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Captured American M1 Garands seemed like a prize to German soldiers in Tunisia—until firing them revealed that the story was about more than a rifle. At Sidi Bou Zid, the weapons had been left behind by Iowa National Guardsmen after three days of resistance. German troops picked them up and fired, discovering a rapid eight-shot capability unlike anything in their own army.
This World War II military history story follows what the M1 Garand revealed to its captors, from the fighting near Sidi Bou Zid to a later misreading of American firepower at Thala. Accounts of a German battalion commander and Erwin Rommel add another perspective on the American rifleman and the forces behind the weapon’s reputation. Explore WW2 history, captured weapons, the M1 Garand in combat, and the experience of German soldiers facing American firepower through a focused historical narration—ideal for listeners interested in wartime strategy, battlefield history, and lesser-known stories of the North African campaign.
This World War II military history story follows what the M1 Garand revealed to its captors, from the fighting near Sidi Bou Zid to a later misreading of American firepower at Thala. Accounts of a German battalion commander and Erwin Rommel add another perspective on the American rifleman and the forces behind the weapon’s reputation. Explore WW2 history, captured weapons, the M1 Garand in combat, and the experience of German soldiers facing American firepower through a focused historical narration—ideal for listeners interested in wartime strategy, battlefield history, and lesser-known stories of the North African campaign.
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00:00February 22nd, 1943. Dawn, under low cloud, on the road to Thala in western Tunisia.
00:08The German 10th Panzer Division has spent two days pushing up this valley.
00:14Behind it lies the Kasserine Pass and the wreckage of the American units that tried to hold it.
00:19Ahead lies Thala. Beyond Thala, the supply depots of the Allied Army in North Africa.
00:26One more push and the road is open.
00:30Then the ridge in front of them erupts. Not the thin, scattered fire of the past few days.
00:36Heavy shells landing in groups on the road, on the assembly areas, on the tanks forming up to attack.
00:43Four American howitzers have been sent up to the crest to fire over open sights,
00:48and before the day is out, they knock out two Mark IV tanks.
00:53The rest of the fire comes from somewhere behind the ridge, out of sight, and it does not stop.
00:58General Fritz von Breuch, commanding the attack, asks what is firing.
01:04He is told,
01:07Arab informers add that fresh troops moved into the pass during the night.
01:12Von Breuch draws the obvious conclusion.
01:14An entire new American infantry division has arrived.
01:18He is wrong.
01:19What has arrived is the artillery of the U.S. 9th Infantry Division, 48 howitzers,
01:272,170 men in 411 jeeps and trucks, in a column 11 miles long.
01:34Five days earlier, they were near the border of Morocco.
01:37They have driven about 800 miles in less than 100 hours, through rain on the plains and ice
01:44in the Atlas Mountains, at night, with headlights blacked out.
01:48By that afternoon, their ammunition is 15 minutes from running dry.
01:53The Germans never find that out.
01:56Von Breuch halts the attack.
01:58Within days, the German army in Tunisia is pulling back east through the pass it had just won.
02:04Keep that picture in mind, because this story keeps returning to it.
02:08A German commander looks at American firepower and reads it wrong.
02:12By that same morning, the Germans in Tunisia held something else American.
02:16Not guns on a ridge.
02:19Rifles.
02:20Hundreds of them.
02:21Gathered a week earlier on the plain below two hills near a village called Sidi Bouzid.
02:27And German soldiers had done what soldiers on every side of every war do with a captured weapon.
02:33They picked them up.
02:34They worked the action.
02:36They fired them.
02:38So here is the question this whole investigation is built on.
02:41What did those American rifles tell the Germans who fired them?
02:45The answer is not what the Germans expected.
02:48And in the end, it is barely about the rifle at all.
02:51Before we go further, if you want to see how the American soldier turned one brutal winter
02:56in Tunisia into an army Germany had to take seriously, hit like and subscribe.
03:02It keeps these stories coming.
03:03To understand where those rifles came from, go back eight days.
03:08February 14th, 1943.
03:11Two bare hills rising out of the Tunisian plain.
03:15Jabal Kassira and Garrett Hadid.
03:17On them are men of the 168th Infantry, an Iowa National Guard regiment of the 34th Division.
03:26Their commander, Colonel Thomas Drake, has been here before, in a sense.
03:31He won the Distinguished Service Cross as a sergeant in 1918.
03:37That morning, German armor comes out of the passes to the east and sweeps around both hills.
03:44By nightfall, Drake's men are an island.
03:48American tanks try to break through to them the next day and are shot to pieces on the open ground.
03:54For two days, the men on the hills hold, under relentless attack,
03:59crowded into whatever cover the rock allows, thirsty and hungry.
04:05On the night of February 16th, they are ordered out.
04:09Before they go, each force destroys all of its weapons and equipment, except what can be carried.
04:16Then they file down the slopes, cross plowed fields onto the plain,
04:20and head for a line of hills about fifteen miles away, in complete darkness.
04:27As the miles go by, exhausted men begin dropping the heavy weapons they had carried off the hills.
04:33At dawn, they are still a few miles short.
04:36German motorized troops spot them in the open and rake the column with heavy machine guns.
04:42Most of the survivors are driven into a large cactus patch.
04:46Nearly all of them are captured.
04:49About eight hundred men from one hill, about six hundred from the other.
04:54Colonel Drake is among them.
04:56What they could not destroy, and could not carry, stayed on that plain.
05:02By early 1943, the rifle the army was putting into its infantrymen's hands was the M1, the Garand, standard since
05:101936.
05:12And now, German soldiers were turning it over in their hands.
05:16To a German infantryman, it looked like a gift.
05:20His own rifle was a bolt action.
05:23Five rounds, and between every shot, a hand off the stock to work the bolt.
05:28The American rifle fired eight, as fast as he could pull the trigger.
05:32The German army had a long habit of cataloging captured weapons, giving them German designations, and putting them to use.
05:40On paper, this one should have been a prize.
05:43One more thing to plant now.
