- 18 hours ago
A single German soldier moving in daylight can trigger an American artillery concentration, and that is the puzzle at the heart of this World War II military history story. Drawing on Rommel’s report, captured German orders, and the letter of a 23-year-old forward observer, it shows why U.S. howitzers were aimed at what looked like a single man in the open.
The answer is not simple wastefulness. It is speed, observation, battlefield control, and the way American artillery protected infantry by shutting down German movement, messengers, snipers, and observers. From Normandy and Lorraine to the Vosges and the Ardennes, the story follows how artillery, forward observers, and communications turned one visible target into a much larger tactical advantage.
If you enjoy WW2 stories, military history, battlefield analysis, and narrated history documentaries, this episode offers a sharp look at how artillery was really used in Europe. It also fits searches for World War II artillery, forward observer stories, Patton’s Third Army, Rommel, and historical war narration for background listening or focused learning.
The answer is not simple wastefulness. It is speed, observation, battlefield control, and the way American artillery protected infantry by shutting down German movement, messengers, snipers, and observers. From Normandy and Lorraine to the Vosges and the Ardennes, the story follows how artillery, forward observers, and communications turned one visible target into a much larger tactical advantage.
If you enjoy WW2 stories, military history, battlefield analysis, and narrated history documentaries, this episode offers a sharp look at how artillery was really used in Europe. It also fits searches for World War II artillery, forward observer stories, Patton’s Third Army, Rommel, and historical war narration for background listening or focused learning.
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LearningTranscript
00:00July 15th, 1944. A chateau cut into the chalk cliffs above the Seine at La Roche-Guillon.
00:08Field Marshal Erwin Rommel is finishing a report that will travel through Field Marshal von Kluge
00:13to Adolf Hitler. The numbers in it are brutal. About 97,000 men lost in Normandy since the
00:21landings. About 6,000 replacements arrived. 225 tanks lost. 17 replaced. But I want you to hold
00:33on to one line, because this whole story turns on it. His troops, Rommel writes, must now
00:40exercise the greatest economy in everything, above all in artillery and mortar ammunition.
00:48A few lines away, he describes the other side of the front. The enemy's enormous use of material,
00:55above all artillery and tanks. One army counting its shells, the other firing as if nobody had
01:03ever thought to count. Four days earlier, on July 11th, the American 2nd Infantry Division
01:09had attacked Hill 192, east of St. Lowe. German paratroopers had held that hill for a month,
01:15looking straight down into the American lines. On that one day, on that one stretch of front,
01:22American guns fired 20,000 rounds. A letter, later found on that battlefield, was signed only
01:29Helmut. At three in the morning, he wrote, his company's sector got such a dense hail of artillery
01:36and mortar fire that we thought the world was coming to an end. His company had gone into the line
01:42with 170 men. 30 were left. But a barrage before an attack is no mystery. Every army in the war
01:50did
01:50that. The mystery is what American guns did on the quiet days, the days when nobody was attacking
01:56anybody. An American Army artillery publication from January 1945 recorded a remark by a German
02:04prisoner. He said it, the report notes, with an air of desperation. The only thing necessary to bring
02:12down an American artillery concentration, he said, was to extend one's hand outside a foxhole. Picture
02:19it from where he sat. Not a tank. Not a convoy. Not a gun position. A hand. A concentration means
02:29shells from a full battery, sometimes from a whole battalion of guns, arriving on one spot together.
02:36And the Americans were bringing that down on a single German soldier who moved in daylight.
02:42So why? Why would an army aim howitzers at one man? If you want to understand how the American army
02:51fought its way across Europe, and what the GIs were really buying with every one of those shells,
02:56hit like and subscribe. It helps this channel keep opening the files.
03:01Most people who hear this story reach for the obvious answer. The Americans were rich. They had
03:07shells to burn. A German shell was precious. An American shell was cheap. So the Americans fired
03:14at anything that moved. The Germans believed exactly that. German artillery officers described
03:21American fire as methodical, schematic, and wasteful. They claimed American gunners spent an enormous
03:28weight of ammunition for every German soldier they actually killed. Some of them put the American
03:34advantage in guns and ammunition at 10 to 1. The U.S. Army's own official historian of the Ardennes,
03:41Hugh Cole, looked at that figure and called it far too high. So keep that word in your pocket.
03:48Wasteful. It's the answer most people stop at. And it's wrong. Or rather, it is only the first layer
03:55of an answer that goes much deeper and gets a lot less comfortable. Here is the first crack in it.
04:01And remember this number because it is coming back. Three months after Rommel signed his report,
04:07the American army in France came close to running dry. In the week of October 15th to the 21st, 1944,
04:16the 105mm howitzers of George Patton's 3rd Army fired an average of 1.1 rounds per gun per day.
04:25The army had wanted 60. Let that land for a second. A battery of four of those howitzers,
04:32working an entire day, put four or five shells into the air. In July, that would not have covered
04:39one German's hand. If the Americans fired at single soldiers simply because they were rich,
04:45October should have settled the question. No money, no waste. Tighten the belt and carry on.
04:52That is not what happened. When the shells ran short, American officers filed reports that read like
04:59alarms. They did not complain that the war had become harder in some general way.
05:05They described losing one very specific thing. And unit after unit reported the same loss.
05:12On the German side of the line, something else was going on. German officers had started writing
05:18new rules for their own men, rules no army had needed before. One of them was about messengers.
