- 7 weeks ago
American officers did something every night in the mud of Belgium that quietly helped stop one of the war’s strangest disasters: trench foot. The story follows Bruce Glover, Jack Lewis, Preston Price, and the riflemen whose wet boots, numb toes, and ruined socks turned into a battlefield crisis across the American front in World War II.
This military history documentary traces how the problem spread from Italy to the Ardennes, why medical warnings were ignored, and how officers, sergeants, and companies finally made foot inspections part of command responsibility. It also follows the Army’s own debate over bad footwear, overshoes, blanket booties, and the hard lessons learned from soldiers who survived by improvising in the cold.
Along the way, the narration compares the American response with the German army’s earlier experience in Russia, showing how two armies handled the same cold injury in very different ways. It is a gripping WW2 history story about survival, command decisions, battlefield medicine, and the hidden cost of winter warfare.
Ideal for listeners searching for World War 2 stories, military history narration, trench foot history, battlefield medicine, and historical documentary storytelling. Also a strong choice for fans of WW2 podcasts, war history listening, and long-form history analysis with a detailed, narrative style.
This military history documentary traces how the problem spread from Italy to the Ardennes, why medical warnings were ignored, and how officers, sergeants, and companies finally made foot inspections part of command responsibility. It also follows the Army’s own debate over bad footwear, overshoes, blanket booties, and the hard lessons learned from soldiers who survived by improvising in the cold.
Along the way, the narration compares the American response with the German army’s earlier experience in Russia, showing how two armies handled the same cold injury in very different ways. It is a gripping WW2 history story about survival, command decisions, battlefield medicine, and the hidden cost of winter warfare.
Ideal for listeners searching for World War 2 stories, military history narration, trench foot history, battlefield medicine, and historical documentary storytelling. Also a strong choice for fans of WW2 podcasts, war history listening, and long-form history analysis with a detailed, narrative style.
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LearningTranscript
00:00On December 23, 1944, at an aid station behind the Elsenborn Ridge in Belgium,
00:06a medic told a private first class named Bruce Glover to take off his boots.
00:11Glover didn't want to. He had been in a hole in the ground for days, in water, in a cold
00:17that
00:17never quite froze and never quite let go. And he had a feeling, he said it down in plain words
00:23long afterward, that if those boots came off, they were never going back on. He was right.
00:30His admission record still exists. Bruce D. Glover, serial number 36860891, 393rd Infantry.
00:42Diagnosis, trench foot. Condition, moderate. He remembered it later as the better part of two
00:49months. The paperwork tells a different story. Liege, then Paris, then a hospital in Birmingham,
00:56England. He was still in that bed on the 8th of May, 1945, the day the war in Europe ended.
01:03Four and a half months out of one pair of wet socks. Now hold on to the next detail,
01:10because it is the first sign that Glover was not unlucky. He was ordinary. Of the 35 men admitted
01:19alongside him that week, 18 carried the same diagnosis. Not 18 wounded, 18 with rotting
01:26feet. That same week, a few miles away, a lieutenant of the 1st Infantry Division, named
01:33Preston Price, had a visitor at his foxhole. Jack Lewis had been his classmate at the Citadel,
01:40and now ran a company next door. And Lewis was complaining about the same thing he always
01:45complained about. That he couldn't feel his toes. He sat down. He worked his boot off. Then the sock.
01:54Several of his toes came away inside it. Price watched a man he had known since he was a cadet
02:00look down at the bare bones of his own foot and understand, for the first time, what had been
02:06happening to him for a month. If this is the kind of story you want more of, the parts of
02:12this war
02:12that don't make the documentaries, a like and a subscribe help these men get found.
02:18The army had a name for it. Trench foot. The official term, chosen after the war, was cold injury,
02:26ground type. It isn't freezing. That's what made it so hard to see coming.
02:31It happens above freezing, in wet and cold, when the blood vessels close down and the tissue
02:37starves in place. And it doesn't hurt at first. It goes numb. Numb feels like relief.
02:46Here's the number, and I want you to sit with it before we go anywhere else.
02:50Between October of 1944 and April of 1945, 46,107 American soldiers in Europe were hospitalized for it.
03:01Let me put that in a shape you can hold. That is three full infantry divisions,
03:07deleted from the order of battle, without a single German firing a shot.
03:12Nine and a quarter percent of every casualty the United States took in the entire campaign on the
03:18continent. And it did not fall evenly. Roughly nine out of ten of those men were frontline riflemen,
03:26the small fraction of an army that actually walks toward the enemy.