05:46The day before the guns opened at Thala, Erwin Rommel himself walked among captured American equipment near the pass.
05:53Afterward, he wrote down what he saw, and in that passage sits a single word this whole story turns on.
06:01I'm going to hold that word back, because by the time you hear it, it should land very differently than
06:07it would right now.
06:09The German soldier with the captured rifle discovered something first, though.
06:14Within minutes of firing it, he learned that it fed from a clip of exactly eight American cartridges, loaded as
06:20a single block.
06:22And that meant the rifle would only keep working under one condition.
06:27A condition no German supply depot in Tunisia could ever meet.
06:32Start with that clip, because it's the first thing a captured M1 says to anyone who fires it.
06:37The rifle doesn't load one cartridge at a time.
06:40You press a steel clip holding eight rounds down into the action, and the clip goes in with them.
06:47Fire the eighth shot, and the empty clip flies out of the rifle.
06:50Then you need another one.
06:53Another clip, and eight more American .30 caliber cartridges to fill it.
06:58Now put that rifle in German hands.
07:01The German army ran on its own rifle cartridge, 7.92 millimeters.
07:07It did not make the American round.
07:10It did not make the American clip.
07:12So every time a German soldier pulled the trigger on a captured Garand, he was spending something he had no
07:18way of replacing.
07:20The rifle was a countdown.
07:23However much ammunition had been picked up with it, that was all there would ever be.
07:28When it ran out, he was holding nine and a half pounds of wood and steel.
07:33Hold on to that idea, because the men on those two hills near Sidi Bouzid had just lived through the
07:38same problem from the other side.
07:41Go back to Colonel Thomas Drake.
07:44Two years after the war in Tunisia, the army added an oak leaf cluster to the Distinguished Service Cross he
07:50had won as a sergeant in 1918.
07:53The citation covers February 14th to 16th, 1943.
07:58It says he held his exposed position for three days without food or water.
08:03And it says he was captured with what was left of his men when the ammunition ran out.
08:09Listen to what that sentence doesn't say.
08:12It doesn't say the rifles failed.
08:15It doesn't say the men broke.
08:17It says the ammunition ran out.
08:21On those hills, the American rifle was exactly as good as the line of trucks behind it.
08:27And for three days, there was no line of trucks behind it.
08:31So the same weapon was telling the same truth on both sides of the battlefield.
08:37A rifle is only the last inch of something much longer.
08:41Cut what's behind it, and it stops.
08:44Which brings us back to Thala, and to the question of what was behind the guns that stopped von Broek.
08:51February 17th, 1943.
08:53The same night Drake's men were stumbling across the plain toward the Cactus Patch,
08:58Brigadier General S. Leroy Irwin received his orders at Tlemcen in western Algeria, near the border of Morocco.
09:05Irwin commanded the artillery of the 9th Infantry Division.
09:09The order was to force march east, to Tabessa.
09:12The way it was understood in his headquarters, go, and don't let anything stand in your way.
09:18The column was moving by late afternoon.
09:21At its head was the 34th Field Artillery Battalion, under a lieutenant colonel named William Westmoreland.
09:2725 years later, the whole world would know that name from Vietnam.
09:32In February of 1943, he was trying to keep 11 miles of trucks on the road.
09:38And the road fought them.
09:40Cold rain and mud on the plains.
09:42Ice and snow in the Atlas Mountains, 3,000 feet up.
09:47At night, the headlights were covered with slitted blackout hoods, little cat's eyes of light.
09:53And on the mountain curves, the drivers could barely see 20 yards ahead.
09:57The drivers hardly slept for the entire march.
10:00Let me put the number in a way you can feel.
10:03800 miles in less than 100 hours works out to about 8 miles an hour.
10:08Every hour.
10:10Day and night.
10:11For four days.
10:13Not a race car on an empty highway.
10:17411 vehicles towing howitzers, through mountains, in the dark, in the rain.
10:23They reached Thala on the night of February 21st.
10:27They did not find an empty position.
10:29British troops had been holding the road.
10:32Brigadier Charles Dunphy's outnumbered 26th Brigade had fought the German spearhead to a standstill just south of the town.
10:39And a small group of British tanks, under Brigadier Cameron Nicholson, had bought hours with their lives.
10:44Into that line, overnight, Irwin's guns went into position.
10:49At dawn, they opened fire.
10:53And here is the detail I want you to remember for the rest of this story.
10:57By that afternoon, the howitzer ammunition was 15 minutes away from being exhausted.
11:0415 minutes.
11:07That's how close the 9th Division's guns came to Drake's situation on the hills.
11:12But the trucks kept coming.
11:15Over the course of the fight, the guns fired 1,904 rounds.
11:21They lost 45 men.
11:23Eight of them killed.
11:25And on the other side of the ridge, a German general listened to that fire,
11:30heard 155s, heard about troops moving in the night,
11:34and decided he was facing a fresh American division.
11:38He wasn't.
11:39He was facing something he had no category for.
11:43Not a division that had been sitting in reserve,
11:46but an army that could pick up its artillery at the edge of Morocco
11:49and put it down in front of him four days later, still firing.
11:55So here is the first layer of the answer.
11:57The captured Garand showed the Germans, who fired it,
12:00that the American rifle was never really a standalone weapon.
12:04It was the tip of a supply system.
12:07The Germans could capture the tip.
12:09They couldn't capture the rest.
12:12But that's only the first layer.
12:14And it's not the one most German officers would have chosen.
12:18Because when they looked at how American infantry actually used those rifles,
12:22they reached for an entirely different explanation.
12:25One German infantry battalion commander,
12:28captured nearly two years later in France,
12:31summed up the American riflemen in a single word.
12:33He meant it as an insult.
12:36He thought it explained everything he'd seen.
12:39He was right about what he saw.
12:41He was wrong about what it meant.
12:43The word was wildly.
12:46The report reached American intelligence
12:48and was printed by the War Department in January of 1945.
12:52A German Panzer Grenadier Battalion commander,
12:55describing a week of fighting against American troops, wrote this.