05:26Another was about when a German soldier was allowed to fire his own rifle. Put those two things together,
05:31the American alarm and the German rule book, and you start to see that the single German soldier
05:37was never really the target. But to see what the target actually was, you first need to meet the man
05:44whose job was to find that German soldier. He was 23, from Cleveland, Ohio. That September,
05:51he sat down and wrote his father a letter describing exactly how he did it. One line in that letter
05:59explains more than any field manual. September 21, 1944. The Moselle River at the edge of the Vosges
06:07Mountains in eastern France. The American 36th Infantry Division, the old Texas National Guard Division,
06:15is pushing across. Somewhere among its rifle companies walks a lieutenant who is not a rifleman at all.
06:23Irvin Blonder was 23. His father and eldest brother ran the family wallpaper business back in Cleveland.
06:30He had come out of college ROTC, been commissioned in June 1943, and joined the 36th in Italy as a
06:38replacement officer with the 131st Field Artillery Battalion. He described his job in one sentence.
06:46My job is to go along with the infantry and conduct the firing of field artillery as the situation
06:51demands. Notice what is in that sentence and what isn't. He does not carry a gun that matters.
06:58The howitzers are miles behind him. What he carries is a map, a radio, and a pair of eyes. He
07:07is a forward
07:07observer. Twelve howitzers in his battalion, and none of them can see. He can. That September, he wrote a
07:16letter home. Not to his wife Shirley. He didn't want to frighten her. He wrote to his father and his
07:23brother
07:23instead, and he told them what the job was really like. Here is the line I promised you.
07:30You see Germans moving a thousand yards away from you, and you bring artillery fire on them.
07:35You kill a few and wound some. Read it again, slowly. A thousand yards. More than half a mile.
07:46At that distance, a man is a dot. You can't see his face. You can't tell a private from a
07:52captain.
07:53You see movement. And for an American observer in 1944, movement was enough.
08:01That is the American system in two sentences. Not, you see a battalion. Not, you see a tank.
08:09You see Germans moving. A few of them. And a 23-year-old from Cleveland lifts a radio handset,
08:17and a battalion of guns he will never see begins to turn toward a field only he is looking at.
08:23He was honest about how it felt, too. You don't stop to think, he wrote, whether it is right or
08:29wrong.
08:30Every German killed, as he saw it, brought the end of the war a little closer.
08:36Now why would an army bother? A few dots at a thousand yards?
08:41Here is where the letter gets interesting.
08:44Because the next thing Blonder describes is what one German soldier could do to him.
08:49He had waded a river, he wrote, about 50 feet wide, to reach the cover of a farmhouse.
08:55Then he had to get back to a better observation point.
08:59As I started across an open field, a German sniper started to fire at me.
09:04One German, one rifle, somewhere in the tree line. I was never so scared in my life.
09:12Stop and think about what was actually running across that field. Not just one American lieutenant.
09:18With him went the eyes of an entire artillery battalion. If that sniper hits him, 12 howitzers
09:25go blind on that stretch of front until somebody else crawls forward to take his place.
09:29One German with a rifle, for those few seconds, was holding a whole battalion of American guns hostage.
09:37That is the first layer of the answer, and it is worth sitting with. On a quiet defensive front,
09:42who actually moves in the open, in daylight? Not the riflemen. They stay in their holes.
09:49The men who move are the men with jobs. A sniper working toward a new position.
09:55An artillery observer with binoculars and a field telephone, who can do to American infantry
10:01exactly what Blonder was doing to German infantry. A runner, carrying orders because the phone line
10:07has been cut. A man hauling ammunition up to a machine gun. Kill the sniper and the field is safe
10:14to cross. Kill the observer and the German guns go blind. Kill the runner and a whole company sits in
10:22the
10:22dark, not knowing what it has been ordered to do. So when Blonder writes, you see Germans moving,
10:29what he is usually looking at is not a man. It is a piece of the German army's nervous system,
10:36caught out in the open. There is another line in that letter that is easy to skip past.
10:40I saw an artillery shell chew up one of my men. That was a German shell. Blonder knew from the
10:48receiving end what happened when an enemy observer got to work. On every quiet stretch of front in
10:54Europe, two sets of eyes were looking at each other across the same fields. His and theirs. Whoever saw
11:02first, and whoever's guns answered faster, decided who went home. And that brings us to speed. Because
11:11a shell is only cheap if it arrives in time. The Germans noticed this before almost anything else.
11:18In the Hurtgen Forest that October, according to the US Army's official history, German troops were
11:24awed particularly by the efficiency of American communications. Back in Normandy, German 7th Army
11:32reports had already singled out the power of American artillery for special mention.
11:37What impressed them was not just how much fell, it was how fast it fell after an observer spoke.
11:44A shell that lands 10 minutes after the German has moved on is wasted. A shell that lands while he
11:50is
11:50still in the open is the end of a sniper, an observer, a runner. Speed is what turned a single
11:57soldier
11:58into a target worth a battery. Now I want you to remember Blonder's radio. Just the radio. A little
12:05over a month after he wrote that letter, it would be the only radio among more than 200 surrounded
12:11American soldiers on a ridge in the Vosges. And how long its batteries lasted would decide a great deal.