03:30In the worst week, the seven days ending on the 17th of November,
03:365,386 men went down. The average man who went down lost 83 days. Most never came back to a
03:45rifle
03:45company at all. There were companies in Lorraine that November reduced to 14 men on their feet.
03:51There was a regiment that lost about 60% of its fighting strength and simply stopped attacking
03:57because there was nobody left to attack with. And in one battalion, men whose feet had swollen
04:03too badly to walk were carried by their friends up to the forward foxholes, so the line would still
04:09have somebody in it. That is the situation in December of 1944. And what happens next is the reason
04:17we're here. Because within weeks, across the whole American front, officers began doing something
04:23every single night. Not medics. Not just sergeants. Officers. The men who sign for a company, who write
04:33the letters home when it goes wrong. It became their job, in writing, by order, with their names attached
04:40to the result. Men who had spent that day getting shelled in the Ardennes, now spent part of that
04:46night on their knees in the mud with a red-lensed flashlight, examining other men's feet.
04:52It looks, at first glance, like the least military thing in this entire war. Within about ten weeks,
05:00the number would collapse. Not improve. Collapse. And I'll give you the exact figures later, because
05:05they're stranger than you'd expect. But here is what I could not get past when I started pulling
05:10the documents. The German army had already met this enemy. Three winters earlier, in Russia,
05:17on a scale that makes Belgium look small. And they had the numbers, counted, tabulated, in hand.
05:25So they knew everything the Americans were about to learn, the hard way. And in the middle of that
05:31catastrophe, the German system produced a document of its own. It was not an order about feet. What
05:38was written in it explains more about the collapse of that American number than any boot, any sock,
05:44or any pair of galoshes ever shipped across the Atlantic. To understand how 46,000 men went down,
05:51you have to go back 13 months, to Italy. Because everything that happened in Belgium had already
05:57happened once, and been written down, and been filed. In December of 1943, Colonel Elliot Cutler
06:04walked through a row of hospital wards outside Naples. Cutler was the chief consultant in surgery
06:11for the entire European theater, and he had seen this disease before, in France, in 1917.
06:18The Fifth Army was drowning in it. Between September and April, more than 5,700 cases.
06:25In one week that February, over 900 men evacuated. For every five men carried out with wounds,
06:33one was carried out with feet. A major named Fiorindo Simeone was studying it,
06:39and he told Cutler that no more than a quarter of these men would ever return to duty. And Cutler
06:45looked at the feet, and Cutler wasn't impressed. In his war, trench foot had meant terrible swollen limbs,
06:52ulcers, the flesh gone blue. These feet didn't look like that. His recorded opinion, written down in his
07:01own diary, was that these soldiers were utilizing the pain very hard as a way out of fighting.
07:08I want you to sit with that, because it is the hinge of this entire story. The most senior surgical
07:15mind in the American war effort stood in front of the thing that would eventually cost three divisions,
07:20and diagnosed cowardice. Now here's what changed him. Back in England, he fell into conversation with
07:28the chief surgical consultant to the Norwegian forces, a man who had just come out of Italy and
07:33who had also fought through the Russo-Finish War. In Cutler's own estimate, that officer had more
07:39experience with cold, wet feet than any doctor then alive. Whatever was said between them, Cutler came
07:46away converted. On the 9th of April 1944, two months before D-Day, he sent three findings up the chain.
07:55The socks issued to American soldiers didn't contain enough wool. American soldiers were invariably fitted
08:02with shoes that were too small. And the second one, remember this one because it comes back at the
08:08very end of this story, and it changes shape when it does. Rigid discipline, Cutler wrote, must be
08:15enforced within combat companies so that socks are changed daily, even if that means nothing more than
08:22wringing them out and putting them back on. There it is, two months before the invasion, in the right office,
08:29in writing. The answer. Watch what happens to it. A dermatologist named Donald Pillsbury had already
08:38reported the same warning from North Africa the previous November, urging that every facility of
08:43the chief surgeon's office be thrown at it. His notes on skin conditions and venereal disease were
08:49duly initialed and acted upon. On cold injury, nothing moved. On the 25th of April, a drafted circular
08:58titled Prevention of Trench Foot went forward. It was referred to another division. It stops there.
09:06On the 22nd of June, 16 days after the landings, Colonel John Gordon's office recommended a command
09:13directive called Care of the Feet. It specified how to fit boots over heavy socks. It gave instructions for
09:21drying socks when no dry pair existed. And it warned, explicitly, against lacing shoes tightly.
09:29It was disapproved by the adjutant general of the theater, on the grounds that existing manuals
09:35already covered the subject, and that the problem was the responsibility of subordinate commands.
