- 26 minutes ago
German POWs in American camps thought they were seeing a broken army — but what they actually witnessed was a system built to correct itself. From Aliceville, Alabama to Tonkawa, Oklahoma and Luxembourg, this military history story follows German prisoners, American doctors, camp discipline, wartime newspapers, and the argument over whether a soldier should be allowed to talk back.
The video traces how 425,000 German prisoners were held across the United States, put to work in mess halls and hospitals, and exposed to an Army where enlisted men could challenge officers, cartoonists could mock generals, and complaints could travel through official channels. It also follows the darker side of captivity: German-run camp courts, the murder of Johannes Kun in Oklahoma, the trial that followed, and the later execution of Eddie Slovik for desertion.
At the center is a simple but powerful question: why did German POWs trust American doctors, laws, and procedures more than their own medics and command culture? The answer unfolds through Casarene, Patton, Stars and Stripes, Yank, and the idea that an army is not only a machine for force, but a machine for finding out when it is wrong.
Created for listeners who enjoy WW2 stories, military history, prisoner of war history, and narrated documentary-style history videos. If you search for German POWs, American Army history, WW2 camps, or forgotten World War 2 stories, this episode fits perfectly for background listening, history study, and calm long-form narration.
The video traces how 425,000 German prisoners were held across the United States, put to work in mess halls and hospitals, and exposed to an Army where enlisted men could challenge officers, cartoonists could mock generals, and complaints could travel through official channels. It also follows the darker side of captivity: German-run camp courts, the murder of Johannes Kun in Oklahoma, the trial that followed, and the later execution of Eddie Slovik for desertion.
At the center is a simple but powerful question: why did German POWs trust American doctors, laws, and procedures more than their own medics and command culture? The answer unfolds through Casarene, Patton, Stars and Stripes, Yank, and the idea that an army is not only a machine for force, but a machine for finding out when it is wrong.
Created for listeners who enjoy WW2 stories, military history, prisoner of war history, and narrated documentary-style history videos. If you search for German POWs, American Army history, WW2 camps, or forgotten World War 2 stories, this episode fits perfectly for background listening, history study, and calm long-form narration.
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LearningTranscript
00:00On the 2nd of June, 1943, a train of the Frisco Line rolled into the station at Aliceville, Alabama,
00:07and about 500 men of the German Afrika Korps stepped down onto American ground.
00:13They did not look like the army that had held the line in Tunisia.
00:16They wore whatever they had left, a duffel bag gone to rags,
00:21here and there a musical instrument, one checkerboard.
00:25Waiting for them was every gun in the county.
00:29Companies of American soldiers stood along the entire length of the road,
00:33from the railroad station to the camp gate.
00:36Rifles, machine guns, shotguns, pistols.
00:40But that is not what the Germans were looking at.
00:43They were looking at the civilians.
00:46The town had come out.
00:48Hundreds of them, standing at the edge of the road to see the enemy.
00:53The prisoners had no idea what several hundred American civilians were about to do
00:58to men who had spent two years killing American sons in North Africa.
01:02One of them said afterward that this was the moment he was most afraid.
01:06Not the guns.
01:08The crowd.
01:10Then the crowd went into the station and came back out with coffee and sandwiches
01:14and handed them to the men who had just come off the train.
01:18Hold on to that picture.
01:20We are coming back to it at the end of this story.
01:23And by then, it will mean something completely different than it means right now.
01:28Those 500 were the front edge of something enormous.
01:32Before the war ended, the United States brought 425,000 German prisoners across the Atlantic
01:39into roughly 700 camps in 46 of the 48 states, at a rate of 30,000 men a month.
01:48And here is the part almost nobody mentions.
01:51The Americans put them to work.
01:53And not only on farms.
01:55Prisoners worked inside United States Army installations.
01:59In the mess halls.
02:01In the hospitals.
02:02Some of them waited tables in American officers' clubs.
02:06Which means that for two years, German soldiers watched the United States Army
02:10from closer than any agent Germany ever placed on American soil.
02:15And what they saw?
02:17They filed away as rot.
02:20They saw privates argue with officers.
02:23Out loud.
02:24In front of other men.
02:26And they decided it meant the American army was finished.
02:31If these stories are worth your time, a like genuinely helps this one reach more people.
02:36And subscribing keeps them coming.
02:39What the American army built in those years is worth looking at closely.
02:44Picture that for a moment.
02:46A German sergeant.
02:48A man out of an army where an officer's word was the end of every sentence.
02:53Standing with a tray at the elbow of the American army while it ate its dinner.
02:58He saw enlisted men run down their own commanders and not be arrested for it.
03:04To a German soldier, this was not a style.
03:07It was a symptom.
03:09And he could name the disease.
03:11In the army he came from, the distance between a private and an officer was not a matter of manners.
03:17It was the load-bearing wall.
03:19Remove it, and the building comes down.
03:22So when a German prisoner watched an American corporal tell a lieutenant he was wrong about something and keep his
03:28stripes,
03:29he was not seeing a different kind of army.
03:31He was seeing an army with the wall knocked out.
03:35And they had every reason to feel confirmed.
03:38Under the Geneva Convention, captured officers could not be compelled to work.
03:42And the Americans honored it to the letter.
03:46Thirty-five German generals and one admiral sat out the war in a compound at Camp Clinton, Mississippi.
03:53Hans-Jürgen von Arnhem, who had surrendered access North Africa, was given a house, a car, and a driver.
04:00The hierarchy the Germans believed in was still standing.
04:03The Americans were paying for its upkeep.
04:07They were wrong.
04:09They were wrong on a scale that is hard to describe.
04:12And the reason they were wrong is the reason I spent weeks on this one.
04:16To understand what those prisoners thought they were seen, you have to understand what they were measuring it against.
04:22Most of the men on that train had gone into captivity in Tunisia in May,
04:27when Axis resistance in North Africa collapsed, and roughly a quarter of a million men laid down their arms.
04:34They had met the Americans at Kasserine Pass in February.
04:37They had seen green American units break apart, guns abandoned, a whole corps handled roughly by a smaller German force.
04:46That was their sample.
04:48What they had not seen was what happened next.
04:51They did not see the American army relieve the commander responsible within weeks.
04:57They did not see that by May the same army was taking Bessert.
05:01They were already on ships by then, headed for Virginia, carrying a picture of the United States Army that was
05:08four months out of date,
05:09and would never be updated, because the only Americans they would see for the rest of the war were the
05:15ones they served coffee to in Alabama.
05:17So they arrived with a verdict already written.
05:20And then they were handed something no prisoner of war in history had been handed before.
05:27Time.
05:28Time.
05:29Years of it.
05:30Time to observe the enemy at close range and confirm what they already believed.