12:18But we are not there yet. Because the Germans were not standing still. They were studying American
12:24observers as carefully as the observers studied them. And by that autumn, German officers had
12:30worked out what this way of fighting was really doing to their men. It was not the casualties that
12:35worried them most. In Italy, a German battalion commander gathered his company officers and laid
12:40down a set of new rules. One of them was so strange that it tells you almost everything.
12:46It was about messengers. And it only makes sense in an army that has learned one man in the open
12:53will
12:53bring down a barrage. The commander's name is not in the record. What survives is his talk,
12:59carried out of Italy in the memory of one of his soldiers. That soldier had spent 16 weeks in the
13:06line
13:06at Casino before he was captured. When interrogators asked how his battalion fought, he repeated what
13:13his commander had told the company officers. The U.S. War Department printed it in its intelligence bulletin
13:19in December 1944 for American officers to study. Listen to how it opens. Not with a complaint about tanks or
13:28aircraft. With this. The enemy, with his superiority in materiel, often has placed an artillery barrage on
13:36individual soldiers. There it is. Not a story told at a veteran's reunion 40 years later. An enemy
13:45commander briefing his own officers, treating it as a plain fact of life. The other side will spend a barrage
13:53on
13:54one man. Then he gives them the rule. During a barrage, never send just one messenger. Think about why
14:04a lone runner crossing open ground is exactly the dot an observer is waiting for. If he goes down,
14:12the message goes down with him and the company is cut off. So send two, by different routes, and hope
14:20one gets
14:20through. German battalions were doubling their messengers because of the way their enemy treated
14:26a single man in the open. But the line that should stop you comes next. Here the commander is not
14:33describing
14:33what the shells did to bodies. He is describing what they did to mines. Many of our soldiers have even
14:41adopted
14:41the idea that they mustn't fire at all. Read that one twice. German infantrymen from one of the best
14:50trained armies in Europe lying in their holes and not firing their weapons. Because they had learned that a
14:57rifle shot gives away a position, and a position given away brings down a concentration. Shoot at the enemy and
15:05his
15:05guns find you. So don't shoot. His remedy tells you how far it had gone. Main positions, he ordered, must
15:14not
15:14fire in daylight. Dig alternate positions. And then a sentence that would have been hard to imagine in a
15:20German briefing in 1940. If we want to bring the old spirit back, the soldiers must learn that their most
15:27important weapon is their shovel. Not the rifle. Not the machine gun. The shovel. Now go back to Erwin
15:36Blonder in that open field, with a German sniper firing at him. Every German who stays quiet in his
15:42hole because the man next to him drew a barrage yesterday is a German who is not shooting at Blonder
15:47today. Or at the rifleman walking behind him. This is the second layer of our answer. When an American
15:54battery fired at one German soldier, the shells landed on one man. But the lesson landed on every
16:01German who saw it. Move and you die. Fire and you die. The shell bought something far larger than one
16:10dead enemy. It bought silence along a whole company front. The Germans felt it from above as well.
16:17A second report, written by a German panzer grenadier battalion commander and printed by American
16:23intelligence in January 1945, leaves no room for doubt about whose guns he meant.
16:30Artillery directed by observation planes places fire on each of our movements. And
16:37U.S. air observation detects every movement and directs sudden and heavy fire concentrations on the
16:43deployment area. Those observation planes were mostly Piper Cubs. Little fabric two-seaters. No bombs. No guns.
16:53They were barely faster than a car on the highway. Ernie Pyle watched them over the Anzio beachhead
16:59in the spring of 1944. They puttered back and forth above the front, spotting for the artillery.
17:06The Germans threw anti-aircraft fire at them. Now and then a German fighter would slip in and make a
17:12pass.
17:13And the Cubs, Pyle reported, usually survived it. Because they flew so slowly the fighters overshot
17:20them. And a Cub could simply drop down and land. Think about how strange that is. The most dangerous
17:28aircraft over a German position might be the slowest thing in the sky. It never dropped anything. It just
17:35looked. German commanders understood exactly what those planes meant. In Normandy, Field Marshal von
17:42Kluge ordered his air units to go after what the U.S. official history quotes as the
17:47particularly obnoxious artillery observation planes. Fighter aircraft, which Germany was desperately short of,
17:55sent to hunt unarmed spotters. An army spending scarce fighters to put out the eyes because it could not
18:02reach the guns. And one German prisoner told his American captors what it felt like underneath them.
18:10When the Cub flies over, he said, all things cease. All we move are our eyeballs.
18:17Now put the pieces side by side and look at what was really happening. The German army in the west
18:23was
18:24being pushed out of the daylight. Helmut, writing from the hedgerows, said movement had become something
18:30for the night. The panzer grenadier commander told his men to attack without warning fire,
18:35at night or in fog if they could. When caught under a barrage, get down at once rather than run.
18:43Better still, work forward, close enough to the American lines that the American guns could not
18:49fire without hitting their own men. Look at that list again. Doubled messengers. Silent rifles.
18:57Shovels instead of weapons. Night instead of day. Hugging the enemy to hide from his artillery.
19:05Every one of those rules is a German soldier agreeing to fight on American terms.
19:11That is what the shell aimed at one man was buying. Not a body count. Control of the battlefield in
19:18daylight, which is when armies move, attack, and resupply. So the German word for it, wasteful,
19:26starts to look a little different, doesn't it? A shell that freezes a hundred men is not wasted on one.
19:33But every one of those German rules rested on a single assumption. The American guns would always answer.