09:40Read that last phrase again. Not, this isn't real. Not, we can't afford it. The responsibility of
09:49subordinate commands. Somebody else's job. Hold that sentence. Everything that follows in this story is an
09:58argument with it. Why did nobody push? Because in the late summer of 1944, the armies were running
10:06across France, and a great many intelligent men believed the thing would be finished before Christmas.
10:13General Bradley called it a calculated risk, and he meant it literally. Ammunition and gasoline went
10:20forward. Winter clothing waited. The first bulk requisition for winter gear left the theater on the
10:2615th of August, the day southern France was invaded. And it was sized for one field army. Five American
10:35field armies were fighting in Europe. The chief quartermaster gave definite assurances that no
10:40further requirements would be submitted. And then there's the detail I genuinely cannot get out of my head.
10:47As late as the 31st of October, with men already going down in the mud, instructions went out to
10:55pack light and dark trousers separately so they wouldn't be issued indiscriminately and spoil the uniform
11:01look of the troops. A million wool jackets sat in warehouses in the United Kingdom that winter because
11:08the trousers that matched them, shade 33, hadn't arrived yet. Men were losing toes in Belgium.
11:17The jackets were in England, waiting for their pants to match.
11:21So what were the soldiers actually told? The manual of therapy, issued a month before D-Day,
11:28prescribed a foot bath with soap and water, 20 minutes of massage, dry socks, and a change of shoes.
11:35For men under mortar fire in a flooded hole in the ground. And one instruction more, repeated in print,
11:42passed down to companies all year. Lace the shoes tightly.
11:48That autumn, the chief surgeon of the European theater finally went and examined the ruined feet himself,
11:54looking for a cause nobody had nailed down. He found it. It was pressed into the skin.
12:01What Major General Paul Hawley found, sunk deep into the swollen tissue of men's feet, were the marks of
12:07their own shoelaces. Not the cold. Not the water. The lacing. The men had done what the manual told
12:16them, tightly, conscientiously, because they were good soldiers. And every one of those laces had been a
12:24tourniquet, slowly closing off the blood to a foot that needed that blood to survive the night.
12:30The army had printed the instruction. The men had obeyed it. The instruction had been maiming them
12:37since October. Hawley, who had 30 years in uniform, gave his verdict on American footwear in one sentence.
12:45And it wasn't a diplomatic sentence. The plain truth, he wrote, is that the footwear furnished
12:52U.S. troops is, in general, lousy. Here's why the lace marks were only half the wound.
12:59The service shoe was cut so scantily across the top that when a man wore heavy socks,
13:04there was no room between the wool and the leather. The uppers couldn't be drawn together
13:09by lacing without harmful constriction. And that was true even of a shoe that fitted correctly.
13:16Hawley remarked that in three decades of army service, he had seldom seen shoes fitted with
13:21the care the job deserved. Then it got worse in a way nobody planned.
13:27A man's feet spread during training. The shoe that fit him as a civilian didn't fit him as a soldier.
13:34Wet leather shrank, so the shoe got tighter still. And when he pulled it off to care for his foot,
13:41the foot swelled. And now he couldn't get it back on. So he stopped taking it off.
13:47That is the trap. And it's worth saying plainly. The single most important preventive measure in
13:54this entire war was a man removing his boots. And the army had issued him a boot that punished him
14:01for doing it. The numbers show you exactly what it cost. During November, the 9th Army's worst
14:08rates fell on the 84th and 102nd divisions. Only 35% of those men had overshoes.
14:16Between them, those two divisions accounted for over 62% of every trench foot case in the entire army
14:23army by the 22nd of the month. Two divisions. Two-thirds of an army's losses. Because of rubber galoshes.
14:33And yet, and this is where it stops being a supply story, the galoshes weren't the answer either.
14:40At the 108th General Hospital, someone had the sense to start interviewing the casualties as they came in.
14:47Not counting them. Asking them. In the week ending the 27th of November, 82 men in every hundred had
14:56lacked overshoes or received them too late. Fine. Predictable. Now the part that isn't predictable.
15:05Of the men in that same hundred who did have overshoes and were wearing them,
15:10only 18 had managed to keep their feet dry. 18. The following weeks it was 2. Then 11.
15:21So the equipment was not the answer. It helped. It was not the answer.
15:28Something else was doing the work, and the men in the holes had already figured out what it was,
15:33months before any general did. They were solving it themselves, in the dark, with whatever was lying around.