05:36And here is where it turns.
05:38Because the German prisoners did not only judge the American army, they set about proving the other model.
05:46Inside those camps, behind American wire, German officers kept their own system running.
05:53Inspections.
05:54Hitler salutes.
05:56Ranks intact.
05:58Courts.
05:59Remember that word.
06:00Courts.
06:01Five months after the Aliceville train, in a camp near Tonkawa, Oklahoma, 200 German prisoners gathered at night in a
06:09mess hall to try one of their own.
06:12A 39-year-old private named Johannes Kunz.
06:16He had done the one thing no soldier of the Reich was permitted to do.
06:21He had disagreed out loud.
06:25What those 200 men did to him in that room, and what the United States did about it 20 months
06:30later, is the part of this story that almost nobody tells.
06:34The 4th of November, 1943.
06:37Camp Tonkawa, in the red dirt of north-central Oklahoma.
06:41Johannes Kunz was 39 years old, a private, and, by the standards of the men around him, a coward.
06:48He had said out loud that Germany was going to lose.
06:52Worse than that, he had said he did not much care.
06:55And he had done one thing more.
06:57At sick call, Kunz had been passing notes to the camp doctor.
07:01The doctor passed them to the American commandant.
07:04What was in them was small stuff.
07:06Camp stuff.
07:07Who was organizing what inside the compound.
07:10But the men in that compound were Afrika Korps, captured at the high-water mark of German victory,
07:15and they had brought their whole world across the ocean with them intact.
07:20And they had help.
07:21Here is the piece of this that still makes American historians wince.
07:26The United States ran those camps through the German chain of command, because it was efficient.
07:30You do not need many American guards if the prisoners' own sergeants form them up, count them, and march them
07:37to work.
07:38So the army handed the compounds back to the men who had run them in Africa.
07:43In camp after camp, the hardest corps of the Afrika Korps took the wire and held it.
07:48And the Americans, busy fighting a world war, let them.
07:53That night, about 200 of them filled the mess hall.
07:57This was not a mob.
07:59That is the thing to understand about it.
08:01It was a proceeding.
08:03Charges were read.
08:05A verdict was reached.
08:07Then the room turned on one unarmed man and killed him with whatever was in it.
08:12And when he broke loose and ran, they followed him out into the dark and finished it there.
08:18Ask yourself what those 200 men thought they were doing.
08:22They were not settling a grudge.
08:24They were repairing something.
08:26Every one of them had spent months inside the United States watching an army that let its privates talk back.
08:32And they had drawn the obvious conclusion.
08:36And here in Oklahoma, they were demonstrating the correct alternative.
08:40The wall goes back up.
08:42The man who disagrees out loud is removed.
08:45That is what an army is.
08:48The Americans found Kunze's body outside the mess hall in the morning.
08:53And then the United States did something that the men in that compound had not budgeted for.
08:58It held a trial.
09:01Not a reprisal.
09:02Not a lockdown.
09:03Not a starvation ration.
09:05Not a line of hostages against the wire.
09:08A trial, under American military law, of enemy prisoners of war.
09:13For the murder of an enemy prisoner of war.
09:17Five men were charged, identified in part by the blood still on their uniforms.
09:22The prosecutor was an army lawyer named Leon Jaworski.
09:27Remember that name, because 30 years later, he reappears in American life as the special prosecutor who took on a
09:33sitting president over Watergate.
09:35In 1943, he was in Oklahoma, building a premeditated murder case on behalf of a dead German private that nobody
09:43in the world was mourning.
09:44The five had defense counsel.
09:47They had the right to be heard.
09:49They had every step of the appeal the law allowed.
09:52And they used all of it.
09:54Do you see what has happened here?
09:56The United States gave the men who murdered Johannes Kunze exactly the thing they had murdered him for having.
10:03It gave them an argument.
10:05They lost it.
10:06All five were convicted of premeditated murder and sentenced to hang.
10:12And then, nothing happened for a year and a half.
10:16Here is why.
10:17And it is one of the coldest calculations of the war.
10:21There were American boys inside German prison camps.
10:24Tens of thousands of them.
10:27If Berlin learned that the United States had hanged German soldiers, Berlin had hostages of its own.
10:33So the sentences sat, confirmed and unexecuted, while the war ran its course because the American army was not going
10:41to trade its own prisoners for the satisfaction of being on time.
10:46On the 10th of July, 1945, two months after Germany surrendered, the five men from the Tonkawa mess hall were
10:54hanged at the United States disciplinary barracks at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.
11:00And Kunze was not the only one.
11:02Before it was over, 14 German prisoners were executed on American soil for killing fellow Germans in American camps.
11:11And eight more went to prison for two more murders.
11:15Historians who have gone through the files believe most of the camp suicides were not suicides.
11:21At Camp Concordia in Kansas, three weeks before Tonkawa, a German captain named Felix Tropschuh went to the Americans and
11:30asked for protection.
11:32He was sent back to his barracks.
11:34He was dead by 11 that night.
11:37The Americans learned that lesson late.
11:40And they learned it the way armies do, by getting it wrong first.
11:44But look at what the answer cost in time.
11:4820 months.
11:49That is how long it took the American system to settle one night's work in one mess hall.
11:55And to the prisoners watching from the compounds, it looked like exactly what they already believed.
12:00Slow.
12:02Slow.
12:03Talkative.
12:04Full of lawyers.
12:06Keep that word in your pocket.
12:08Slow.
12:09We will need it in December of 1944, when the German army bet its last reserves on the belief that
12:15an army full of arguing amateurs would come apart when it was hit hard enough.
12:21Because that is the question underneath all of this.
12:23And I want to be honest with you about it.
12:26The Germans were not stupid.
12:28They were watching a real thing.
12:31American soldiers really did argue with their officers.
12:34Constantly.
12:35And not quietly.
12:37The United States Army printed their complaints in its own newspapers.
12:41It gave a private a legal right to accuse his own commander.
12:45And in a building in Luxembourg, in the last winter of the war, a four-star general was about to
12:51summon a 25-year-old sergeant and accuse him, to his face, of inciting mutiny in the middle of a
12:58campaign.
12:59The general was George Patton.
13:02And the argument they had in that room decided something bigger than either of them.
13:07March, 1945.
13:09Luxembourg.
13:11A 23-year-old sergeant named Bill Malden drove up to the headquarters of the 3rd Army because a four
13:17-star general had summoned him.
13:18And he brought his dog.
13:21Malden drew a cartoon strip for Stars and Stripes, the army's own newspaper.
13:25His two characters, Willie and Joe, were infantrymen.
13:28They were filthy.
13:30They were unshaven.
13:31They were exhausted in a way that showed in the shoulders.