19:41In October 1944, on Patton's front in Lorraine, for weeks on end, they mostly didn't. And what
19:49American infantry learned in those weeks, about what the guns had really been doing for them,
19:54their own officers put in writing, in words that still read like a call for help.
20:00October 2nd, 1944. At 12th Army Group headquarters, General Omar Bradley instituted strict rationing
20:07of artillery ammunition across the American armies in France. Nine days later, it got worse. On October 11th,
20:15his headquarters canceled the ammunition allocation already in force, and told the armies there would
20:20be no further issues until November 7th. They would live on what they already had.
20:26For some calibers, the amount now meant to last 33 days was smaller than what had originally been
20:32allotted for eight. The officer who had to make those numbers work was Brigadier General John Hines,
20:38chief of the Army Group's artillery section. Hines did not like rationing at all. He argued,
20:45in the words of the official history, that it was, contrary to the basic principle of giving a
20:50commander a mission and the means. You tell a general what to take, you don't tell him how many
20:56shells he may use to take it. But there was no arguing with the arithmetic. How did the richest army
21:02in the world end up counting shells like Rommel? Two reasons, and neither of them had anything to do
21:08with courage. In the fall of 1943, under pressure from a congressional committee worried about waste
21:14and surplus stocks, the War Department had cut back ammunition production. A year later, those missing
21:20shells were the ones that weren't there. And the shells that did exist were sitting hundreds of miles
21:26behind the front, at the end of a supply line that started on the Normandy beaches. Now, remember the
21:32number I asked you to keep? Here it is again, in its full context. In the week of October 15th
21:38to the 21st,
21:403rd Army's 105mm howitzers fired 1.1 rounds per gun per day. That week, the whole of 3rd Army fired
21:49about
21:493,400 rounds of 105 ammunition. 1st Army, to the north, fired more than 109,000. Same army, same war,
21:59same week. Thirty times the difference. So what did a 3rd Army Corps commander do with almost nothing?
22:07He wrote rules. The artillery commander of 20 Corps, the Corps in front of Metz, restricted his guns to
22:14three kinds of mission. Counterattacks, endangering the battle position. Counter-battery fire, against
22:22active enemy guns. And observed fire, on the most lucrative targets.
22:28Look closely at that last phrase, because this is where our story turns. The most lucrative targets.
22:36A German runner at 1,000 yards is not a lucrative target. A sniper in a tree line is not
22:43a lucrative
22:43target. A single German soldier walking across a field is now, by written order, off the list.
22:50For the first time since the landings, an American observer in Lorraine could watch a German move in
22:57daylight and be forbidden to do anything about it. In part 1, I told you that when the shells ran
23:04short,
23:04American units reported losing one very specific thing. Here it is. The official history sums up the
23:12reports in a single line. Unit after unit reported its inability to take targets of opportunity under
23:19fire. A target of opportunity is exactly what Erwin Blonder described in his letter. Germans moving
23:25a thousand yards away. Not planned, not scheduled, just seen. The dot in the field. The thing the Germans
23:34called waste. And what happened when the Americans lost the ability to hit it? The 35th Infantry Division's
23:42artillery officer put it plainly. The inability to use its artillery took the teeth out of its attacks.
23:49One of the division's regiments, he reported, had been twice repulsed for lack of artillery support.
23:56Twice. Thrown back twice by German positions that in July would have been under fire the moment a man
24:03showed himself. Those reports did not just disappear into a file. Some of them were collected by observers
24:10working for Lt. Gen. Ben Lear, sent out to see what was really happening at the front. Remember Lear's
24:16name. A few weeks later, he would be handed a different shortage, and it would turn out to be the
24:21same problem seen from the other end. Now let me take you to one town, because this is where it
24:27stops
24:27being a table of numbers. Maisière-les-Metz, north of Metz, held by Germans who had turned its houses
24:34into small fortresses. The American 357th Infantry, of the 90th Division, had been fighting into it since
24:42the first week of October. There were plans for a full assault. Then a 3rd Army order froze the allotment
24:49of all artillery ammunition above 3-inch caliber. And the official history says that put an end to
24:55the idea of continuing a full-fledged assault. So the infantry did it the other way. House to house.
25:02Block to block. Demolition charges and flamethrowers. A platoon or a squad might take a house or two in a
25:11day.
25:12On October 20th, the Americans managed something. They brought a single 155mm self-propelled gun
25:18forward to within 150 yards of the town hall, the Hotel de Ville, and it slammed 10 rounds into the
25:26building. The Germans shelled the town in reply. One gun, 10 rounds, against the main strong point of a
25:36fortified town. Compare that with a battery's worth of shells coming down on a single German hand in July.
25:44The town hall still had to be taken by men. On October 26th, K Company fought its way onto the
25:51lower floor and was driven back out by flamethrowers. On the 27th, the Americans tried again, with four
25:59teams of 10 men each. One team broke into the building. All but one of its men were killed or
26:05wounded.
26:07Now here is the strange part. And it gets stranger. On the other side of the same front, the German
26:14Army
26:15Group G was rationing its own guns that October to roughly one to one and a half rounds per gun
26:21per day to build up a reserve. For a few weeks in Lorraine, both armies were starving at almost the
26:27same rate. The advantage the Germans called wasteful had simply vanished. And it was the American infantry that
26:35felt it, because the American way of fighting had been built around it.
26:39So what was the shell really for?
26:42Mazier gives you the answer in two acts. You've just seen the first act, the fight with almost no guns.