15:4018. Art Broadhurst, a combat engineer with the 75th Division, had boots that took up water like a
15:46sponge, and overshoes that let snow in over the top. He found a sheepskin hanging in a barn, cut himself
15:53a
15:53pair of moccasins to wear inside the galoshes, and threw his army boots away. James Langford, a rifleman in
16:01the 99th, couldn't get his overshoes over his shoes at all during the first days of the bulge. So he
16:06wore
16:07four buckles, and three or four pairs of socks, and no shoes whatsoever. In the same division,
16:14William McMurdy watched a sergeant in his platoon go through the winter in seven pairs of socks,
16:19and nothing else. Barefoot, essentially, inside a rubber galosh. In Belgian snow.
16:26And here's the thing that should stop you. The army's own medical historians later concluded,
16:32those men were right. Discarding the tight boot and packing the overshoe with six or eight pairs of wool
16:38was among the best protections available. Because the toes could finally move. Not warmer. Looser.
16:47Everything the institution had gotten wrong, the private in the whole had reverse-engineered from pain.
16:54Others stuffed straw and newspaper into their galoshes. The paratroopers at Bastogne wrapped
17:00their feet in foraged burlap sacks. Some men used the white silk powder bags that came packed with 155
17:07millimeter shells. Extremely effective, and there were never enough of them. And all along that front,
17:15GIs were stripping the thick felt and leather winter boots off German dead. Because to the American
17:22infantryman, rightly or wrongly, whatever he saw on a German was assumed to be better than his own.
17:29So by mid-December, the situation was this. The men knew what worked. The generals did not. And nothing
17:37connected the two. Then a full major of the United States Army took off his rank, put on a private's
17:44uniform, and walked into a rifle company under a false identity. To find out what his own soldiers knew
17:51that his own headquarters didn't. On the 30th of January, 1945, an infantry replacement reported to
17:58the headquarters of L Company, 310th Infantry, 78th Division, near Kozen, inside Germany. He was older than
18:05the others. That was the only thing about him worth a second look. He had a rifle and a duffel
18:11and no
18:11history anyone asked about. And the men of the company took him for what he appeared to be,
18:16another warm body sent up to fill a hole in the line. He was Major Arthur Goodfriend, an editor of
18:23Stars and Stripes. A handful of senior officers knew. Nobody in the company did. He had gotten himself
18:30deliberately misidentified as a private so he could find out, from inside a rifle company,
18:36how the American soldier was actually surviving the winter. Because the Army's published account and
18:41the Army's casualty lists had stopped agreeing with each other. Understand what the official line was
18:48at that moment. That same week, American newspapers were running stories about doughboys hobbling on
18:54frozen feet. Newsweek had just published a piece titled Shades of Valley Forge on the failures of the
19:05Police Department. And that the resulting trench foot could lead to gangrene and amputation.
19:11General Eisenhower's headquarters dismissed the reports as isolated cases. Goodfriend went to
19:17find the isolated cases. What he found first was a forward command post with men crowded around a wood
19:23stove. No overcoats, because the overcoats had long since been thrown away for being too heavy to fight
19:29in. Field jackets only. Gloves out at the fingers. Several men had pulled socks over their hands.
19:37These were the soldiers that Army publicity was at that moment describing as the best equipped in the
19:43world. He was a new man, so the veterans took him in hand. And this is the part I find
19:49remarkable.
19:50There was a curriculum. Not a printed one. Wear two or three pairs of socks, but not so many that
19:57the boot
19:57goes tight, because tight is how you lose the foot. Watch out though, they told him, because most of our
20:04shoes are too tight anyway, and when they fill with water they get smaller still. Put a felt or cardboard
20:10pad in your overshoes. Don't throw the overshoes away, whatever the others tell you. An entire body of
20:17survival knowledge, accurate, hard-won, and transmitted mouth-to-mouth by privates, the same
20:23knowledge that Colonel Cutler had put in a memorandum nine months earlier and watched disappear
20:28into a filing system. The men had no idea a colonel had ever written it. They'd worked it out themselves,
20:34from the inside, at the cost of their own toes. Goodfriend also collected the verdicts. The consensus on
20:41the combat boot was that it was rotten. His own battalion commander, a lieutenant colonel,
20:46a man responsible for 800 lives, told him flatly that the people who made that boot ought to be
20:52put in jail. And he recorded something else, which matters more than the equipment. The premature
20:59announcements, the stories about vast quantities of winter gear in the rear, or on the ocean, or in
21:05production back home, had done real damage. They had depressed the frontline soldier's morale and,
21:11in Goodfriend's words, weakened his respect for the army. That is the true crisis of that winter,
21:18and it isn't a supply crisis. An infantryman will accept almost anything. He will accept that there
21:25are no boots. What he will not accept is being told there are boots. The gap between the announcement
21:31and the foxhole was where the trust was dying. And an army whose riflemen have stopped believing,
21:38it is an army that has lost something it cannot requisition. You can see it in one exchange.