13:34And they treated the United States Army as a hazard roughly equal to the German one.
13:40Every rifleman in Europe read them and recognized himself.
13:43General George Patton read them, too.
13:47Malden had just run a drawing that made fun of a 3rd Army order about neckties in the combat zone.
13:52And Patton had had enough.
13:55He had already been writing to Eisenhower's headquarters demanding the cartoons be stopped.
14:00So there they were.
14:02On one side of the desk, the most famous fighting general in the United States Army, a man who had
14:07slapped a private in a hospital tent in Sicily and nearly lost his command for it.
14:12On the other side, a sergeant, 23 years old, who would win the Pulitzer Prize that same year.
14:19Patton opened with a question that has survived word for word.
14:23What are you trying to do, he said?
14:25Inside a goddamn mutiny?
14:27It went 45 minutes.
14:30Patton said the cartoons made American soldiers look like bums and tore down discipline.
14:35Malden said the opposite.
14:36That a man who can laugh at his own misery in print is a man who is not going to
14:41crack in a hole in the ground.
14:43Neither of them moved an inch.
14:46There is a moment in Malden's account of it where his dog, who was also named Willie, stood up when
14:51the general stood up and fell off his chair.
14:54They shook hands and parted, agreeing to disagree.
14:59Now, stop and hold this next part in your mind, because this is the whole video in one sentence.
15:04The sergeant kept his job, the cartoons kept running, and it was the general who was told to stand down.
15:11Eisenhower's position was written down, and it was not ambiguous.
15:15Stars and stripes belonged to the soldiers, not to the command.
15:20Nothing in it was to be censored, except for military security.
15:24Commanders were not to interfere, and if a commander had a problem with what his men were reading,
15:29he could bring it to the supreme commander personally.
15:32Patton kept pushing.
15:34On the 11th of April, 1945, Eisenhower's naval aide noted in his diary that Patton might now admit he had
15:42lost the Battle of Malden.
15:44And I want to be precise about what that means, because it is easy to hear it as a nice
15:48story about a cartoonist.
15:51Patton was not wrong that the cartoons undercut him.
15:54He was overruled anyway, by a commander who had decided that the cost of letting soldiers say what they thought
15:59was lower than the cost of not knowing what they thought.
16:03Think about what a German officer would do with that information.
16:06In the middle of the largest campaign in American history, the supreme allied commander spent his own attention protecting a
16:14sergeant's right to make fun of a general in print.
16:22And Malden was not an exception.
16:25He was a symptom of something the army had built on purpose.
16:29There was a second paper, Yank, the Army Weekly.
16:33Every man on it, editors, writers, artists, photographers, was enlisted.
16:38Not one officer could edit a line of it or kill a story in it.
16:43That was not a local arrangement, and it was not an accident.
16:47The authority for it came from the President of the United States and the Secretary of War.
16:53Yank ran a column called Mail Call.
16:55And Mail Call printed letters from privates going after their own officers by the thousand.
17:02Officers were allowed into those pages under one condition.
17:05They could come in to defend themselves.
17:08One infantry medic wrote home to his parents that the best thing about Yank was that the writers even told
17:15the officers to go to hell sometimes.
17:17And it went further than the newspapers.
17:19The United States Army hired social scientists and put questionnaires in front of its own troops,
17:25hundreds of thousands of them, asking what they actually thought about their food, their officers, their odds, and the point
17:33of the war.
17:34Anonymous. Uncensored.
17:37Then it read the answers and acted on them.
17:41No other army on earth was collecting the private opinions of its privates as a weapons-grade input.
17:47And the results filled four volumes after the war.
17:51And beneath the newspapers there was law.
17:53Article 121 of the Articles of War
17:58Any member of the armed forces who believes himself wronged by his commanding officer
18:03and who asks that officer for redress and is refused
18:06may complain to a superior officer, a private, formally accusing the man who commands him,
18:13with the statute on his side.
18:15That law is still alive today, under a different number.
18:19Now put yourself back in that officer's club in Texas or Kansas,
18:23with the German prisoner carrying the tray.
18:26He is watching an American captain get contradicted by a corporal,
18:30and he does not know that the corporal is standing on a federal statute.
18:34He thinks he is watching bad manners.
18:37He is watching a legal right.
18:40But a right to complain is not by itself a reason to win a war.
18:45Plenty of institutions let people complain and change nothing.
18:49So here is where this stops being about manners and starts being about combat.
18:54Two years before Luxembourg, in a mountain pass in Tunisia,
18:58the United States Army was handed the worst defeat of its war in the West up to that point.
19:03The men who walked out of it went straight into captivity, or straight into a rebuilding.
19:09And what happened in the eight weeks after that defeat
19:12is the reason the German prisoner's picture of the American army
19:16froze in February of 1943 and never moved again.
19:21February 14th, 1943.
19:23Sidi Bouzid in central Tunisia.
19:27Before dawn, two German panzer divisions came out of the desert
19:30on both sides of an American position and closed behind it.
19:34American infantry were left sitting on two bare hills,
19:38with the war going on underneath them.
19:40An American tank counterattack went in the next day,
19:43straight across open ground, and was taken apart in an afternoon.
19:47Over the next ten days, the Germans pushed the United States Army back
19:5150 miles through the Kasserine Pass.
19:54More than 6,000 American casualties.
19:58Thousands of men into captivity.
20:00Equipment abandoned along the roads.
20:03Among the Americans taken in those first hours
20:06was a lieutenant colonel named John Waters,
20:09an armored officer holding a position east of Sidi Bouzid.
20:13He went into a German prison camp and stayed in one until 1945.
20:18He was also George Patton's son-in-law.
20:22So when Patton arrived in Tunisia three weeks later
20:25to take over that corps,
20:26he was rebuilding an army that had already taken a member of his own family away from him.
20:32That is the American army the men on that Alabama train had beaten.
20:36That is the sample they carried to Oklahoma.
20:39And they were entitled to it.
20:41What they were not able to see
20:43was what the United States did in the eight weeks that followed.
20:46Because that part happened inside a system they had no equivalent for.
20:52Start with the man responsible.
20:54The commander of the American Second Corps was Major General Lloyd Friedendahl.
20:58And while his men were being overrun,
21:01Friedendahl was about 70 miles behind them, underground.
21:05That is not a figure of speech.
21:07He had put engineers to work,
21:09blasting a shelter complex into a ravine,
21:11a job that ate weeks of engineer time in a theater short of engineers.
21:16His staff called it Speedy Valley.
21:19He almost never went forward to look at the ground his divisions were fighting on.
21:23He issued orders in a private slang of his own invention,
21:26so that the men receiving them sometimes had to work out what he meant.
21:30And he gave orders directly to units two levels below him,
21:34going around his own division commander,
21:37who protested and was ignored.
