- 9 minutes ago
German forces spent precious ammunition trying to silence American voices. This World War II military history story reveals how loudspeaker crews, German-language radio broadcasts featuring Glenn Miller, and safe-conduct leaflets challenged the Wehrmacht’s grip on its soldiers.
From the dangerous speaker truck near Saint-Lô to Lieutenant Arthur Hadley’s loudspeaker-equipped tank, the story follows a psychological warfare campaign that ultimately helped secure thousands of German surrenders. Its key was a promise repeated at the front: prisoners would be treated according to the Geneva Conventions. A detailed historical documentary about propaganda, trust, and the human cost of war.
From the dangerous speaker truck near Saint-Lô to Lieutenant Arthur Hadley’s loudspeaker-equipped tank, the story follows a psychological warfare campaign that ultimately helped secure thousands of German surrenders. Its key was a promise repeated at the front: prisoners would be treated according to the Geneva Conventions. A detailed historical documentary about propaganda, trust, and the human cost of war.
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LearningTranscript
00:00July 15th, 1944. The hedgerow country outside St. Lowe, Normandy.
00:06On the German side of a hedgerow, paratroopers are dug into the earth bank,
00:10the way they have been dug in for weeks. By now, they know every sound this war makes.
00:16The crack of a rifle. The tearing noise of an American machine gun.
00:20The short whisper a mortar round makes in the last second before it lands.
00:25This time, they hear a sound they do not know.
00:27A human voice. Huge. Speaking German.
00:33Coming from the American side of the field, less than 50 yards away.
00:38The paratroopers do what soldiers do with something they do not understand.
00:42They shoot at it. Rifle and machine gun fire rakes the American vehicle the voice is coming from.
00:49The rounds keep hitting it. And the voice keeps talking.
00:53That is the part worth holding onto.
00:56Nobody in that vehicle is shooting back.
00:59The men operating it are not there to kill anyone.
01:02Their job is to keep talking while they are being shot at.
01:05At a range where a decent German rifleman does not need a scope.
01:09Their equipment is not impressive.
01:11Their own company records complain about it.
01:13The set puts out 25 watts.
01:16That is less power than the bulb in a kitchen lamp.
01:19To be heard at all, the crew has to drive into the killing range of the men they are talking
01:24to.
01:25Then something happens that the German officers on that stretch of line have been working for weeks to prevent.
01:3218 German paratroopers climb out of their holes and walk toward the Americans.
01:37Not a battalion.
01:39Not a company.
01:4118 men.
01:42But these were paratroopers.
01:44Some of the hardest troops Germany had in Normandy.
01:47Men who had been holding the ground around St. Lowe against everything the American First Army could throw at them.
01:54And they walked out because of a voice.
01:57An American infantryman who had watched the whole thing and who had not believed in the idea for a second
02:03said out loud what a lot of G.I.s were thinking.
02:07I guess I was wrong, he said.
02:09Why the hell don't you guys bring that thing up here all the time?
02:14Keep that question in your head.
02:16Because the German army was asking a version of it too.
02:19And its answer was the opposite of his.
02:23If you want to see how the U.S. Army turned a 25-watt speaker into a weapon, hit like
02:28and subscribe.
02:30It helps this story find the people who want to hear it.
02:33Here is the strange thing about the next 10 months.
02:37Wherever those American voices appeared, German fire followed.
02:41It happened so often that the people who later studied these operations wrote that the loudspeaker vehicles became magnets for
02:49enemy fire.
02:50Direct and indirect.
02:52Rifles and machine guns, which you would expect from men who could see the truck.
02:57But also mortars.
02:59Rockets.
03:00Artillery.
03:02Now stop and think about what that means.
03:04A mortar round does not land on a loudspeaker by accident.
03:08Somebody on the German side had to hear it.
03:10Had to pick up a field telephone.
03:12And had to ask for fire on it.
03:14So picture that German soldier's position.
03:18American artillery had been killing his friends since June.
03:21His own side never had enough shells.
03:24And yet, here was a target it considered worth spending those shells on.
03:29Not a tank.
03:30Not a gun battery.
03:32Not an observation post.
03:33A man with a microphone.
03:37Why?
03:38That is the question this whole story turns on.
03:41Why would an army that was running short of nearly everything spend its ammunition on a voice?
03:47And why, by the spring of 1945, would one American lieutenant with a speaker bolted to the turret of a
03:54light tank bring in something like 5,000 German prisoners in a matter of weeks?