21:44Around that same time, a soldier in the 84th Division, named Mike Churko, was finally issued shoe
21:50packs, the good boot, the one that worked, arriving at last. The next day, his unit was ordered to turn
21:58them back in and take the combat boots again. The reason given? Now that winter was over,
22:03the shoe packs would slow them down. It was the 20-something of January. There was snow on the
22:09ground. Meanwhile, the disease was doing arithmetic on the whole front. In that first week of the bulge,
22:17of every hundred men admitted with cold injury at the 108th General Hospital, only 46 still had an
22:24adequate supply of socks. Three pairs. The week after? 42. The army's own historians added the detail
22:33that gets left out of every chart. Many of the men who did have dry socks simply couldn't put them
22:39on
22:39because of what was happening around them. But somebody in a hospital had noticed something in
22:45those interviews. Something small. And it changed the arithmetic entirely.
22:51A large share of the men arriving at aid stations with apparent cold injury didn't need a hospital
22:56at all. They needed to get warm and put on a dry pair of socks. That was it. That was
23:03the whole
23:03treatment. Which meant a man could be saved for his company by 10 minutes and a pair of socks, or
23:09lost to
23:10the war for 83 days, depending entirely on whether someone made him take his boots off in time.
23:16And that raised the question the American army had been avoiding since April. Whose job was it to make
23:23him? The first man to answer that question in public was, of all people, George Patton. And he
23:29answered it in a way nobody expected on the 21st of November, 1944. His third army had already issued a
23:37directive on the 9th. It hadn't worked. So Patton wrote to his commanders himself, and the letter opens with a
23:44sentence that reads strangely even now. The most serious menace confronting us today, he wrote,
23:51is not the German army, which we have practically destroyed, but the weather, which, if we do not
23:57exert ourselves, may well destroy us through the incidents of trench foot. Read it again with the date
24:04in mind. Late November, 1944. Patton is telling his generals that the greatest threat to the third
24:12army is not the Wehrmacht. He wasn't wrong. For the week ending the 25th of November, for every hundred
24:19battle casualties evacuated from his army, 60 more men were evacuated with cold injury. The medical
24:26officer who carried that figure to him added the assessment that trench foot was doing quite as much
24:30damage to the allied cause as the enemy was, because of how long the disability lasted, and how readily
24:36it came back. 60 for every hundred. From an army that was, at that moment, attacking. Now, that letter
24:46didn't fix it. I want to be honest about that, because the tidy version of this story would have Patton
24:51write a memo and the epidemic stop. It didn't. Cases in the third army had already peaked and were falling,
24:58for reasons that had as much to do with the weather as with him. In December, the whole thing came
25:03roaring
25:04back in a different form, as frostbite, when the ground froze during the Ardennes offensive.
25:103,213 cases in the week ending the 29th of December alone. What the letter did was something else.
25:18It moved the problem across a line inside the army's own head. Trench foot stopped being a medical subject,
25:26and became a command subject, the thing a general answers for. And the army had a way of finding out
25:33whether that was true, because it had been quietly running a natural experiment all winter without
25:39meaning to. Here it is. Some divisions had consistently good records. Some had records that
25:46were almost consistently bad. And here's the key, regardless of how hard they were fighting.
25:53Combat activity did not tell the whole story. When investigators went into the bad divisions,
26:00they almost invariably found conditions that could be improved. Same theater, same weather,
26:07same lousy boots, same shortage of galoshes. Wildly different numbers. Which meant the variable was not
26:15the equipment. The variable was the command. The clearest case was the 30th Infantry Division,
26:221st Army. An old, seasoned outfit whose commanders had understood the danger long before anybody sent
26:29them a directive about it. The army's official history describes what they had built with a phrase
26:34worth keeping. A well-developed system of foot discipline. And the result was that only when the
26:41tactical situation was entirely beyond control did that division take appreciable losses from cold.
26:48Not because they were issued better gear. They weren't. The 30th didn't receive shoe packs and
26:54winter equipment in quantity until after their part in the Battle of the Bulge was finished.
