one knee
50:08in the dirt
50:08reaching into his pocket.
50:10That is not a small thing.
50:12It may be
50:13the largest thing there is.
50:15And when the steel
50:16finally came down the road,
50:17it turned out
50:18to be carrying
50:19the kinder
50:19of the two hands
50:20a child had ever been offered.
50:24Thank you for staying
50:25with this story
50:25all the way to the end.
50:27If it moved you,
50:28take a second
50:29to tap the like button.
50:30It really does help
50:31this kind of history
50:32reach the people
50:33who would want to find it.
50:34And it tells me
50:35which stories
50:35are worth telling.
50:37Subscribe
50:38and ring the bell
50:39so the next one
50:40doesn't pass you by.
50:41And before you go,
50:43I'd like to hear from you
50:44down in the comments.
50:45Where in the world
50:46are you watching from?
50:47And if someone
50:48in your own family
50:49served in the Second World War,
50:51a father,
50:52a grandfather,
50:53an uncle
50:53who made it home
50:54or one who didn't.
50:56Tell me about them.
50:58Say their name here.
51:00This is a good place
51:01to keep it alive.
51:01live.