21:39Now watch what the argument does.
21:41On the 20th of February,
21:43with the battle still running,
21:45Eisenhower sent Major General Ernest Harmon forward.
21:49Officially, Harmon was going up as a deputy corps commander.
21:53Unofficially, he was Eisenhower's eyes.
21:57Harmon got to Speedy Valley,
21:58and Friedendahl handed him a note.
22:01The note authorized Harmon to take charge of the battle.
22:04A corps commander of the United States Army
22:07had put in writing that somebody else should run his fight.
22:11When Harmon came back to headquarters,
22:13Eisenhower asked him what he had seen.
22:16Harmon's answer was four words.
22:19Friedendahl was, he said,
22:20no damn good,
22:22and he should be relieved.
22:24And here is the detail I would ask you to hold on to,
22:26because it tells you the argument had rules.
22:30Harmon was then offered the corps himself.
22:33He turned it down.
22:35He had just recommended a man's removal,
22:38and he would not take the job that came out of it.
22:42Friedendahl was relieved in the first week of March,
22:4414 days from the disaster
22:47to the removal of the officer responsible.
22:50His replacement was George Patton.
22:53And Patton, arriving to fix an army that had just been beaten,
22:57went after neckties.
23:00Helmets buckled, ties on.
23:02Fines for men out of uniform,
23:04in the desert,
23:05two weeks after Kasserine.
23:08Yes, the same neckties that would put him nose to nose
23:11with a sergeant in Luxembourg two years later.
23:15He was not being ridiculous.
23:17He was reaching for the only lever he could pull
23:20in the time he had.
23:22But the neckties were the small part.
23:24The big part was paper.
23:27The United States Army took what had gone wrong in Tunisia,
23:32wrote it down,
23:33printed it,
23:33and pushed it out to the whole force.
23:36Official War Department documents.
23:38Lessons learned by the American army
23:41during the Tunisian campaign.
23:43Distributed so that a lieutenant
23:45training a company in Georgia
23:46would know in a matter of weeks
23:48what had killed men in a pass in North Africa.
23:52That is what the arguing was for.
23:54Not morale.
23:56Not manners.
23:57A route by which bad news could travel
24:00from the bottom of an army
24:01to the top of it,
24:02fast enough to matter.
24:04Now hold that against the other system.
24:08In July of 1944,
24:10the German commander in the West,
24:12Field Marshal Gerhard von Rundstedt,
24:14was asked by Berlin
24:16what should be done
24:16about the situation in Normandy.
24:19He told them to make peace, you fools.
24:21He was correct.
24:23He was also dismissed within days.
24:25And four days after the bomb plot
24:28against Hitler,
24:28the German armed forces
24:30were ordered to drop
24:31the military salute
24:32and use the Nazi party salute instead,
24:35arm out,
24:36throughout the Wehrmacht.
24:38One army answered failure
24:40by removing the man who failed.
24:42The other answered failure
24:43by making the salute compulsory.
24:48Eight weeks after Kasserine,
24:50American troops were attacking
24:51at El Gattar
24:52and stopping a panzer division.
24:54Ten weeks after that,
24:56the Tunisian front collapsed
24:57and roughly a quarter of a million
24:59Axis soldiers went into the bag
25:01and some of them
25:02stepped off a train in Alabama
25:04on the 2nd of June
25:06and were handed a sandwich.
25:09And they explained it to themselves
25:11the way beaten armies do.
25:13Material.
25:14Trucks.
25:15Fuel.
25:16Aircraft.
25:17Not competence.
25:19Never competence.
25:20They had seen the Americans
25:22in February,
25:23and February was the truth,
25:25and everything after it
25:26was arithmetic.
25:28But there is a bill
25:29for running an army this way,
25:31and I am not going to pretend
25:33there isn't.
25:34An army that lets its men
25:36talk back
25:36has to decide
25:37what it does
25:38with the man
25:39who stops obeying
25:40altogether.
25:41The United States
25:43faced that question
25:44in a French village
25:45in the last winter of the war
25:46in the case of a private
25:48named Eddie Slovik.
25:50And the answer it gave
25:51has been argued about
25:52ever since.
25:53December 16, 1944.
25:56The Ardennes Forest
25:57on the border
25:58of Belgium and Germany.
26:01Germany put everything
26:02it had left
26:03into one attack
26:04through a sector
26:05the Americans
26:06had left thin.
26:07The plan required speed.
26:10Split the Allied armies.
26:11Run for the Meuse.
26:12Take Antwerp.
26:15And the whole thing
26:16rested on an assumption
26:17about the men in the way.
26:20Hit green American units
26:21hard enough
26:22and they will come apart
26:23and the roads will open.
26:26That is the same judgment
26:27the prisoners in Oklahoma
26:28had made
26:29about American privates
26:31arguing with their officers.
26:33In December of 1944,
26:35the German army
26:36bet its last reserves on it.
26:38The spearhead
26:40was an SS colonel
26:41named Joachim Piper
26:42with the strongest
26:44armored column
26:45in the offensive
26:45and a timetable
26:47measured in hours.
26:49On the morning
26:50of the 18th of December,
26:51he came down
26:52on the town of Trois-Ponts
26:54where the road he needed
26:55crossed the river.
26:57Waiting for him
26:58was C. Company
26:59of the 51st Engineer
27:01Combat Battalion.
27:03Engineers.
27:05Not a blocking force,
27:07not armor,
27:08not paratroops,
27:09a company of men
27:10whose job that week
27:11was roads and bridges,
27:13who had been sent up
27:14the day before
27:15and had spent the night
27:16wiring charges.
27:18They blew the bridge
27:19in his face.
27:21After the war,
27:22Piper said it plainly,
27:23If we had captured
27:25the bridge
27:25at Trois-Ponts intact
27:26and had swung west,
27:28he said,
27:28we might have reached
27:29the Meuse in one day.
27:31He turned north
27:32and went for another crossing
27:34at a place called
27:35Neuf-Moulin
27:36over a creek
27:37called the Lien.
27:38Men of the 291st
27:41Engineer Combat Battalion
27:42were on that one
27:43with 2,500 pounds
27:45of explosive under it.
27:47The lead German tank
27:48came into view
27:49and opened fire.
27:50The bridge
27:51went into the air.
27:53Now think about
27:54the decision inside that.
27:56Blowing a bridge
27:57is irreversible.
27:59Blow it too early
28:00and you strand
28:01your own people
28:01on the wrong side.
28:03Blow it too late
28:04and you have handed
28:05the enemy a road.
28:06In both cases,
28:07the man who made the call
28:09was Junior.
28:10He was standing
28:11on the bridge
28:11and he was not going
28:12to get an answer back
28:13from Corps
28:14in the 90 seconds he had.