27:00So look at what one of their regimental commanders did instead. Colonel Branner Perdue had the 120th
27:07Infantry in the snow, reducing the bulge salient with no proper winter footwear coming. So he stopped
27:15waiting for the Quartermaster Corps and had booties made, cut roughly to the shape of a combat boot,
27:21sewn three layers thick, out of salvaged blankets, and blankets captured off the Germans. American
27:29soldiers went through that winter with the enemy's bedding wrapped around their feet because their
27:34own army's supply chain had lost an argument about trouser shades. They were light enough that a man
27:41carried his inside his shirt, where his body kept them dry and warm until the moment he needed them.
27:47Gus Roof, a mortar man in the regiment, did exactly that, carried them against his chest, and when things
27:54went quiet, pulled off his soaked boots, let them dry, and put the booties on inside his overshoes.
28:02There is no doubt, he wrote, that they saved many of us from getting trench feet. By the middle of
28:09January,
28:09there were enough for every man in the regiment, and for every replacement, handed over on arrival.
28:16The 8th, the 78th, and the 44th Divisions started copying them. The Army's own medical history
28:24eventually acknowledged blanket booties inside overshoes as one of the best forms of protection
28:28developed in the entire theater, precisely because the toes could move. A colonel with a sewing operation
28:35had outperformed the Quartermaster General of the United States Army. And then, in January, all of it,
28:42Purdue's booties, the 30th's foot discipline, Patton's letter, got taken away from the individual
28:49commanders who invented it, and turned into something the whole feeder had to do, every night,
28:54whether they believed in it or not. Which is when the American Army did the thing that the German Army,
28:59with three more winters of experience, had never once attempted. In January of 1945, the prevention
29:06of cold injury became, across every American Army in Europe, a command responsibility. Those three
29:13words are the answer to the question the Adjutant General had ducked in June, when he wrote that the
29:18problem belonged to subordinate commands. Now it belonged to a specific person, with a name and a rank,
29:25in every company on the line. Here is what it looked like on the ground. The men were instructed,
29:33actually instructed, which most of them never had been. Remember, in the Italian epidemic the year
29:38before, of 320 men studied with trench foot, 59 percent had never received any instruction in
29:46preventing it. In one sample of 142 men interviewed at a clearing station, not a single one had been taught
29:53what he was risking by sleeping in the cold without changing his wet socks. Not one in 142.
30:01Second, a supply chain was built for one item. Clean dry socks moved forward with the daily rations,
30:09in the ration jeeps, in the ration sleds. A man drew his food and his socks together and handed back
30:17the
30:17wet pair. When the tactical situation broke that, he was to wring out what he had and dry it against
30:24his own skin inside his shirt. Third, control teams. Small groups whose job was to go into units and
30:33enforce it, and to sit down with the divisions whose numbers were bad and work out why. And fourth,
30:40the thing this whole story turns on. Somebody had to physically look. Every night, in the dark, in the
30:49line, at the feet of men who did not want to take their boots off, because taking them off hurt
30:55and
30:56because they might not go back on. Officers and sergeants knelt in the mud with red lensed flashlights
31:02and checked, one man at a time, for the color and the swelling that meant a soldier had about a
31:09day
31:09left before he cost the United States 83 of them. Now, why is that the thing no German would touch?
31:19Not because German soldiers didn't care about their feet. They did. They had winter manuals. They had
31:25Fußlappen, the issued foot wraps that a man wound around his foot instead of a sock, in which the manual
31:31insisted were warmer than socks. A German artilleryman named Franz Fritsch remembered that he was never
31:38issued socks at all, only wraps, and that his family sent him socks from home because wraps and socks
31:44both wore out. And the German army knew this disease far better than the American army did. In the winter
31:51of
31:5141 and 42, in Russia, they took something on the order of 100,000 frostbite casualties. Nearly 15,000
32:00men lost limbs. Reported figures for trench foot in the German army that same winter run to a quarter
32:07of a million. 250,000. Against 46,000 Americans three winters later. So they had the experience.
32:17They had the data. They had, in fact, counted it. Which brings us to the German document.
32:24On the 21st of February, 1942, with the Eastern Front frozen solid and men dying of exposure in front of
32:31Moscow, the Nazi Party issued an instruction to its public speakers. Confidential. Guidance on what to say.
32:40It begins by stating that the rumors circulating about severe hardship among the troops in the east lack any
32:46foundation. Such difficulties as exist are the ordinary, unavoidable difficulties of winter, so minor, given the
32:54length and depth of the front, as to be of no significance. The rumors, it explains, most likely originate in
33:01enemy
33:02propaganda, intended to damage the world's view of the German defense and to weaken the confidence of the German people.