12:58The infantry shoots wildly into areas
13:02where the presence of our troops is suspected.
13:04And then, as if to make sure nobody missed the point,
13:08most of the fire is unaimed.
13:11He added that the Americans avoided close combat.
13:14Now put yourself in the boots of a German soldier
13:17who has fired a captured Garand.
13:19He knows what that rifle feels like.
13:22Eight shots, as fast as the finger moves.
13:25No bolt to work.
13:26No pause to think.
13:28To him, the commander's report would make perfect sense.
13:32Hand a man a rifle like that,
13:34and he will spend ammunition like water.
13:36Of course the Americans shoot wildly.
13:39The rifle practically asks them to.
13:42That was the German reading.
13:44And notice how comfortable it is.
13:46It turns American firepower into a weakness.
13:49Lots of noise.
13:50Not much courage.
13:53Here's the problem with it.
13:54The Americans were writing the same thing about the Germans.
13:57A month earlier, in December of 1944,
14:01the same intelligence bulletin printed comments from American soldiers on German firepower.
14:07The Germans' famous light machine guns with their ripping rate of fire got this verdict from the men who had
14:13faced them.
14:14Actually, these weapons are terrific ammunition wasters.
14:19So each army looked at the others' fire and saw waste.
14:23Think about what that tells you.
14:26Waste is not something you can see from the other side of a field.
14:30Waste depends on what you can afford.
14:33The German commander saw Americans spending bullets on empty hedgerows and called it wild.
14:38Because in his army, that spending would have been reckless.
14:43In the American army, it was a decision.
14:46Whose decision?
14:48Let me show you a man who had to make it.
14:51June of 1944.
14:54Normandy.
14:54The U.S. 90th Infantry Division came ashore at Utah Beach and walked straight into the hedgerows.
15:00Its first weeks were so bad that Omar Bradley's staff recommended breaking the division up and using its men as
15:06replacements.
15:07Among its officers was William Depew, 24 years old, who would soon command the 1st Battalion of the 357th Infantry.
15:17Years later, Depew didn't soften it.
15:20My regiment simply did not perform, he said, notwithstanding the heroic effort and tragic losses among lower-ranking officers and
15:28the bewildered troops.
15:29That's an American officer describing his own regiment.
15:33Remember that tone.
15:35It's going to matter.
15:35Because the army's answer to failures like that was, in part, the very fire the German commander sneered at.
15:43George Patton wrote about it in the plainest terms.
15:46He called the M1 that magnificent weapon.
15:49And he told his infantry to advance firing as they walked.
15:53Every few steps, rifle held low between the belt and the armpit.
15:58Fired from there, he said, it was just as effective as from the shoulder.
16:03The idea was simple.
16:05A German machine gunner who is being fired at keeps his head down.
16:09While his head is down, Americans are walking toward him.
16:13The German battalion commander saw the bullets going into empty-looking hedges and called it un-aimed.
16:20It was un-aimed.
16:22It was un-aimed.
16:22That was the point.
16:23It wasn't meant to kill the man in the hedge.
16:26It was meant to keep him from killing the men moving toward him.
16:31Patton's approach had real costs, though.
16:33And here is where the American story turns.
16:37Depew watched marching fire spread through the army, and he did not like what he saw.
16:42It became, he said, a fad.
16:45In some American units, it was almost the only way they knew how to attack.
16:49Walk a line of riflemen into well-hidden German positions, and they were simply walking into a killing zone.
16:57Worse, the moment the Americans stopped firing to make the final rush, as he put it, the enemy then comes
17:04up out of his foxholes and starts to fire at you.
17:07So the same army that produced the Doctrine also produced its sharpest critics.
17:13And the critics didn't just complain.
17:15They changed how they fought.
17:18Winter of 1945, the Ardennes, between Bastogne and Wiltz.
17:23Depew's battalion is ordered to attack.
17:26He has a theory by now.
17:28The Germans defend the hilltops and the valleys, but not the hillsides.
17:33So at about four in the morning, in the dark, his men move in single file around the sides of
17:39the hills, slip through the German positions, and come out behind them.
17:43They do it three times in that fight.
17:46We never had to fire a shot, Depew said.
17:49That is the same battalion, in the same war, that simply did not perform in Normandy.
17:56Where did the lesson come from?
17:58He told us.
17:59It was something we learned in Normandy, he said.
18:03Don't fight them head on.
18:05Find out where they are and go someplace else.
18:08So here is the second layer.
18:10The German who fired a captured Garand thought he had learned how Americans fight.
18:15A rifle that empties fast, in the hands of men who spray and stay back.
18:21What the rifle could never show him was the army around it.
18:24An army that measured its own failures out loud, argued about its own doctrine, and kept changing faster than its
18:32enemy's picture of it.
18:33By the time a German report called the American Rifleman wild, the American Rifleman had often moved on.
18:41But German officers weren't only mocking the American rifle.
18:45In private, their army had been trying for years to build one like it.
18:48And when Germany finally put its own self-loading rifle into production, the design it borrowed from was not American.
18:55It came from another enemy entirely.
18:58Why Germany borrowed from that army, and how many of those rifles ever reached the front, is one of the
19:04most revealing numbers in this whole story.
19:06To see why Germany borrowed from that other army, go to a factory floor in Massachusetts, on the eve of
19:12Pearl Harbor.
19:14Springfield Armory, late 1941.
19:18About 7,500 people now work here, in a government arsenal that has been making American rifles since the days
19:25of George Washington.
19:27Its budget had jumped 250% in 1940 alone.
19:32The plant runs three shifts, around the clock.
19:35Nearly all of that effort goes into one rifle, the M1.
19:40The man whose name is on it works inside the same walls.
19:44John Garand was a Canadian-born machinist who had come to the armory as a civilian engineer.
19:50A newspaper in 1941 described him as having the quiet shyness of the absorbed technician.
19:58He had given his rifle to the government royalty-free.
20:01When Congress tried to award him a grant of $100,000, the effort failed.