28:16An army where a corporal
28:18can tell a captain
28:19he is wrong
28:20is an army where
28:21a lieutenant
28:22will blow a bridge
28:23without asking.
28:25Those are the same habit.
28:27The Germans
28:28had been watching
28:28one half of it
28:29in a mess hall
28:30in Texas
28:31and calling it
28:32decay.
28:33The other half
28:34was standing
28:35on the Lien
28:36with a detonator
28:37and on the 23rd
28:38of December
28:39with that battle
28:40at its worst
28:41the supreme commander
28:42of the allied forces
28:43in Europe
28:44sat down
28:45and signed
28:46a death warrant
28:47for an American
28:47private.
28:49His name
28:50was Eddie Slovik.
28:51He was 24
28:52from Detroit
28:53and he had told
28:55his company commander
28:56to his face
28:57that he was too frightened
28:58to serve
28:59in a rifle company.
29:01Then he wrote it down.
29:03He handed
29:04a written confession
29:05of desertion
29:05to a cook
29:06at another unit.
29:07He was offered
29:08a way out.
29:10Tear it up.
29:11Go back to your company.
29:12Nothing more
29:13will be said.
29:14He refused.
29:16He was tried
29:17on the 11th
29:17of November
29:181944
29:19in front of
29:20nine officers
29:21and convicted.
29:22On the 31st
29:23of January
29:241945
29:25at Saint-Marie-aux-Mines
29:27in eastern France
29:28twelve riflemen
29:29shot him.
29:30He was the only
29:32American soldier
29:32executed for desertion
29:34since the Civil War
29:35and he has been
29:36argued about
29:37in the United States
29:38ever since.
29:39Which is
29:40in its way
29:41the most American
29:42part of the story.
29:44I am not going
29:45to tell you
29:45how to feel
29:46about that
29:46but I want
29:47you to see
29:48the numbers
29:48around it
29:49because they
29:50are the argument.
29:52More than
29:5221,000
29:53American soldiers
29:54were convicted
29:55of desertion
29:56in the Second World War.
29:58Forty-nine of them
29:59were sentenced
29:59to death.
30:01One
30:01was executed.
30:03In the entire war
30:04in every theater
30:06the United States
30:07military
30:07put 102
30:09of its own men
30:10to death
30:11and all the others
30:12were for murder
30:13or rape.
30:15Now the other column.
30:16German military courts
30:18handed down
30:18at least 25,000
30:20death sentences.
30:21Researchers who have
30:23worked through
30:23the surviving records
30:24put the number
30:25executed for desertion
30:26alone
30:26somewhere between
30:2815,000 and 18,000 men.
30:30The Western allies
30:32together
30:32over the same years
30:34executed about 300.
30:36And if you want to know
30:37how deep that ran
30:38here is the last one.
30:40On the 13th of May
30:421945
30:43a German military court
30:46sat inside
30:46a prisoner enclosure
30:47in Amsterdam
30:48and sentenced
30:49two German sailors
30:51to death
30:51for desertion.
30:53A German firing squad
30:54shot them
30:55the same afternoon.
30:57Germany had surrendered
30:59five days earlier.
31:00There was no Reich
31:01left to desert from
31:03and the system
31:04executed them anyway
31:05because the system
31:07was not really
31:07about winning the war.
31:08It was about the wall.
31:11So both armies
31:12drew a line.
31:13That is the honest
31:14way to put it.
31:16The difference
31:16is where.
31:18The American line
31:19was drawn
31:19at refusing to fight.
31:21Everything short of that
31:22every complaint
31:24every cartoon
31:25every corporal
31:26telling a captain
31:27he had the map
31:28upside down
31:29was allowed
31:30and some of it
31:31was protected by law.
31:33The German line
31:35was drawn
31:35at the disagreement
31:36itself.
31:37And look at
31:39what each line
31:39cost in process.
31:42Eddie Slovik
31:42got a trial
31:43defense counsel
31:45a review chain
31:46and 81 days
31:48and in the end
31:49it took the signature
31:50of the supreme
31:51allied commander
31:52in the middle
31:53of the largest battle
31:54the American army
31:55had ever fought.
31:57Johannes Kunze
31:58got one evening
32:00in a mess hall
32:01in Oklahoma.
32:02By the spring
32:03of 1945
32:04the Ardennes gamble
32:06had failed
32:06and the German officers
32:08who made it
32:09were in captivity.
32:11And then
32:11the United States army
32:13did something
32:13almost no victorious army
32:15has ever done.
32:17It put those officers
32:18on the payroll
32:19and asked them
32:20to explain
32:21in writing
32:22how they had been beaten.
32:25More than 2,000 reports
32:26came back.
32:28What those men wrote
32:29about American sergeants
32:31is not what they
32:32had been saying
32:32in 1943.
32:34July 1944
32:36The War Department
32:37Washington
32:39By that summer
32:40the United States
32:41had a problem
32:41inside its own country
32:43that it had spent
32:43a year and a half
32:44refusing to look at.
32:46Here are the figures
32:47and I want you to listen
32:48to them carefully
32:49because they cover
32:50seven months.
32:52Between September
32:53of 1943
32:54and April of 1944
32:56inside American
32:58prisoner of war camps
32:59there were six murders
33:01two forced suicides
33:0443 more deaths
33:06recorded as voluntary suicides
33:08a general camp riot
33:10and hundreds
33:12of separate acts
33:13of violence.
33:15That is the German army
33:16still running
33:17on American soil
33:18killing Germans.
33:20And the reason it could
33:22was the arrangement
33:23I described earlier.
33:24The Americans
33:25had handed the compounds
33:27to the prisoners
33:27own chain of command
33:29because it saved guards
33:30and the men
33:32who took that chain
33:32of command
33:33were the hardest
33:34core of the Africa Corps.
33:36The United States
33:36had, without meaning to
33:39subcontracted discipline
33:40to the people
33:41whose entire
33:42theory of discipline
33:43was the thing
33:44this war was about.
33:45So watch how
33:46that gets fixed
33:47because it is
33:48the same machine
33:49we have been looking
33:50at all along
33:51only this time
33:52it is running
33:53inside the United States
33:54and the people
33:55pushing on it
33:56are not soldiers
33:57at all.
33:58Remember Captain
33:59Felix Tropschuh
34:00the German officer
34:01at Camp Concordia
34:02in Kansas
34:03who asked the Americans
34:04for protection
34:05was sent back
34:06to his barracks
34:07and was dead
34:08by 11 that night?
34:09That case
34:10did not stay quiet.
34:12Two American
34:13newspaper columnists
34:14took it to
34:14Eleanor Roosevelt.