33:09Then comes the sentence I keep returning to. The Wehrmacht at the front, it says, and the administrative
33:15offices in the occupied territories have tabulated the cases of frostbite. These figures prove that all the chatter is
33:23exaggerated. And then, whether and when the figures are released to the public depends on strategic considerations.
33:33They had the number. They just weren't going to say it. The directive goes further.
33:39Speakers were told to combat the talk energetically. When people cited sources, doctors, orderlies, Red Cross nurses, mayors
33:49who had seen the amputees in the hospitals, speakers were to demand written proof, whereupon the rumor mongers would fall
33:56silent, being unable to support their irresponsible chatter. Understand what that instruction does.
34:05Somewhere in Germany, there is a nurse who has spent the winter cutting frozen feet off 19-year-olds.
34:11The party's official guidance is that she is careless, gullible, and probably repeating enemy propaganda,
34:19and that a party speaker should say so to her face. Now put the two systems side by side, because
34:26they were solving the same problem.
34:28The Americans counted, published, argued, and blamed themselves. The Germans counted, sealed it, and instructed the nation to disbelieve its
34:40own hospitals.
34:42But that's still not the whole answer. Because there is one more American document from that winter,
34:48and it reveals that a serious faction inside the United States Army wanted to do something to these men
34:54that was closer to the German instinct than anyone likes to remember. The argument was about a medal.
35:00Army Regulation 645, dated the 3rd of May, 1944, laid out who received the Purple Heart.
35:08An injury to any part of the body from an outside force, element, or agent, sustained as the result of
35:14a hostile
35:15act of the enemy, or while in action in the face of the enemy. That word in the middle, element.
35:23Somebody read it and realized that weather is an element, and that a man whose feet had rotted off in
35:28a
35:28hole in Belgium while facing the German army had, by the plain text of the regulation, qualified.
35:35The army fought about it for months, and the position that emerged against it went like this.
35:41Cold injury is preventable. A preventable injury is not an honorable wound. Therefore, these men should not be decorated.
35:51Some officers went further. The record notes that some suggested that soldiers with trench foot should rather be punished.
35:59There it is. The same instinct in an American uniform. The disease is the soldier's fault. Charge him.
36:08That instinct did not win. And the reason it did not win is the actual answer to everything we have
36:15been circling for the last hour. Because trench foot was preventable, that part was true.
36:21The general board that studied the whole catastrophe after the war stated it flatly.
36:26Cold injury, ground type, is to a great extent preventable. And they listed why it had happened
36:34anyway. Inadequate clothing and foot gear. Unfavorable operational conditions. And the delay of many units
36:42in instituting a program with emphasis on, and close supervision of, the measures to be taken by the
36:49individual soldier. Look at where the blame lands in that sentence. Not on the individual soldier.
36:56On the units that were slow to supervise him. That is the whole thing. That is the entire difference.
37:05Both armies agreed the disease was preventable. The question was, who had failed to prevent it?
37:11And the two systems gave opposite answers. In the German system, the man in the hole was
37:18responsible for his own body. And the institution's response to its own casualty figures was to classify
37:25them and instruct the public to disbelieve the nurses. The soldier's rotting foot was his private
37:32failure. And the state's problem was the rumor. In the American system, by January of 1945, that foot had
37:42become an officer's failure. Measured. Reported weakly. Compared between divisions. Attached to a commander's name.
37:51And once you have decided that a private's feet are a captain's responsibility, the nightly inspection
37:57isn't sentimental. It's just what that decision looks like when you carry it out to the end.
38:03Somebody has to kneel down in the mud and actually look, because somebody upstairs has agreed to be
38:09answerable for what's found. That is the thing no German would touch. Not the foot. The accountability.
38:18And here's how you know it was real, rather than a story the Americans told afterward.
38:24They published the indictment against themselves. The official medical history of the United States
38:30Army, printed by the Surgeon General, available to anyone, says that the fundamental and all-pervading
38:37reason for the epidemic was that the lessons of the past had not been learned or heeded.
38:42It says that if the premise is accepted that cold injury is largely preventable,
38:47there is no real excuse for what happened. No real excuse. About their own war. In their own book.
38:57It names the theater chief quartermaster who refused the better clothing. It records that
39:03requisitions were too small and too late, based on poor planning and wishful thinking. It preserves Colonel
39:10Cutler's opinion that the men in Italy were faking, so that everyone can see how badly he got it wrong
39:16before he got it right. Now compare the two documents one final time.
39:22Germany, February 42. The figures exist, and their release depends on strategic considerations.