20:07He never got it.
20:08Remember that.
20:10The rifle the Germans were picking up in Tunisia had no patent fee attached to it, and its inventor was
20:16drawing a government salary.
20:18Now listen to this number, because it's the one this whole part turns on.
20:23At its peak, Springfield finished 1,300 M1 rifles per shift.
20:29One shift.
20:30Eight hours.
20:31That works out to about 164 rifles every hour, from a single plant, three times a day.
20:39The people doing the work changed, too.
20:42As the men left for the services, the armory hired women for most of the jobs on the M1 line.
20:48They were called WOWs, Women Ordnance Workers.
20:52And they eventually made up 43% of the workforce.
20:56By the end of the war, Springfield alone had built about 3.1 million M1s.
21:03Add the rifles Winchester made under contract, and the wartime total passes 4 million.
21:09Now cross the Atlantic.
21:11The German army had wanted a self-loading rifle of its own for years.
21:15In 1940, it asked German industry for one, and it set the rules.
21:20One of them sounds harmless.
21:22The rifle was not to have holes drilled into the barrel.
21:26Gas ports, in other words.
21:28The same small hole that drives the action of the M1.
21:32Without that hole, the designers had to tap the gas some other, more complicated way.
21:38Mauser and Valter both delivered rifles under the name Gewehr 41.
21:43Mauser's design proved unreliable in combat.
21:47Valter's still suffered from reliability problems.
21:49A rule written at a desk in Germany had shaped the rifle that reached the soldier at the front.
21:55And the soldier paid for it.
21:59Then, in the summer of 1941, the German army invaded the Soviet Union.
22:03And there, it ran into a rifle it had not taken seriously.
22:08The Soviet Tokarev.
22:10The SVT-40.
22:12It had a drilled barrel and a simple gas system.
22:15And it worked.
22:17German soldiers picked those up, too.
22:20Here is the answer to the question I left you with.
22:23Germany borrowed from the Soviets because the Eastern Front was where its army did most of its learning.
22:28The Red Army was the enemy it had met first, in the largest numbers, for the longest time.
22:35Valter adopted a gas system on the Soviet pattern, and the result was the Gewehr 43.
22:41It went into production in October of 1943.
22:44Stop and line that date up against everything you've heard so far.
22:49The U.S. Army had made the M1 its standard rifle in 1936.
22:55Springfield was running three shifts before Pearl Harbor.
22:57The men of the 168th Infantry were carrying American semi-automatics across a Tunisian plain in February of 1943.
23:07Germany's answer reached the production line eight months after that.
23:12Now the number.
23:13Counting both the rifle and its shorter version, the Karabiner 43,
23:17the best estimate is that Germany built about 402,700 during the entire war.
23:24Put that next to Springfield.
23:26At its peak rate of 1,300 rifles a shift, three shifts a day,
23:31one American plant could turn out Germany's entire wartime production of the Gewehr 43 in about 100 days.
23:38And how did the German army plan to use what it had?
23:42The intention was to issue 19 of these rifles to each infantry company,
23:4710 of them fitted with telescopic sights.
23:5119 in a company of well over 100 men.
23:55In practice, many went to the best shots as marksmen and sniper rifles.
24:00And even that modest plan, in the words of one reference work, was never completely achieved.
24:07Think about what that means for our German soldier with a captured Garand in his hands.
24:12In his own army, a rifle like that was a special weapon, handed to a chosen few, rationed.
24:20On the American side of the line, it was what every rifleman in the company carried.
24:26Cooks carried it.
24:27Clerks carried it.
24:29Replacements fresh off the boat carried it.
24:32So here is the third layer.
24:34The captured M1 didn't only tell the German how American supply worked, or how American doctrine changed.
24:41It told him the size of the country he was fighting.
24:44The rifle in his hands was not rare.
24:46It was ordinary.
24:48And ordinary, at that scale, was something his own army could not produce.
24:53The trouble was, that is not the story most of us grew up hearing, about what the M1 told the
24:59Germans.
25:00The story we heard was about a sound.
25:03A small metallic ping the rifle makes when the empty clip flies out.
25:08Generations of veterans' sons and grandsons have heard that German soldiers listened for that ping,
25:14knew it meant an American was empty, and rushed him.
25:18It is one of the most repeated stories in the whole lore of the Second World War.
25:22So it's worth asking the obvious question.
25:25What did the men who were supposedly listening for it actually say?
25:30Camp Perry, Ohio.
25:31Decades after the war.
25:33Robert Bell has spent his working life with the M1.
25:37He is an armorer for the Civilian Marksmanship Program,
25:40the organization that has kept these rifles in American hands since the government stopped issuing them.
25:45He has taken thousands of them apart,
25:47and at some point he did something that very few people who repeat the ping story ever thought to do.
25:54He asked the Germans.
25:56Bell sat down with German veterans of the war, including a couple of panzer commanders,
26:01and asked them straight out about the ping.
26:03Did they listen for it?
26:05Did they wait for that little ring of steel and then charge?
26:09Here is what they told him.
26:10We're getting shot at.
26:12Our hearing already isn't that great.
26:14We didn't listen for that ping.
26:17Picture what they were describing.
26:18A German soldier in a hedgerow or a cellar,
26:21his own machine gun hammering a few feet away,
26:24mortar rounds landing,
26:26artillery overhead,
26:27men shouting.
26:28Somewhere out in front of him,
26:29an American rifle ejects a strip of thin steel weighing a fraction of an ounce.
26:34The idea that he could pick that one sound out of that noise,
26:38know which rifle it came from,
26:40and run at it before the American could reload,
26:43falls apart the moment you imagine it.
26:46The experts agree.
26:48Writing in American Rifleman in 2023,
26:51the historian Bruce Canfield called the scenario highly implausible,
26:55and he put it as plainly as it can be put.
26:58There is no documented evidence that even one casualty was inflicted because of the sound.
27:05So the most famous thing the M1 supposedly revealed to the Germans,
27:09it never revealed at all.