26:49On October 28th, the guns came back to Mazier, including some of the heaviest howitzers in the
26:54American Army. What happened over the next three days, and what it cost, measured against those 10-man
27:01teams at the town hall, is the clearest explanation of this whole story you'll find anywhere in the
27:06record.
27:07October 28th, 1944
27:10Mazier-les-Metz, the second act
27:14This time, three companies of the 357th went forward behind an artillery preparation.
27:20240-mm howitzers, among the heaviest guns the American Army had in Europe, fired ahead of the infantry.
27:28The regiment's commander, Colonel George Barth, was wounded on the first day. The attack kept going,
27:34and the Germans gave way. By October 30th, the town was American.
27:40Now, I want you to hear the next number the way the official historian wrote it.
27:45American losses in that final phase were only 55 officers and men.
27:51Against that, he set the loss of an entire German battalion, 55. Remember the 10-man team that broke
28:00into the town hall the day before, and the one man who came out of it unhurt? For most of
28:05October,
28:06that was the price of Mazier, paid a house at a time by men with flamethrowers and demolition charges.
28:12When the guns were allowed to speak, the town fell in three days.
28:17That is the third layer of our answer, and it is the one the Germans never really saw from their
28:22side of the line.
28:24A shell does not replace courage. It replaces a man.
28:29Every job a shell does is a job some American rifleman does not have to do with his body.
28:35Hit the sniper with a battery, and no squad has to work around his flank.
28:39Freeze a German company in its holes, and no platoon has to take those holes one at a time.
28:46So the real question was never, can we afford the shell? It was, can we afford the man?
28:54And by the autumn of 1944, the honest answer was, no.
29:00Here's a statistic that should change how you think about the whole American war.
29:05Across the theaters, infantrymen were about 14% of American troops sent overseas.
29:11They took something like 70% of the casualties.
29:15A small slice of the army was doing almost all of the bleeding.
29:19And there was no deep pool behind them.
29:22Back in 1943, Washington had made a decision that later historians called the 90 Division Gamble.
29:29Instead of building a giant ground army, the United States would field roughly 90 divisions,
29:34and pour the rest of its manpower into factories, ships, aircraft,
29:38and the supply lines that fed every allied army in the war.
29:42It was a deliberate bet.
29:44Fewer riflemen, backed by more steel than any army had ever had.
29:49By that autumn, the army had already gone past its authorized strength of 7.7 million men.
29:55The riflemen it had were nearly all the riflemen it was going to get.
30:00Which brings us back to Erwin Blonder.
30:03Because while the 357th was fighting through Maizière,
30:07Blonder was in the worst week of his life.
30:09On October 24, 1944, the 1st Battalion of the 141st Infantry
30:15pushed along a forested ridge in the Vosges and found itself cut off.
30:20The Germans closed in behind it.
30:22More than 200 American soldiers were surrounded in the pine woods.
30:26They would go down in history as the lost battalion.
30:31That autumn, Blonder's own 6th Corps had reported it could give adequate artillery support to only one division at a
30:37time.
30:38Blonder had the only radio.
30:40He nursed its batteries.
30:42They were supposed to last two days.
30:45He made them last six.
30:47Every message out of that ridge went through his hands.
30:51The men dug in, and the Germans attacked every morning, and every morning, the Americans held.
30:57The army tried to reach them with everything it had.
31:00The division packed supplies into artillery shells and fired them toward the perimeter.
31:06As Blonder remembered it, it did not work well.
31:10On the 5th day, fighter planes dropped belly tanks full of food.
31:14Most of them landed among the Germans.
31:17The men were living on almost nothing, and a third of them, Blonder included, had trench foot.
31:22By the 3rd day, he could not walk.
31:25In the end, it was not shells that got the lost battalion out.
31:29It was riflemen.
31:31The job went to the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, made up almost entirely of Japanese Americans,
31:38many of whose families were behind barbed wire in camps back home.
31:43They attacked uphill through the forest for days, against Germans who had every reason to hold.
31:49When they finally reached the ridge, the price of reaching a little over 200 men was about 800 casualties.
31:57Hold those two pictures side by side.
32:00Mazier, where the shells came back and the town fell for 55 men.
32:05The Vosges, where the shells couldn't do the job and the infantry paid with 800.
32:11I am not saying artillery could have saved the lost battalion on its own.
32:15Forest, fog, and German guns made that fight what it was.
32:20But it shows you, as clearly as anything in this story, what the other currency was.
32:26When steel can't do it, men must.
32:30And every army commander in Europe knew how many men he had left.
32:35Now, remember Ben Lear, the general whose observers collected those reports about units unable to fire at targets of opportunity?
32:43By December, the theater calculated it would be short about 17,000 riflemen by the end of the month.
32:51By late January 1945, the armies were short 82,000 infantrymen, nearly 50,000 of them riflemen.
33:00Rear area soldiers were pulled out of depots and offices and retrained to carry rifles.
33:06On December 26th, the theater appealed for volunteers to retrain as infantry.
33:12Among those who stepped forward were more than 2,000 black soldiers.
33:17And Eisenhower created a new post to deal with all of it.
33:21Deputy Theater Commander for Manpower.
33:25He gave it to Ben Lear.
33:27The same general who had watched the army run short of shells now had to find the men to replace
33:33them.
33:34Two shortages.
33:36One equation.