34:15From there
34:16it went into
34:17the War Department
34:18and Camp Concordia
34:19became the first
34:20place in the country
34:21where the army
34:22tried a different
34:23approach to the men
34:24behind its wire.
34:25In July of 1944
34:27the War Department
34:29admitted,
34:30in policy,
34:31that it had got
34:32this wrong.
34:33It began pulling
34:34the hard cases out.
34:35The committed Nazis,
34:37the SS men,
34:38the Gestapo people,
34:39the organizers,
34:40went to a maximum
34:41security camp
34:43at Alva, Oklahoma
34:44which the other
34:45prisoners called
34:46the Nazi Lager,
34:47the Nazi camp.
34:49Prisoners identified
34:50as anti-Nazi
34:52went the other way
34:52to Fort Devens
34:53in Massachusetts.
34:55The wire stopped
34:56being one thing
34:57and became
34:58a sorting machine.
34:59Look at the shape
35:00of that.
35:01A German captain
35:02is murdered in Kansas.
35:04Journalists pick it up.
35:05It reaches
35:06the president's wife.
35:07It reaches
35:08the War Department.
35:10Policy changes
35:11across 700 camps.
35:13Nobody in that chain
35:14was in the chain
35:15of command.
35:16The complaint came
35:17from outside
35:18the army entirely
35:19and the army
35:20moved anyway.
35:21And I want to be fair
35:22about the timing
35:23because it took
35:24too long.
35:25Tropschuh died
35:26in October of 1943.
35:28The policy did not
35:29change until July
35:31of 1944.
35:33Nine months
35:33and men died
35:35inside American wire
35:36in those nine months.
35:37Slow again.
35:39Slow.
35:40And then it moved.
35:41Now ask the question
35:43the other way.
35:44What was the German
35:45equivalent?
35:46What happened
35:47when a German soldier
35:48saw something wrong
35:49and needed it
35:49to reach the top?
35:51There wasn't one.
35:53Not because Germans
35:54were stupid
35:54and not because
35:55German officers
35:56were all fanatics
35:57because they were not.
35:58Because the structure
35:59had no wire for it.
36:02Information that made
36:03a superior look bad
36:04had nowhere to go
36:05that was not also dangerous
36:06to the man carrying it.
36:08A field marshal
36:09who told Berlin
36:10the truth about Normandy
36:11was gone in 48 hours.
36:14Multiply that
36:14by every rank
36:15all the way down
36:16to the corporal
36:17who can see
36:17that the position
36:18is wrong
36:18and you have an army
36:19that can only learn
36:20at the speed
36:21of its worst commander's
36:22willingness to be corrected.
36:24And here,
36:25finally,
36:26is the answer
36:26to the thing
36:27the prisoners
36:27could not work out
36:28and it has almost
36:29nothing to do
36:30with courage
36:31or equipment.
36:32An army is not only
36:33a machine
36:34for delivering force.
36:35It is a machine
36:36for finding out
36:37that it is wrong.
36:38Every army in that war
36:39was wrong constantly.
36:41About the ground,
36:42the enemy,
36:43the weather,
36:44the plan.
36:45The only question
36:46that ever mattered
36:47was how many hours
36:48it took for being wrong
36:49to reach somebody
36:51who could change it.
36:52The arguing
36:53was the wiring.
36:54That is all it ever was.
36:56A private
36:57who can contradict
36:58a lieutenant
36:58is a censor.
37:00A newspaper
37:01that prints complaints
37:02is a cable.
37:03A statute
37:04that lets a soldier
37:05accuse his commander
37:06is a circuit breaker.
37:09Fourteen days
37:10from Kasserine
37:10to the relief
37:11of a corps commander
37:12is that system's
37:13reaction time,
37:14measured.
37:15The men waiting tables
37:17in the officers' clubs
37:18were looking straight
37:19at the nervous system
37:20of the army
37:20that was going
37:21to beat them.
37:22And they read it
37:24as bad manners.
37:26After the surrender,
37:27the United States Army
37:28went looking
37:28for the other side
37:29of that.
37:30Beginning in 1945,
37:32it hired captured
37:33German officers,
37:34generals,
37:35staff officers,
37:36corps commanders,
37:37and paid them
37:38to write down
37:39how the war
37:39had looked
37:40from their side.
37:41That program ran
37:42for 16 years
37:43and produced
37:44more than 2,000 studies.
37:46Think about
37:47the confidence
37:47that takes.
37:48The winner sat down
37:49and asked the loser,
37:51in detail,
37:52on the record,
37:53what he had actually seen.
37:55And again and again,
37:57in those studies
37:58and in the memoirs
37:59that followed them,
38:00the thing German commanders
38:01came back to
38:02was not American tanks
38:04and it was not
38:05American aircraft.
38:06It was the American
38:07junior leader.
38:09The sergeant
38:10and the lieutenant
38:11who did not wait.
38:12The unit that kept working
38:14after the man in charge
38:15of it was hit.
38:17They had spent the war
38:18running into a problem
38:19they could not name,
38:20and the name
38:21was the thing
38:22they had watched
38:23in the mess halls
38:23and dismissed.
38:25But the sharpest verdict
38:26on the American way
38:27of running an army
38:28did not come from a general.
38:30It came from a group
38:31of German enlisted men
38:32and junior officers
38:34who were quietly
38:35pulled out of the camps
38:36in 1945,
38:38moved to a fort
38:39on the Rhode Island coast
38:41that did not appear
38:42on any list,
38:43and handed something
38:44no prisoner of war
38:45had ever been handed,
38:47a printing press,
38:49and the freedom
38:50to write whatever
38:51they wanted with it.
38:52February 27, 1945,
38:55Fort Kearney
38:56on the coast of Rhode Island
38:57at Narragansett.
38:58The army took
38:59a small coastal post
39:01and quietly handed it
39:02to a unit called
39:03the Special Projects Division.
39:05The men who ran it
39:06were not typical soldiers.
39:08The chief was
39:09Lieutenant Colonel
39:10Edward Davison,
39:11born in Scotland,
39:12a published poet,
39:13a professor
39:14from the University of Colorado.
39:16His assistant
39:17was Major Maxwell McKnight.
39:19The camp commander
39:20was Captain Robert Kunzig.
39:22Inside the army,
39:24the whole operation
39:24went by a nickname,
39:26the Idea Factory.
39:27Then just
39:28the Factory.
39:30About 85 German prisoners
39:32were pulled out of camps
39:33around the country
39:34and brought there.
39:35They had been screened,
39:37interviewed,
39:37and tested,
39:38and they had one thing
39:39in common.
39:40They were writers,
39:41professors,
39:42artists,
39:43editors,
39:43and they were not Nazis.