27:12But don't throw the story away yet,
27:14because it's hiding something real.
27:16Ask yourself who actually heard that ping clearly,
27:20every single time.
27:22Not the German 50 yards off.
27:24The man holding the rifle,
27:26with the sound right beside his ear.
27:29The ping was an American worry.
27:31Men in a firefight heard their own rifle announce that it was empty.
27:35And they hated it.
27:37And what did they do about it?
27:39This is where the story gets interesting.
27:42Roy Dunlap, who served in Army ordnance during the war
27:45and later wrote about what he saw,
27:47described it.
27:49Rather than fire a clip all the way down, he said,
27:52soldiers simply released and ejected partially emptied clips
27:55and reloaded with full ones.
27:57Press a button, the half-used clip pops out,
28:01a fresh eight goes in.
28:03Three or four live cartridges dropped into the mud,
28:06and nobody thought twice.
28:07Some units went further.
28:09In some outfits, Dunlap wrote,
28:12it was customary to empty the rifle,
28:14blazing away the remaining cartridges,
28:17just to get to a fresh clip faster.
28:20Hold that picture against something a British writer said about the M1.
28:24To a man raised on the Lee-Enfield, which could be topped up a few rounds at a time,
28:28the American rifle had a serious flaw.
28:31As he put it,
28:33a magazine could not be topped up.
28:35It was a complete clip or nothing.
28:38From a British point of view,
28:40that was a design weakness.
28:42And in a careful, frugal army,
28:44it would have been.
28:46Now go back to the German with the captured Garand.
28:49The one from the very beginning of this story,
28:52on the plane below Sidi Bouzid,
28:54holding a rifle and whatever ammunition was picked up with it.
28:59Imagine he fights the way the Americans did.
29:01He ejects a half-empty clip to be ready for the next rush.
29:05He has just thrown away cartridges that no German factory makes.
29:10He blazes off the last three rounds to get to a fresh clip.
29:14Now he has fewer fresh clips.
29:17Every habit that made the rifle work in American hands
29:21would disarm him in a single afternoon.
29:24That's the fourth layer,
29:25and it's the one that ties all the others together.
29:29The M1 didn't come alone.
29:31It came with a set of habits,
29:33and every one of those habits assumed something.
29:36Don't count your rounds.
29:38Don't save half a clip.
29:41Don't top up.
29:42Fire into the hedge, where the enemy might be.
29:45Every one of them assumed that the next clip
29:48was always in the bandolier,
29:49the next bandolier always on the truck,
29:52and the next truck always on the road.
29:55Now think back to that German battalion commander
29:57and his word.
29:59Wildly.
30:00He watched Americans pour fire into hedges and fields
30:03and called it unaimed.
30:06He thought he was seeing a lack of discipline.
30:08What he was really seeing was a budget.
30:11The Americans weren't shooting like men who didn't know better.
30:14They were shooting like men who had never had to count.
30:18And a German soldier who picked up the M1 learned that the hard way,
30:22faster than any report could have told him.
30:24He had the rifle.
30:26He didn't have what the rifle assumed.
30:29Without that,
30:30the very feature that made it so dangerous in American hands,
30:34eight shots as fast as you can pull the trigger,
30:37became the fastest way to run dry.
30:39So far, though,
30:40everything we've seen has been the Germans
30:42looking at the American army from across a battlefield.
30:45Watching it.
30:47Capturing pieces of it.
30:48Firing those pieces.
30:50Drawing conclusions.
30:52In the winter of 1944,
30:54the German army tried something far more ambitious.
30:57It decided to become the American army.
31:00Not to study it,
31:02but to wear it.
31:04Hundreds of German soldiers would put on American uniforms,
31:08drive American vehicles,
31:10speak American English,
31:11and carry American weapons.
31:13And they would slip through the front
31:15in the first hours of Hitler's last great offensive.
31:19To pull it off,
31:20Germany had to gather everything American
31:22it had captured in five years of war.
31:25And what it managed to find,
31:27when it finally counted,
31:28may be the most honest verdict
31:30on the American army that Germany ever wrote.
31:33October 22nd, 1944.
31:36Hitler's headquarters at Rostenberg in East Prussia.
31:40Otto Skorzenny,
31:42the SS commando officer
31:43famous for snatching Mussolini
31:45off a mountaintop the year before,
31:47has been summoned to see the Führer.
31:49Hitler tells him about an offensive
31:51no one outside a small circle knows about yet.
31:54In the Ardennes, in December,
31:56the German army will strike the Americans
31:58with everything it has left.
32:00And Skorzenny will lead a special brigade into the gap.
32:03His men will look, sound, and fight like Americans.
32:07Their job is to race ahead,
32:09sow confusion,
32:10and seize bridges over the Meuse River.
32:13The plan depends on one thing,
32:15American equipment.
32:17Lots of it.
32:18So the order goes out across the German army in the West.
32:22Skorzenny's staff draws up a list of what the brigade needs.
32:2615 tanks,
32:2820 armored cars,
32:3020 self-propelled guns,
32:32100 jeeps,
32:3240 motorcycles,
32:34120 trucks,
32:36American and British uniforms,
32:39roughly 3,300 men.
32:41Now remember what you heard about scale.
32:43One American armory,
32:45finishing 1,300 rifles in a single shift.
32:48Keep that number in your head
32:49while you hear what Germany's army in the West
32:52could actually find.
32:54Two Sherman tanks,
32:55both in poor condition.
32:58Units that didn't understand the request
33:00sent Polish and Russian equipment instead.
33:03When the final count was made,
33:05the brigade had a single working Sherman,
33:074 American scout cars,
33:0930 jeeps,
33:11and 15 trucks.
33:13To fill the gap,
33:14German vehicles were painted American olive drab
33:17and given Allied markings.
33:19Five Panther tanks had their cupolas removed
33:22and were wrapped in thin sheet metal
33:23to look from a distance
33:25like American M-10 tank destroyers.
33:28The men were no better.