33:37Every shell that did not fire was a rifleman who had to do its work instead.
33:42That is why American officers in October wrote about missing the single German soldier as though they had lost something
33:49precious.
33:50They had.
33:51They had lost the cheapest way to keep their own men alive.
33:56But knowing that does not put a single shell in a howitzer.
34:00So what did the American army actually do about it?
34:03In November, the army took 27 enlisted men straight off the front lines in Europe and flew them back across
34:10the Atlantic.
34:11Not on leave.
34:13Not as heroes for a parade.
34:15They were sent home for a job that no rifleman in a foxhole would have believed if you'd told him.
34:21They were gunners.
34:23One mortar crew and two artillery gun crews.
34:2627 enlisted men in all.
34:28Taken out of the line in Europe and flown home at the suggestion of the Secretary of War.
34:33Their orders were to tour the factories.
34:35The idea was simple.
34:37Let the people filling shells meet the people firing them.
34:40In late November, Undersecretary of War Robert Patterson announced the tour to the press.
34:47The soldiers spoke for themselves.
34:49One sergeant told reporters his unit could not fire for three days because a shortage of ammunition.
34:55Another said they needed, and he chose his word carefully for the newspapers, a heck of a lot more ammunition.
35:03Picture that sergeant on a factory floor somewhere in the Midwest.
35:07A man who had spent the autumn watching Germans he was not allowed to shoot,
35:11standing in front of a woman at a loading line who had never seen a howitzer fired in anger.
35:17That was the whole supply chain in one conversation.
35:20The front talking directly to the source.
35:23And the factory floor needed to hear it.
35:25Here's how deep the hole was.
35:28That autumn, the theater asked Washington for more than five million rounds of 105mm ammunition.
35:34That single request was two and a half times the total American production of that round for the month of
35:40October.
35:42Washington could promise about half of it.
35:44For the long-range 155mm gun, about a third.
35:48For the 81mm mortar, about a quarter.
35:53The fixes had started months earlier.
35:56In April 1944, the War Department ordered production back up,
36:00including more than 1.3 million rounds a month of 155 howitzer ammunition,
36:05and about $200 million for new plants.
36:09But a shell factory is not a light switch.
36:12By November, the official history notes, those measures were only beginning to show up in the numbers.
36:18The army even released soldiers back to civilian jobs for 90 days to work in the plants making 105 rounds.
36:26Think about what that tells you.
36:28An army so short of riflemen that it was retraining clerks for the front line was also sending soldiers back
36:35to the factories.
36:36Because a soldier on a shell line, it had decided, could save more riflemen than he could replace.
36:43That is not a rich man wasting money.
36:45That is a very careful calculation.
36:49And in November, the calculation started paying out at the front.
36:54November 8th, 1944.
36:56Lorraine.
36:58Third Army opened its offensive toward the Tsar.
37:01In front of 12th Corps, 17 Corps artillery battalions opened fire,
37:06and for the first half hour, 20 more division battalions joined them.
37:10The preparation ran three and a half hours.
37:13In 24 hours, 12th Corps fired nearly 22,000 rounds.
37:19Remember, three weeks earlier, a 3rd Army howitzer had been firing about one round a day.
37:25The official historian describes the effect in a single sentence.
37:29The fire smashed the forward enemy positions, destroyed communications,
37:34and effectively neutralized most of the German guns.
37:39Destroyed communications.
37:42Hear that phrase in light of everything we've seen.
37:45The runners.
37:46The phone lines.
37:47The messengers sent in pairs.
37:50In one morning, the American guns did on a grand scale what the observer with a single German in his
37:56sights did every day in July.
37:59They cut the nerves.
38:02Across November, the numbers climbed back.
38:053rd Army's 105mm howitzers averaged about 45 rounds per gun per day.
38:117th Army, about 49.
38:139th Army, more than 70.
38:16The theater fired about 2.5 million rounds of 105 ammunition that month, more than in any month before it.
38:24At Czar Lautern, 10th Corps was putting out more than 15,000 rounds a day against about 6,000 German.
38:32And the observers went back to work.
38:35The single German soldier was back on the list.
38:39Now here's something I find fascinating.
38:42The Germans studied all of this, and they wrote it down.
38:45The German Army High Command circulated pamphlets on combat experience against the Americans.
38:52The U.S. official history of the Lorraine campaign quotes them.
38:56They said,
38:57The American soldier depends upon tremendous materiel support.
39:01And they added that,
39:03When he is denied heavy support by the combined arms, the drive in the attack dwindles.
39:09They meant it as a criticism.
39:12Read it again knowing what you know now.
39:15The Germans had described the American bargain with almost perfect accuracy.
39:20The American infantrymen did depend on materiel, by design.
39:25That was the whole point of the 90 Division gamble.
39:28When the shells stopped in October, the attacks did lose their drive.
39:33And the 35th Division's officer had said so in nearly the same words.
39:37The lack of artillery took the teeth out of its attacks.
39:41What the Germans saw as a weakness was the American system working exactly as intended.
39:47Spend steel, so you don't have to spend men.
39:51And the same pamphlets praised the American artillery itself.
39:55German observers noted its accurate fire, its plentiful ammunition, its range,
40:01and its skilled use of artillery planes as observation posts in the air.
40:06The Cubs.
40:07The eyes over the hand outside the foxhole.
40:11So by late November, every piece of our answer is on the table.
40:16The single German was the nervous system of his army.