04:00To answer that, you first have to know who was holding the microphone.
04:05The men of the mobile radio broadcasting companies were not typical GIs.
04:10Many had been born in Europe.
04:12Many had fled it.
04:13They spoke German because it had been their first language.
04:16And they had gone through special training camps in Maryland and Pennsylvania before being shipped to France.
04:22One of them was Stefan Heim.
04:25Born in Chemnitz, Germany, he had been editing an anti-Nazi German-language newspaper in New York before the war.
04:32He came ashore in Normandy as an American sergeant about ten days after D-Day.
04:37And his job was to write the words that would be spoken into German ears.
04:42Think about what that job asked of a man.
04:44He had escaped the Third Reich.
04:47Now he was writing for crews who would lie 50 yards from its soldiers and talk to them in their
04:53own language.
04:54The routine these teams worked out had a strange courtesy to it.
04:58Before a single word went across to the Germans, the operator warned his own side first.
05:05Attention, attention, all American soldiers.
05:08You will now hear a broadcast in the German language addressed to the enemy, asking them to surrender.
05:13One man who studied these operations after the war called it hog-calling.
05:18Then came the German.
05:21Rarely more than 90 seconds of it.
05:23And it usually promised the listener nothing but facts.
05:26And the infantry around those teams often did not want them there.
05:30The company's own history admits that even supporting infantry units were hesitant about exposing the crews to the danger.
05:37There was a second reason nobody needed to write down.
05:41When the truck started talking, the fire that came back did not only land on the truck.
05:46It landed on every American dug-in around it.
05:50Here is a detail most people have never heard.
05:53On the sixth day after D-Day, American gunners fired their first shells packed with paper instead of explosive.
06:00Six rounds of leaflets.
06:02Six German prisoners walked in.
06:05By the end of June, the 1st Army had fired some 900 of those rounds.
06:10Somebody in the American Army had worked out very early that a German soldier could be reached with something other
06:16than steel.
06:16But the loudspeaker was still a hard sell.
06:19Most commanders saw it as a gimmick that drew fire.
06:22Some days it worked, the way it worked outside St. Lowe.
06:26Plenty of days, it did not work at all.
06:29Remember that 25-watt set?
06:31Because it tells you where this story started.
06:33By the time it ends, the American voice will be coming out of the turret of a tank.
06:38And the German side will no longer be dealing with a truck it can shoot at.
06:43Before the speakers got bigger, though, the Americans tried something else.
06:47Something that did not need to get within 50 yards of anybody.
06:51That autumn, in a recording studio in London, an American major in uniform would stand in front of a microphone
06:58holding a script written out phonetically in a language he did not speak.
07:03The German army could drop mortar rounds on a truck in a Normandy field.
07:07What that major was about to send across the front line could not be hit with anything at all.
07:13October 30, 1944. Studio One, Abbey Road, London.
07:18Glenn Miller is standing at a microphone in the uniform of a major in the United States Army Air Forces.
07:24He is 40 years old.
07:25He has one of the most famous dance bands in the world behind him.
07:30And in his hands is a script he cannot read.
07:33It is written in German.
07:35Not proper German, though.
07:38Somebody has spelled it out phonetically, sound by sound, so that a band leader born in Iowa can say words
07:45he does not understand to men he will never meet.
07:49Next to him is a woman the program calls Ilsa.
07:52That was not her real name.
07:54At least one of the women who spoke as Ilsa was an American broadcaster named Gloria Wagner.
08:00And more than one woman on the German desk used the name.
08:04Her job was to chat with Miller on the air, in fluent German, as if they were old friends.
08:10The audience for this recording is not in London.
08:13It is not in America.
08:15It is in foxholes, bunkers, and cellars on the other side of the front line.
08:20The program's name tells you exactly who it is for.
08:23Music for the Wehrmacht.
08:26Between now and November 20th, the band will record six of these shows.
08:31Johnny Desmond, the singer the troops called the G.I. Sinatra, will stand at this same microphone and sing one
08:37of the band's popular songs, My Heart Tells Me, in German.
08:42Stop for a moment and consider how strange that is.
08:45On October 12th, 1935, the man running German radio had announced a definitive ban on jazz across every German station.
08:54For nine years, the Nazi state had kept this kind of music off the air.
09:00Now, the United States Army was going to put it straight into the ears of German soldiers,
09:05with one of America's most famous band leaders introducing it himself.
09:10Why go to all this trouble?