33:30Out of about 2,500 finally assembled,
33:33roughly 10 spoke perfect English
33:35and knew American idioms.
33:3730 or 40 spoke it well,
33:39but knew no slang.
33:42120 to 150 could get by.
33:45Most of the brigade spoke little or no English at all.
33:48And the weapons.
33:49After nearly two years
33:52of fighting the American army
33:53in Tunisia,
33:54Sicily,
33:55Italy,
33:55and France,
33:56and all the American rifles
33:58that had been picked up along the way,
34:00the result is recorded
34:01in a single line.
34:03Only enough American weapons
34:05had been found
34:06to equip the commando unit.
34:09The small group of best English speakers.
34:12Not the brigade.
34:13A company.
34:15Stop on that for a moment,
34:17because it changes how you see everything
34:19that came before.
34:21Remember the German soldier
34:22on the plane below Sidi Bouzid,
34:25turning a captured M1 over in his hands?
34:28We've been treating him
34:29as the start of something.
34:31He wasn't.
34:32He was the whole of it.
34:34Germany could capture American rifles.
34:37It could never capture enough of them
34:39to matter.
34:41A captured Garand
34:42was always an exception,
34:44a curiosity,
34:45a few hundred rounds,
34:46and then a club.
34:48And when Germany needed
34:49American weapons by the thousand,
34:51for its most important deception
34:53of the war,
34:54it found out how few
34:55it really had.
34:57That's the fifth layer.
34:59You can pick up the tip of a system.
35:01You cannot pick up the system.
35:04The commandos did go through the lines
35:06in American uniforms,
35:07and they caused real confusion.
35:10Forty-four of them went,
35:11and all but eight made it back.
35:14But the brigade never got near the Meuse.
35:17So Scorzenny's men were thrown
35:18into an ordinary attack instead.
35:21The target was a town called Malmedy.
35:24December 21, 1944.
35:27A German deserter had already warned
35:29the Americans what was coming.
35:31Before dawn,
35:33on the road at Bounier,
35:34outside town,
35:35German vehicles roll up
35:37to an American roadblock,
35:38and the men inside shout,
35:40Hey, we're American soldiers.
35:42Don't shoot!
35:43The roadblock is held by Company B
35:45under Captain Murray Pulver.
35:47He doesn't believe them.
35:49He calls for artillery,
35:51and a colonel at division
35:52gives him the only order there is.
35:55Captain, hold at any cost.
35:58The attack at Bounier breaks down.
36:01A German officer later counted
36:0360 to 70 men lost there.
36:05Down at the Warch River,
36:06the main attack hits a railway embankment
36:08and a bridge.
36:10Men of the 99th Infantry Battalion
36:12hold the embankment.
36:13One of their sergeants,
36:15Roland Aslison,
36:16said the attackers
36:17lost some hundreds of men.
36:20At the bridge is a private
36:21named Francis Curry.
36:23He is 19 years old
36:25in Company K
36:26of the 120th Infantry,
36:2830th Infantry Division.
36:30He starts the fight
36:31with a Browning automatic rifle.
36:34He picks up a bazooka
36:35and goes after German armor.
36:37And when the bazooka is gone,
36:39he takes an M1,
36:40the same rifle we've been following
36:42through this whole story,
36:43clips an anti-tank grenade
36:45onto its muzzle,
36:46and keeps firing at the tanks.
36:49Hold on to that name,
36:51Francis Curry.
36:52We're going to see him again.
36:55An artillery observer,
36:572nd Lieutenant Arnold Snyder,
36:58knocks out the lead Panther,
37:00one of the tanks dressed up
37:02as an American tank destroyer,
37:03with a bazooka round
37:04into the engine.
37:06In Company M,
37:08Lieutenant Kenneth Nelson is hit,
37:10leading the machine gun defense.
37:12Sergeant John Vanderkamp
37:13takes over and is wounded too.
37:16Both receive the
37:17Distinguished Service Cross.
37:19Nelson's is awarded
37:20after his death.
37:21Behind them,
37:23the American guns fire
37:24roughly 3,000 rounds that day,
37:27some of them with
37:28brand new proximity fuses
37:29that burst in the air
37:30over the German infantry.
37:33During the fight,
37:34a surviving Panther
37:35crashes into Skorzeny's
37:36command post under shelling,
37:38and a shell fragment
37:39hits Skorzeny himself
37:41in the face.
37:42And here's the number
37:44I want you to set
37:45beside those 3,000 rounds.
37:47When a German artillery battalion
37:49finally arrived
37:50to support the attack,
37:52it had 16 shells.
37:5516.
37:57That's the whole story
37:58of this investigation
37:59in two numbers.
38:01On one side,
38:02a 19-year-old private
38:04with an M1
38:05and 3,000 shells behind him.
38:07On the other,
38:08a brigade dressed as Americans,
38:10carrying what little American gear
38:12it could scrape together
38:13and 16 shells.
38:16But the Germans
38:16had been told
38:17all of this before.
38:18Not at Malmody,
38:20not in 1944.
38:2322 months earlier,
38:24in Tunisia,
38:25the most famous
38:26German general of the war
38:28had walked through
38:29a field of captured
38:30American equipment
38:30and written down
38:32what he saw.
38:33And in that passage
38:34was one word,
38:36the word I promised you
38:37at the very beginning.
38:38February 20th, 1943.
38:41Evening.
38:42Just beyond the Kasserine Pass.
38:45An American armored group
38:47pushes forward
38:48into the German advance
38:49and is caught
38:49at point-blank range.
38:51It is destroyed.
38:53When the fighting dies down,
38:55the Germans count
38:55what they've taken.
38:57About 20 American tanks.
38:59About 30 armored troop carriers,
39:01most of them towing
39:0275-millimeter anti-tank guns.
39:05The next morning,
39:07Erwin Rommel
39:08goes to look at them.
39:09Think about where
39:10he is standing.
39:11It's the same place
39:13as the German soldier
39:14on the plane
39:15below Sidi Bouzid,
39:16turning a captured rifle
39:18over in his hands.