40:19Hitting him froze everyone who watched.
40:23And every shell that did the work saved an American rifleman the army could not replace.
40:29But there was still one thing nobody knew.
40:32Whether this system could hold when the Germans stopped hiding and came straight at it.
40:38Bradley was worried about exactly one date.
40:41On November 21st, looking at the stockpiles, he warned that the ammunition on hand would let 12th
40:47Army Group keep up its offensive only until about 15 December.
40:52Mark that date, the 15th of December.
40:56Because on the morning of the 16th, in the forests of the Ardennes, the German army attacked with
41:02everything it had left.
41:04And some of the first men in its path were American gunners and a battalion of riflemen who would spend
41:11the next week finding out exactly how much one American shell was worth.
41:19Before dawn, along some 80 miles of the Ardennes front, German guns opened up and German infantry came out of
41:27the fog.
41:28The attack Hitler had been building for months had begun.
41:33On the northern shoulder of the attack, the Germans had to get past the American 99th and 2nd Infantry Divisions.
41:39And behind them, a long, bare rise called Elsenborn Ridge.
41:44Up on that ridge, the Americans began gathering guns.
41:48Now watch what happens to the system we have been following when the Germans stop hiding from it.
41:54On the night of December 17th, a single battalion of the 99th Division was covered by a defensive barrage of
42:0111,500 rounds.
42:03One battalion. One night.
42:07Go back to October for a moment and remember 3rd Army's entire 105mm fire for a week.
42:14About 3,400 rounds.
42:17More than three times that went into one night's protection for one battalion.
42:22The next day, one artillery battalion of the 2nd Division, the 38th Field Artillery, fired more than 5,000 rounds
42:29by itself.
42:30At the twin villages of Kringkelt and Rocherath, German tanks pushed in among the American foxholes.
42:36The official history is blunt about what stopped many of them.
42:41Artillery throughout this fight offered the first line of anti-tank defense.
42:47Shells immobilized panzers before they ever reached the foxhole line and left them, the historian writes, like crippled geese in
42:54front of the hunter.
42:57And then there is Dom Bütkenbach.
42:59It was a manor farm on a low ridge, sitting across the road the Germans needed to swing west.
43:06Holding it was the 2nd Battalion of the 26th Infantry, 1st Division, under Lt. Col. Daryl Daniel.
43:13Now listen carefully to who was actually in that battalion, because this is where every thread of our story comes
43:20together.
43:21According to the official history, its rifle companies were made up mostly of replacements.
43:26It was short of automatic rifles and grenade launchers.
43:28These were the men Ben Lear's numbers were about.
43:33The riflemen the army barely had.
43:35What the battalion did have was this.
43:38It dug deep.
43:39It strung wire.
43:41And it had its forward observers in place.
43:45Men doing exactly what Erwin Blonder had done in September.
43:49Watching.
43:50Registering every approach.
43:53Ready to talk to the guns.
43:55At about 2.25 on the morning of December 19th, some 20 truckloads of German infantry dismounted west of Bullingen
44:03and came on behind a dozen tanks.
44:06The 33rd Field Artillery Battalion lit the ground with illumination shells, then hit it with white phosphorus and high explosive.
44:14Three tanks pushed down the road into Dom Bütkenbach itself.
44:18The 155mm howitzers of the 5th Field Artillery Battalion began dropping shells around them so close that the crews abandoned
44:27their tanks and ran.
44:29Later that morning, a German scout car broke through, and its last round killed Corporal Hale Williams and Private Richard
44:36Wallenberg at their anti-tank gun.
44:39On the 20th, in fog, about 20 tanks and a rifle battalion came again.
44:45Again illumination.
44:47Again concentrations.
44:49This time from three artillery battalions at once.
44:52Then came December 21st.
44:55The hardest day.
44:57The Germans threw in elements of the 12th SS Panzer Division, a full Panzer Grenadier Regiment, and the guns and
45:04rocket launchers that had pounded Krinkelt.
45:07For about three hours before dawn, that fire hit the American foxhole line without a pause, tearing gaps in it
45:14and smashing weapons.
45:16At first light, the Americans called down defensive barrages on their own front.
45:21Battery after battery came in, until at least ten field artillery battalions were firing for one infantry battalion.
45:27The fire, as the official history puts it, boxed the American lines.
45:33A wall of shells on every side the Germans could come from.
45:37German tanks still broke through on the right.
45:40They overran an anti-tank platoon and drove along the hedgerows, wiping out machine gun and automatic rifle crews.
45:48One self-propelled tank destroyer knocked out seven tanks in succession.
45:53A 57-millimeter gunner named Corporal Henry Warner, who had already destroyed three panzers, was killed.
46:00He would receive the Medal of Honor.
46:03And at one point, the battalion's communications were cut for about three hours.
46:08The shells kept arriving.
46:10Stop on that for a moment, because it is the most important sentence in this story.
46:16The phone lines were down.
46:18The observers couldn't call.
46:20And the fire kept coming anyway, onto the right places, because the targets had been worked out in advance, and
46:26the guns knew where every approach lay.
46:29The habit of July.
46:31Every field watched.
46:32Every movement already a target.
46:35Had been built so deep into the system that it kept working when the wires were cut.
46:41In eight hours on the 21st, the American guns fired more than 10,000 rounds in support of Dom Butchenbach.
46:48Afterward, a patrol counted 300 dead German infantrymen in the woods from which the final assault had come.