39:30The United States, 1958. Here are the figures. Here are the names. Here is precisely how we failed our
39:39own infantry and let it serve as a warning for all future operations. One army protected its reputation
39:47from its casualties. The other protected its casualties by publishing its reputation. And in the winter of 1944,
39:55in the mud, one of those two habits turned into a man with a flashlight on his knees in front
40:02of a 19-year-old's
40:03bare feet. So did it work? Here is the curve, week by week, and I have been holding it back
40:11for six parts
40:12because it only means something now. The peak, 5,386, in the week ending the 17th of November.
40:22Through January, never fewer than 3,000 a week. Then the week ending the 16th of February, 1,643.
40:33The following week, 596. By the week ending the 30th of March, 108. The entire month of April for three
40:44million men, 230. From 5,000 a week to 100. And there is a bitter, honest complication in that
40:53collapse that the army itself insisted on recording. One that turns the whole triumph sideways.
40:59Here is the complication, and the army's own historians put it in writing rather than let
41:04anyone believe a cleaner story. By the time the shoe packs arrived in quantity, by the time the wool
41:10socks and the properly sized overshoes and the M1943 jackets finally came ashore, by the time the
41:18trench foot program was running in every division, the weather had broken. The thaw came. The fighting
41:25eased. Temperatures rose. The supplies and the program and the spring all arrived at roughly the same moment,
41:33and no honest man can hand the whole of that collapse to any one of them.
41:37The official verdict is brutal in its plainness. They came too late to be entirely useful.
41:44So the men who died of it, died of it before anybody fixed anything. That is simply true,
41:51and the United States Army wrote it down about itself and printed it. But something did change
41:57that could not be undone by weather. 46,107 men hospitalized. Three infantry divisions. The
42:0783 days apiece for those who came back at all. And most did not come back to a rifle company.
42:14Not one of them shot. And out of that, an institution learned that the body of a private
42:19first class is an asset the institution is accountable for. The lessons then learned,
42:25the official history notes, shaped the preparations for the war expected in Japan and the Far East.
42:30They shaped Korea. The buddy check. The sock discipline. The officer who looks. All of it
42:37comes out of that winter, and it is still in the manuals now, 80 years on, written in the toes
42:43of men
42:43from Nebraska and Missouri and New Jersey. Bruce Glover left the hospital in Birmingham on the 8th of May,
42:511945, the day the war in Europe ended. He came home. He told his family about it in his own
42:58words,
42:58decades later. And because he did, his admission record and his four and a half months are in this
43:03story instead of lost. Preston Price survived and wrote his own account, which is how we know what
43:10happened to Jack Lewis's toes inside that sock. Murray Pulver, the company commander in Purdue's regiment,
43:17was wearing his blanket booties inside his overshoes during an attack when a German grenade landed under
43:23his right foot and exploded. The overshoe was blown to pieces. The three layers of salvaged blanket
43:30absorbed the rest. He walked away with a bruise, and he lived to write it down. Gus Roof came home
43:38too,
43:38and published his account of the road from Holland to the Rhine, and made sure the booties were in it.
43:43And on the 20th of January, 1945, at a place called Gérimont in Belgium, an army photographer stopped
43:51three men of the 30th Division taking a 10-minute break by a small fire. Sergeant Albert Soli of Westwood,
43:58California. Private Jimmy Ferguson of Granby, Missouri. Technical Sergeant Robert Kircher of Maplewood, New Jersey.
44:08Ferguson is holding up his booties for the camera. Three layers of blanket cut to the shape of a boot,
44:15and he is showing them off like a man showing off a new car. That is what victory looked like
44:21that
44:21January. Not a tank. A private from Missouri, grinning, holding a piece of German bedding that
44:28his colonel had sewn into a boot so that he would still have feet in the spring.
44:34The answer to all of it is smaller than you'd think, and it isn't about boots at all. An army
44:40that will kneel down in the mud and look at a private's feet has already decided that the private
44:46matters more than the army's dignity. And an army that will publish the number of feet it ruined
44:51has already decided that the truth matters more than the army's reputation. That was the thing the
44:58other side would not touch. And it beat them. Thank you for staying with me. No tanks, no aces,
45:06no famous last stands. If you made it here, it's because you understand that armies are won and lost
45:12in things this small. A like genuinely helps this reach people who've never been told any of it.
45:20Subscribe and ring the bell, and I'll keep digging into the parts of this war that got left out.
45:25And tell me where you're watching from. If your father or grandfather served in an American outfit,
45:30give me his name and unit. And if he came home from that winter with feet that never felt right
45:35again,
45:36say so. A great many did, and they mostly never said much about it. Somebody should.
45:42A great relationship.