09:12To understand that, you have to go back to Normandy.
09:16To a sunken road.
09:18Victor Brombert was 19 when the army trained him to question Germans.
09:23The son of Russian émigrés who had raised him in Paris,
09:26he spoke German well enough that he and one other man from his team were sent out on a special
09:31mission, more than once.
09:33They crawled down a sunken road, past German helmets lying in the mud with holes through them, toward the German
09:40line.
09:41Then they talked through a loudspeaker, coaxing, encouraging,
09:46telling the men on the other side that surrender was a way out.
09:50The Germans answered every time.
09:53Not with words.
09:54With mortar rounds, and with rockets from the multiple launchers the G.I.s called
09:59Screaming Mimis, coming down on the place the voice had come from.
10:05And here is the part Brombert never dressed up.
10:08Not a single German surrendered on those occasions.
10:12He wrote, many years later, that it humbled them about the effectiveness of their rhetoric.
10:18Put that next to Saint-Lô.
10:21One day, 18 paratroopers walked out.
10:24On other days, the only answer was rockets.
10:28So what made the difference?
10:30That is one of the pieces of this puzzle, so hold on to it.
10:34A loudspeaker at the front had one weakness nobody could engineer away.
10:38It spoke to everybody at once.
10:41The private, who might have wanted to listen, was lying in the same hole as his sergeant.
10:46The sergeant was a few yards from his lieutenant.
10:49Every man in that position heard the same words at the same moment.
10:52And every man knew the others had heard them, too.
10:56And somewhere in that position, there was always a man with a field telephone.
11:01A radio was different.
11:03A German soldier could listen to a radio in a dugout at night, with the volume turned low.
11:08Alone, or with one or two men he trusted, nobody else had to know.
11:13He was breaking the law when he did it.
11:15From the first day of the war, September 1st, 1939, the Reich had made deliberately listening to foreign stations a
11:23crime.
11:24Men had gone to prison for it.
11:26Men who passed on what they had heard had been executed.
11:30So the Americans were not only offering music, they were offering it across a line the German state itself had
11:36drawn.
11:37Every soldier who tuned in had already made one small decision on his own.
11:42Against orders.
11:44Think about that.
11:45Before a word of persuasion reached him, he had already disobeyed once.
11:51And the program did not lecture him.
11:53The policy at the American broadcasting station in Europe was to play it straight.
11:58American popular music.
12:00American entertainers.
12:02Very little that sounded like propaganda at all.
12:06Bing Crosby sang on those German programs.
12:09So did Dinah Shore.
12:11So did Marlena Dietrich, the Berlin-born star who had taken American citizenship and now wore an American uniform.
12:19Only now and then did Miller step to the microphone and say something more.
12:23Pay close attention to this sentence because it will come back near the end of this story.
12:28And when it does, it will mean something very different.
12:31I hope the day will soon come when German soldiers will be able to return to their homes and families,
12:37to be happy and listen to whatever they may please, especially to the voice of America, the voice of freedom
12:44and liberty.
12:46Listen to what that sentence does not say.
12:49It does not say surrender.
12:51It does not say the war is lost.
12:54It talks about home, family, a man choosing for himself what he hears.
13:01The Germans tried to jam the signal.
13:03Research done after the war concluded that most of the broadcasts got through anyway.
13:08So by November of 1944, the United States was reaching the German soldier in two ways.
13:14A voice at 50 yards that could be shot at, and music in the dark that could not.
13:20But neither of them solved the real problem.
13:23A soldier in a foxhole does not surrender to a song.
13:27He surrenders to a man with a rifle, at one exact moment, with his hands in the air and his
13:34back to his own lines.
13:35On every front of this war, men were shot in that moment.
13:39Every soldier knew it.
13:41And no amount of swing music could promise him he would live through the next ten seconds.
13:47The Americans' answer to that fear was a small piece of paper with one man's signature on it.
13:53The German answer to that piece of paper did not aim at the soldier at all.
13:58It aimed at his family.
14:01October 10, 1944.
14:05Triererstrasse, on the southeastern edge of Aachen.
14:09Three American soldiers are walking toward the German lines in the open.
14:13First Lieutenant Cedric Lafley.
14:15First Lieutenant William Boehm.
14:17Private First Class Ken Kading.
14:20One of them is carrying a white flag.
14:23Another is carrying a sheet of paper.
14:26Aachen is the first major German city the Allies are about to take.
14:30It is nearly surrounded.