46:55Daniel had planned to pull his battalion back 1,000 yards.
46:58He never needed to.
47:00And when he talked about it afterward, he did not credit his own leadership.
47:04He credited the guns.
47:06We wouldn't be here now, he said, if it wasn't for them.
47:11So now we can answer the question from the title.
47:13All of it.
47:14Together.
47:15The Americans fired artillery at a single German soldier, because that soldier was rarely just a soldier.
47:22He was a runner, a sniper, an observer.
47:25A piece of the nervous system of the German front.
47:28Because the shell that hit him taught every German who saw it to stay down, stay quiet, and give up
47:34the daylight.
47:35And underneath both of those reasons was the one that mattered most.
47:39Every job a shell did was a job an American rifleman did not have to do with his body.
47:46In an army that had chosen, deliberately, to have fewer riflemen and more steel than anyone else.
47:54At Dombutgenbach, that bargain was cashed in.
47:58A battalion of replacements held a ridge against an SS Panzer Division, because ten battalions of guns did the work
48:04that would otherwise have needed thousands more men.
48:07The Germans called it methodical, schematic, and wasteful.
48:11First army's howitzers were firing 69 rounds per gun per day.
48:17Third army's total, for almost the whole of October and early November, barely equaled what it fired on a single
48:23day at the height of the Ardennes.
48:26But there is a last part of this story, and it brings us back to where we started.
48:30To a chateau above the Seine, and a sentence in Rommel's report that we have not read yet.
48:36And to a lieutenant from Cleveland, who, that same Christmas Eve, was nowhere near Elsenborn Ridge.
48:43Go back now to July 15th, 1944, and the chateau above the Seine.
48:49There is one more sentence in Rommel's report that we have not read.
48:54He was writing about the fresh German infantry divisions being fed into Normandy, and what was happening to them under
49:00that enormous use of material.
49:03Even the bravest troops, he wrote, will be smashed piece by piece, losing men, arms, and territory.
49:13Peace by piece.
49:15Read that phrase again, knowing what you know now.
49:19A runner.
49:20An observer.
49:22A sniper in a tree line.
49:24A hand outside a foxhole.
49:26Rommel was not describing one great battle that broke his army.
49:30He was describing the thing this whole story has been about.
49:34An army being taken apart.
49:36One man.
49:38One movement.
49:39One message at a time.
49:41Two days after he signed that report, Rommel's staff car was strafed by an allied fighter on a Normandy road,
49:48and he was badly wounded.
49:50He never commanded again.
49:52In October, implicated in the plot against Hitler, he was forced to take poison.
49:58Kluge, who forwarded the report, had already taken his own life in August.
50:03But Rommel's report was never really the end of this story.
50:07The end is on the American side, where it always was.
50:11Daryl Daniel's battalion held Dom Budgenbach.
50:14On December 23rd, the 12th SS Panzer Division gave up trying to break through there.
50:21Daniel received the Distinguished Service Cross.
50:24Corporal Henry Warner, the anti-tank gunner, received the Medal of Honor, after his death.
50:29And the replacements who made up most of those rifle companies, men the army had scraped together from depots and
50:35training camps that autumn, were still in their foxholes when it was over.
50:40That was what the 10,000 rounds were for.
50:43And Erwin Blonder?
50:45He spent his last days with the Lost Battalion unable to walk, his feet ruined by trench foot.
50:51When the 442nd broke through on the 7th day, he was carried off the ridge.
50:57Doctors at a field hospital managed to save his feet.
51:00Somewhere along the way back, as Blonder told it, his ambulance was stopped by George Patton himself, who scolded him
51:07for not keeping his feet dry.
51:09He landed in Boston on Christmas Eve, 1944.
51:13Think about that date for a moment.
51:15On the same days Daryl Daniel's battalion was holding its ridge in Belgium, under a wall of American shells,
51:21the observer whose letter opened this story was coming home.
51:25He could not walk on his own until March.
51:28His feet never fully healed.
51:30He went back to Cleveland, to his wife Shirley, and into the family business his father and brother had kept
51:36going while he was away.
51:38His letter, the one where he wrote,
51:40You see Germans moving 1,000 yards away from you and you bring artillery fire on them,
51:45was eventually published in a collection of American wartime letters.
51:50Decades later, he went to reunions.
51:52He made friends there, among the Americans who had been with him on the ridge,
51:56and among the Japanese-American veterans of the 442nd, who had come up the hill to get them.
52:02He said for the rest of his life that those men deserved more recognition than they ever got.
52:08Hold that picture against the one we started with.
52:11Rommel, in his chateau, counting shells.
52:15Blonder, on a field in France, spending them on dots at 1,000 yards.
52:20One army that could not afford to fire at a single soldier.
52:24And one that could not afford not to.
52:27That is what the Germans never quite understood when they called it waste.
52:32They were counting American shells.
52:34The Americans were counting American riflemen.
52:38So here is the answer to the question in the title, as simply as I can put it.
52:43The Americans fired artillery at a single German soldier because they had decided that wherever a shell could go,
52:50an American rifleman would not have to.
52:52And every shell that went in his place was another chance for that rifleman to come home,
52:58the way Irvin Blonder did on Christmas Eve.
53:03Thank you for watching this one all the way through.
53:06If it changed how you think about the way the American soldier fought in Europe,
53:10and what every one of those shells was really meant to protect,
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