39:20Only now,
39:21it's the most famous general
39:22in the German army,
39:24walking among
39:24captured American vehicles,
39:26opening hatches,
39:28looking at what the enemy
39:29had brought to Africa.
39:31And here,
39:32at last,
39:33is what he wrote.
39:35The Americans,
39:36Rommel said,
39:37were fantastically
39:38well-equipped.
39:39And then,
39:40the sentence I've been
39:41holding back
39:41since the beginning
39:42of this story.
39:43We had a lot
39:44to learn from them,
39:46organizationally.
39:48Organizationally.
39:50Not their courage.
39:51Not their tactics.
39:53Not their tanks,
39:54which he had just beaten.
39:55Not even their weapons
39:57as such.
39:58He looked at a field
39:59of captured American equipment
40:01at the very moment
40:02of an American defeat.
40:03And the thing
40:04that struck him
40:05was the organization
40:06that had put it there.
40:08He even said what he meant.
40:10The next line reads,
40:11One particularly striking feature
40:13was the standardization
40:15of their vehicles
40:16and spare parts.
40:17Now, let me show you
40:18why that one word
40:20is the answer to everything
40:21in this investigation.
40:23Go back through the layers.
40:25The rifle that ran dry
40:27in German hands
40:28because no German depot
40:29made its clip
40:30or its cartridge.
40:32That's organization.
40:34Drake's men on the hills,
40:36holding for three days
40:37until the ammunition ran out.
40:39And Irwin's guns
40:40driving 800 miles
40:41in 100 hours
40:42so it wouldn't run out
40:44at Tala.
40:45Organization.
40:46A German commander
40:47calling American fire
40:49wild.
40:50While American officers,
40:51like William Depew,
40:53were openly tearing apart
40:54their own doctrine
40:55and rebuilding it.
40:57Organization.
40:59Springfield turning out
41:001,300 rifles a shift
41:02while Germany planned
41:0419 self-loaders per company
41:06and never got there.
41:08Organization.
41:09American soldiers
41:11dropping half-full clips
41:12in the mud
41:13without a second thought
41:14because the next clip
41:16was always there.
41:17And Skorzenny's brigade,
41:19five years into the war,
41:21unable to find enough
41:22American rifles
41:23to arm more than
41:24a single company.
41:26Every layer is the same word,
41:29seen from a different side.
41:30And Rommel's word,
41:32standardization,
41:33is the thread
41:34that ties it together.
41:36Think about Francis Curry
41:38on the bridge at Malmedy.
41:40He started with
41:41a Browning automatic rifle.
41:43He finished with an M1.
41:45The rifle,
41:46the automatic rifle,
41:48and the machine guns
41:49in the hedgerows around him
41:50all fired the same
41:52American .30-caliber cartridge.
41:54One round,
41:55made by the hundreds of millions,
41:57coming up the same road
41:59on the same trucks,
42:00feeding every weapon
42:01in the squad.
42:03A German soldier
42:04with a captured Garand
42:05was holding
42:06one piece of that chain.
42:08He could fire it
42:09until the chain ran out.
42:10He could never plug it in.
42:12So here is the full answer
42:14to the question
42:15in the title.
42:16What did captured
42:17American M1s
42:18reveal to the Germans
42:19who fired them?
42:20They revealed that the rifle
42:22was not the weapon.
42:24The weapon
42:24was the organization
42:26behind it.
42:27And unlike a rifle,
42:29that could not be picked up
42:30off a battlefield.
42:31The terrible part,
42:33for Germany,
42:33is that its own commanders
42:35were told this in time,
42:36and not all of them listened.
42:39February 22nd, 1943.
42:42Around one in the afternoon,
42:44the same day
42:45the 9th Division's guns
42:46were firing at Thala,
42:48Field Marshal Albert Kesselring
42:50came to see Rommel.
42:51Rommel had already heard
42:53from the front.
42:54The men facing American guns
42:55were, in his words,
42:57astounded at the flexibility
42:59and accuracy
43:00of the American artillery.
43:02He and Kesselring
43:03agreed to break off
43:04the offensive in stages.
43:06Kesselring, Rommel wrote,
43:08still rated the Americans'
43:10fighting value low.
43:12Rommel thought Kesselring
43:13was looking at Africa
43:14through rose-colored glasses.
43:17Then watch how fast
43:18the organization Rommel
43:19described went to work.
43:22On March 6th,
43:23George Patton took command
43:24of the American 2nd Corps.
43:27Three days later,
43:28Rommel left Africa for good.
43:30On March 23rd,
43:32at El Gittar,
43:33the German 10th Panzer Division,
43:35the same division
43:36that had been stopped at Thala,
43:38attacked the U.S.
43:391st Infantry Division
43:40head-on.
43:42It ran into American artillery
43:43and tank destroyers
43:45firing from prepared positions,
43:46and it was thrown back.
43:49One month.
43:50From the cactus patch
43:52below Sidi Bouzid
43:53to an American corps
43:55stopping a panzer division
43:56in the open.
43:57Rommel had seen it coming.
43:59He had said it,
44:00in one word,
44:02standing among
44:02captured American equipment.
44:04Nearly two years later,
44:06in January of 1945,
44:08with his 3rd Army
44:09fighting through the Ardennes,
44:11Patton wrote a letter
44:12about the M1.
44:13He called it
44:14the greatest battle implement
44:16ever devised.
44:18People quote that line
44:20all the time
44:20as a compliment to a rifle.
44:22Notice who he sent it to.
44:24The Army's chief of ordnance.
44:27The man whose job
44:28was to design the weapons,
44:30buy them,
44:30and keep them supplied
44:32with ammunition.
44:33The man in charge
44:34of the organization.
44:36Patton wasn't only
44:37praising the rifle.
44:38He was praising
44:39the system that kept it fed.
44:41And he knew exactly
44:42who to thank.
44:43That leaves the men
44:44who carried that system
44:45on their backs.
44:47The colonel
44:48who walked off
44:49a Tunisian hill
44:50into a cactus patch
44:51in a prison camp.