39:45Among them was
39:46Alfred Anders,
39:47who before the war
39:48had been arrested
39:49and sent to Dachau.
39:51Hans-Werner Richter,
39:52taken prisoner in Italy
39:53in 1943.
39:54Gustav Hacke,
39:56a novelist and correspondent,
39:58who became the first editor.
40:00Franz Wiesniewski,
40:0224 years old,
40:03an artist
40:04and a junior officer.
40:06A man named
40:07Imfried Willemsig,
40:09who before the war
40:10had been a ballet dancer.
40:12Kunzig,
40:13running the camp,
40:14did something
40:15no German commandant
40:16would have permitted.
40:17He let the discipline
40:19go slack.
40:20His own words,
40:22years later.
40:23We had almost
40:24no problems at Kearney,
40:26he said.
40:26Once in a while,
40:28we would have to
40:28sort of jack them up
40:29and make sure
40:30they kept their beds neat,
40:31try to keep it very
40:32military and correct.
40:35And the prisoners
40:36at Fort Kearney
40:37sat and argued
40:38about politics
40:39and literature
40:39and what Germany
40:41was going to be,
40:42not only with each other,
40:44but with the American
40:45officers running the place.
40:47Then the army
40:48gave them a newspaper.
40:49It was called
40:50Der Ruf.
40:52The Call.
40:53Written in German,
40:54edited by German
40:55prisoners of war,
40:56printed in the United States
40:58and shipped out
40:59to the camps.
41:00The first issue
41:00went out
41:01on the 6th of March,
41:021945.
41:0311,000 copies
41:05into 134 camp canteens,
41:085 cents each.
41:10Now here is where
41:12it gets interesting.
41:13And this is the part
41:14that tells you
41:14the Americans meant it.
41:16The prisoners
41:17did not use that paper
41:19to thank anybody.
41:20they used it
41:21to argue
41:22with the United States.
41:24When American policy
41:25pushed the idea
41:26that the German people
41:28as a whole
41:28carried the guilt
41:29for what had been done,
41:31the men at Fort Kearney
41:32rejected it in print.
41:34They put the responsibility
41:36on Hitler
41:36and the men around him
41:38and said so
41:39in a newspaper
41:40produced under
41:41American army supervision.
41:43And the Americans
41:44printed it
41:44and shipped it
41:45to 134 camps.
41:48Read that again
41:49if you need to.
41:51The United States
41:52handed its prisoners
41:53a press
41:54and when they used it
41:55to contradict
41:56American policy,
41:57the press kept running.
41:59The prisoners bought it.
42:01By the 15th issue
42:03in October of 1945,
42:05the print run
42:05was 75,000 copies
42:08and more than 73,000
42:10of them sold.
42:11It was not funded
42:12by the American taxpayer.
42:14It made a small profit.
42:16One prisoner wrote in
42:17and said what he liked most
42:18was the truth in it
42:19even when the truth
42:20was bitter
42:21and that the eyes of many
42:22had now been opened.
42:25Think about who was doing
42:26the arguing
42:26in that newspaper.
42:28Men who two years earlier
42:30had been inside a system
42:31where the wrong sentence
42:32out loud could kill you.
42:34They had watched
42:35Americans do it
42:36and then they did it themselves
42:38on paper
42:39in the enemy's country
42:41and nothing happened
42:43to them.
42:44And it was not only
42:45the men at the factory.
42:46A sergeant named
42:48Reinhold Pable
42:49later wrote a book
42:50about his years
42:50in American captivity.
42:52The thing that stayed
42:53with him
42:53was not the food
42:54or the baseball
42:55or the pay.
42:57It was that Americans
42:58could say and read
42:59whatever they wanted.
43:01He had come out
43:01of a country
43:02where that sentence
43:03was not possible
43:04and he found it
43:05in a prison camp.
43:06I want to be careful here
43:08because it is easy
43:09to oversell this.
43:11A survey of some
43:1222,000 repatriated prisoners
43:14reported that about
43:1574% went home
43:16with an appreciation
43:17of democracy
43:18and a friendly attitude
43:19toward the men
43:20who had held them
43:20and about 10%
43:22were still committed Nazis.
43:24Other studies
43:25of the same program
43:26found much less change
43:27than that.
43:28Historians still disagree
43:29about how deep it went.
43:31But you do not have
43:32to settle that argument
43:33to see the point
43:34because the proof
43:35is not in the percentages.
43:37The proof
43:38is that the argument
43:39existed at all
43:40and it did not stop
43:42when the shooting did.
43:43In the spring of 1946,
43:45the War Department
43:46put a board together
43:47under Lieutenant General
43:48James Doolittle,
43:49the man who had led
43:50the raid on Tokyo,
43:52and gave it one job.
43:54Find out what enlisted men
43:55actually thought
43:56about their officers.
43:57The board sat
43:58through 38 hearings
44:00between the 28th of March
44:02and the 4th of April,
44:03heard 42 witnesses,
44:05and read more than
44:061,460 letters
44:08from soldiers.
44:10The letters said
44:12what the Germans
44:12had heard
44:13in the mess halls.
44:15Privilege,
44:16caste,
44:17officers who abused
44:19the men under them.
44:20And the United States Army,
44:23having just won
44:24the largest war
44:25in human history,
44:26took those letters
44:27seriously enough
44:28to change its own rules.
44:31Enlisted men
44:32would sit
44:33on courts-martial.
44:35Incompetence
44:36removed quickly.
44:37So the argument
44:39the German prisoners
44:40had diagnosed
44:41as a fatal weakness
44:42turned out to be
44:43the one part
44:44of the American army
44:45that never
44:46stopped working.
44:48And there is
44:49one thing left
44:50to settle.
44:51At the start of this,
44:52I asked you to hold
44:53on to a picture.
44:54A railway station
44:55in Alabama
44:56on the 2nd of June,
44:581943.
45:00A crowd of
45:01American civilians
45:03coffee and sandwiches
45:04handed to men
45:05who had been
45:05killing their sons.
45:07I told you
45:08it would mean
45:09something different
45:09by the end.
45:11It does.
45:12And it has to do
45:13with what two of the men
45:14from that printing press
45:15did when they got home.
45:17The 2nd of June,
45:181943.
45:19Aliceville, Alabama.
45:21500 men
45:22off a train
45:23and a town
45:23standing along the road
45:24to look at them.
45:26I said we would
45:27come back to the coffee
45:28and the sandwiches
45:28and here is what
45:30I think they were.
45:31Nobody ordered that.
45:33There was no directive
45:34from Washington
45:35telling the people
45:35of Pickens County, Alabama
45:37how to behave
45:38toward the men
45:38who had been shooting
45:39at their sons.
45:41They decided it themselves
45:42at a railway station
45:44in about 10 minutes.