44:53The 19-year-old private
44:54at the Malmedy Bridge.
44:57And the quiet engineer
44:58in Massachusetts
44:59who never got
45:00his $100,000.
45:03One of them,
45:04behind German barbed wire,
45:06was about to prove
45:07Rommel's word
45:08in a way
45:08no German guard expected.
45:10June 6, 1943.
45:12Schubin
45:13in German-occupied Poland.
45:16A new prison camp
45:17opens for captured
45:18American officers.
45:19The Germans call it
45:20Offlag 64.
45:22The first senior
45:23American officer
45:24inside the wire
45:25is Colonel Thomas Drake,
45:27the man who walked
45:28off a Tunisian hill
45:29into a cactus patch
45:30four months earlier.
45:31The Germans
45:32had taken his rifles.
45:33His men had destroyed
45:35most of their weapons
45:35before the night march,
45:37and the rest
45:37were picked up
45:38off the plane.
45:39Drake had nothing
45:40left to fight with.
45:42So he did the one thing
45:43the Germans could not
45:44confiscate.
45:45He organized.
45:47Inside that camp,
45:48the prisoners built
45:49a shadow staff,
45:50exactly the way
45:51an American headquarters
45:52was built.
45:53A commander,
45:54a chief of staff,
45:56a personnel section,
45:58an intelligence section,
45:59an operations section,
46:01a supply section.
46:02It was one of Drake's
46:04requirements.
46:05One former prisoner
46:06remembered that
46:07the senior American
46:08had established a control
46:09that turned out
46:10to be a great benefit
46:11in the nearly two years ahead.
46:12Think about what that means.
46:14Rommel looked at
46:15captured American equipment
46:16and wrote that Germany
46:17had a lot to learn
46:18from these people
46:19organizationally.
46:21Then Germany locked
46:22a group of those people
46:23behind barbed wire
46:24with no equipment at all.
46:26And the first thing
46:27they built
46:27was an organization.
46:29Drake ran the camp
46:31from its opening
46:31until July 27, 1944,
46:34when he was repatriated
46:35in an exchange
46:36of prisoners.
46:38He came home
46:38before the war ended,
46:40exactly one year later
46:41to the day,
46:42on July 27, 1945,
46:45near Reims,
46:46in France.
46:47Major General Leland Hobbs
46:49of the 30th Infantry Division
46:50hung the Medal of Honor
46:51around the neck
46:52of Francis Currie,
46:54the private
46:54from the bridge
46:55at Malmedy.
46:56Currie had been orphaned
46:58at 12 and raised
46:59by foster parents
47:00on a farm
47:00in Hurleyville, New York.
47:03After the war,
47:04he went to work
47:04as a counselor
47:05at the Veterans Administration
47:06Hospital in Albany.
47:08He stayed for 30 years,
47:09from 1950
47:10until he retired
47:11as a supervisor
47:12in 1980.
47:14The 19-year-old
47:15who fought German tanks
47:16with an M1
47:17spent the rest
47:18of his working life
47:19helping the men
47:20who came home
47:21from the wars
47:21after his.
47:23In 1998,
47:25the first Medal of Honor
47:26G.I. Joe figure
47:27was modeled on him.
47:29He died on October 8, 2019,
47:32in Selkirk, New York.
47:34He was 94.
47:36And the quiet engineer,
47:38John Garand,
47:39stayed at Springfield Armory
47:41until 1953.
47:43In March of 1944,
47:45in the middle of the war,
47:46he received the Medal
47:47for Merit.
47:48He never received
47:50a single royalty
47:51on his rifle.
47:53More than 6.5 million M1s
47:55were eventually made.
47:57He died in Springfield,
47:59Massachusetts,
48:00on February 16, 1974,
48:03at the age of 86.
48:05Now come back
48:06one last time
48:07to where this story began.
48:10February, 1943.
48:11A German soldier
48:12on a plane in Tunisia,
48:14picking up an American rifle
48:16that someone had carried down
48:17from a hill in the dark.
48:19He works the action.
48:21He fires it.
48:23Eight rounds.
48:24Faster than anything
48:25his own army gave him.
48:27And then the clip flies out,
48:29and he looks for the next one.
48:31And there isn't one.
48:33That is what
48:34the captured M1 revealed.
48:36Not that the American rifle
48:37was better,
48:38although it was a fine rifle.
48:40It revealed that the rifle
48:41was the smallest part
48:43of what he was fighting.
48:44Behind every American
48:46who carried one
48:47stood a truck.
48:48And behind the truck,
48:49a road,
48:50a depot,
48:51a ship,
48:52a factory running
48:54three shifts,
48:55an army willing
48:56to tell itself the truth
48:57about its own mistakes,
48:59and an organization
49:00that could put guns
49:02in front of Fallah
49:02after 800 miles
49:04in a hundred hours.
49:06He could take the rifle.
49:08He could not take any of that.
49:11Rommel saw it
49:12in a single morning
49:13and wrote it
49:14in a single word.
49:16And a colonel
49:17in a prison camp,
49:17with no rifle at all,
49:20proved him right.
49:21The American soldier
49:22didn't win
49:22because he carried
49:23a better weapon.
49:24He won
49:25because he never
49:26carried it alone.
49:28Thank you for staying
49:29with this story
49:30all the way to the end.
49:31If it gave you something
49:33you didn't know
49:33about the American soldier
49:34in the Second World War,
49:36please hit like.
49:37It's a small thing,
49:38but it helps this story
49:39reach people
49:40who've never heard
49:40of Thomas Drake
49:41or Francis Curry.
49:43Subscribe
49:44and turn on the bell
49:45so you don't miss
49:46the next one.
49:47And tell me in the comments
49:48where you're watching from.
49:49If your father,
49:51grandfather,
49:51or uncle
49:52served in the American forces
49:53or alongside them
49:55in an allied army,
49:56please write his name
49:57and his unit.
49:59Every name you leave there
50:00is part of this record.