45:45That is the same fact
45:47as the corporal
45:48contradicting the captain.
45:49It is the same fact
45:51as the sergeant
45:51drawing his general
45:52as a fool
45:53and keeping his job.
45:55A country
45:56where ordinary people
45:57are expected
45:57to decide things
45:59produces an army
46:00where ordinary soldiers
46:01are expected
46:02to decide things
46:03and both of those
46:04look like disorder
46:05from the outside.
46:06Right up until the moment
46:08they are the only thing
46:09holding.
46:11The camps emptied.
46:12Aliceville shut down
46:14on the 30th of September,
46:151945.
46:16By 1946,
46:18every one
46:19of those 425,000 men
46:22was gone.
46:23Back to a Germany
46:24most of them
46:25barely recognized,
46:26carrying whatever
46:27they had decided
46:28America was.
46:30And somewhere
46:31in that 425,000
46:33were the men
46:34who had stood
46:35with trays
46:36in American officers' clubs,
46:38watching corporals
46:39contradict captains,
46:40taking it down
46:41as evidence
46:42of a rotten army.
46:44Some of them
46:45went home
46:46and spent the rest
46:46of their lives
46:47trying to build
46:48a country
46:49where a man
46:49could do that.
46:51Here is what became
46:52of the people
46:53in this story.
46:55Alfred Anders
46:56and Hans-Werner Victor
46:57went home
46:58to a country
46:59with nothing
46:59left standing.
47:01And the first thing
47:02they did
47:02was start a newspaper.
47:04They called it
47:06Der Huf,
47:06the same name
47:07as the one
47:08they had run
47:09behind American Wire.
47:10And after 15 issues,
47:12the American
47:13occupation authorities
47:14shut it down
47:15because the two of them
47:16had turned the habit
47:18they learned
47:18in Rhode Island
47:19on the United States.
47:21I am not going
47:22to smooth that over.
47:23The Americans
47:24did not always
47:25live up to
47:26their own machine.
47:27But the habit
47:28outlived the censorship.
47:30In 1947,
47:32those same two men
47:33gathered a circle
47:34of German writers
47:34that became known
47:35as Group 47.
47:37And for the next
47:3820 years,
47:39that circle
47:40was the center
47:41of gravity
47:42of German literature.
47:43It was built
47:44by men who learned
47:45how to disagree
47:46in public
47:47in a prisoner of war
47:48camp in the United States.
47:50Johannes Kuntz,
47:52the private
47:52who said out loud
47:54that Germany
47:54was going to lose,
47:56lies in the German cemetery
47:57at Fort Reno, Oklahoma.
48:00The men who killed him
48:01are buried
48:02at Fort Leavenworth.
48:03He was right
48:04about the war
48:05and it cost him
48:06his life.
48:07And the country
48:08that buried him
48:09is the one
48:10that made sure
48:10it was answered for.
48:13Eddie Slovik
48:13was buried in France
48:15in the plot
48:16reserved for
48:16executed American soldiers.
48:19His wife,
48:20Antoinette,
48:20spent the rest
48:21of her life
48:21asking for him back
48:23and died in 1979
48:25without getting him.
48:27Then,
48:27a county commissioner
48:28in Michigan
48:28named Bernard Kalka
48:30took it up,
48:30raised $8,000 himself
48:32and in 1987
48:33brought Eddie Slovik
48:34home to Woodmere Cemetery
48:36in Detroit
48:36to the grave
48:37next to his wife.
48:39The argument
48:40over that case
48:41has never closed.
48:42It is not supposed to.
48:45George Patton
48:46who lost the argument
48:47about the cartoons
48:47died in December
48:49of 1945
48:50after a road accident
48:51in Germany.
48:53Eisenhower
48:53who overruled him
48:55ended up president.
48:57And Lloyd Friedendahl
48:58the general
48:59pulled out of Tunisia
49:00in 14 days
49:01was sent home
49:02promoted to
49:03lieutenant general
49:04and spent the rest
49:06of the war
49:06training American soldiers
49:07in the United States.
49:09Even the man
49:10the system removed
49:11was not thrown away.
49:13He was moved
49:14to where he could
49:14do some good.
49:16And Bill Malden
49:17the sergeant
49:18who told a four-star
49:19general to his face
49:20that Willie and Joe
49:21were staying
49:22went on drawing
49:23for the rest of his life
49:24and won a second
49:26Pulitzer Prize
49:26in 1959.
49:28In 2002
49:29he was in a nursing home
49:31in Newport Beach,
49:31California
49:32with Alzheimer's disease.
49:34A newspaper columnist
49:35mentioned it.
49:36And the men
49:37who had been
49:37Willie and Joe
49:38the ones still alive
49:39sent more than
49:4110,000 cards and letters
49:42to his bedside.
49:44Some of them
49:45did not write.
49:46They drove there
49:47and sat with him
49:48so he would not
49:49be by himself
49:50the way he had not
49:51left them by themselves
49:52in Italy and France
49:5360 years before.
49:56He died on the 22nd
49:57of January,
49:582003
49:59at 81.
50:01200 men
50:02in an Oklahoma mess hall
50:04answered the question
50:05of what to do
50:06with a man
50:06who disagrees
50:07with their fists
50:09in one evening.
50:11It took the United States
50:1320 months,
50:14a courtroom,
50:15and a reviewing
50:16authority's signature
50:17to answer it back.
50:19The slow way won.
50:21The Germans
50:22in those mess halls
50:23were not wrong
50:24about what they saw.
50:25They were wrong
50:26about what it meant.
50:28They watched
50:28American privates
50:29argue with their officers
50:31and called it
50:32an army coming apart.
50:33It was an army
50:34finding out
50:35it was wrong
50:35faster than anyone
50:37could take advantage of it.
50:38That was the whole secret.
50:40It was carried past them
50:41on a tray
50:42every evening
50:42for two years
50:43and it was
50:44the American private
50:45arguing with his lieutenant
50:47who was holding it.
50:49Thank you for staying
50:50with this one to the end.
50:51If it was worth your time,
50:53a like helps it reach
50:54the people
50:54who would want to see it.
50:55And if you subscribe
50:56and turn on the bell,
50:57you will know
50:58when the next one is up.
51:00Tell me in the comments
51:01what country
51:01you are watching from.
51:03And if your father,
51:04your grandfather,
51:05or your uncle
51:06served in the Second World War,
51:07tell me his name
51:09and his unit.
51:10The American soldier
51:11in this story
51:12spent the whole war
51:13being underestimated
51:14by people
51:15who were looking
51:15right at him.
51:16The men in your family
51:18were not imaginary either
51:19and their names
51:21belong somewhere
51:22people will read them.