14:31The paper in the Americans' hands says so, in plain words.
14:35The city of Aachen is now completely surrounded by American forces.
14:39If it is not promptly and completely surrendered unconditionally, the American army's ground and air forces will proceed ruthlessly with
14:48air and artillery bombardment to reduce it to submission.
14:52The garrison has 24 hours.
14:55And the Americans did not trust one piece of paper to carry the message.
14:59The same terms went out over loudspeakers.
15:02They went out over Radio Luxembourg.
15:04They were packed into leaflet shells and fired into the city itself.
15:08Every man inside Aachen who wanted to know what was being offered could know it.
15:14Now look at what this moment really is.
15:17For the first time in this story, the choice in the title stops being a figure of speech.
15:23On one side, American words.
15:26On the other, American artillery.
15:29The Germans could have either one.
15:31They only had to choose.
15:33The German commander rejected the ultimatum.
15:36His orders, coming down from Hitler himself, were to fight for the city to the last.
15:42So the Americans kept their word.
15:46When the deadline ran out on October 11th, around 300 fighter bombers came in over Aachen and dropped more than
15:5360 tons of bombs.
15:56American guns fired 4,871 rounds into the city over two days.
16:03Hold that picture next to the loudspeaker truck at St. Lowe.
16:07The German army had chosen artillery again.
16:10Only this time, it was American artillery landing on German heads.
16:15Why would men choose that?
16:17Part of the answer was in the pockets of the German soldiers themselves.
16:22Since September, Allied aircraft had been dropping a small leaflet over the German lines.
16:27It was called a Pussiaschein, a safe conduct pass.
16:31It carried a printed signature, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Commander, and a promise in German and in English.
16:40The German soldier who carries this safe conduct is using it as a sign of his genuine wish to give
16:45himself up.
16:47He is to be disarmed, to be well looked after, to receive food and medical attention as required,
16:53and to be removed from the danger zone as soon as possible.
16:58The main version of that pass was printed in more than 67 million copies.
17:03More than 65 million were dropped.
17:06And here is the number worth remembering.
17:09An official report in October of 1944 found that 77% of German prisoners had read at least one Allied
17:17leaflet.
17:18On the Brest Peninsula, about 80% of prisoners had leaflets on them when they were taken.
17:22So the words were getting through.
17:25The German soldier knew what was being offered.
17:27He knew the Americans would honor it.
17:30Many of them were carrying the proof in their tunics.
17:34So why were so many still in their holes?
17:37Because the German army had understood something very early.
17:41It could not stop the pass from falling.
17:44It could not jam every broadcast or shoot every loudspeaker truck.
17:49What it could do was change what that piece of paper would cost.
17:54On August 2nd, 1944, an order went out from Hitler's headquarters down to the level of every division.
18:01All soldiers were to be thoroughly and repeatedly informed that any soldier who placed himself in the service of the
18:08enemy had forfeited his life and the life of his family.
18:13Then the commanders on the Western Front started asking for more.
18:16On September 26th, the general commanding the German corps defending Aachen, the very city those three Americans walked into, complained
18:24that shooting deserters was not enough of a deterrent.
18:26He asked for reprisals against their families, concentration camps, confiscation of property.
18:34Five weeks later, the commander-in-chief in the West, Field Marshal von Rundstedt, asked his subordinates to consider placing
18:41the relatives of deserters in concentration camps as well.
18:45On November 5th, the commander of Army Group G told his troops directly,
18:50If a man deserted or failed to do his duty, the arrest of his family was ordered.
18:57On November 19th, the high command in Berlin put its own name to the same threat.
19:03Stop and think about what those orders mean for our question.
19:07The German army was no longer arguing with the American voice.
19:10It had given up on winning the argument.
19:13Instead, it was trying to make sure every soldier who heard it would think of his mother first.
19:18Now go back to Aachen, October 21st, 1944.
19:23American infantry have fought their way through the city block by block,
19:27and they are closing on the bunker where the garrison's new commander, Colonel Gerhard Vilk, has his headquarters.
19:34The men who walk out of that bunker under a white flag are not German.
19:38They are two American engineers who had been captured,
19:42Staff Sergeant Ewert Padgett and Private First Class James Haswell.
19:47The Germans are sending American prisoners out to arrange their own surrender.
19:52At five minutes past noon, Brigadier General George Taylor accepts it.
19:57Around 1,600 German soldiers are taken in the city.
20:00Then, American interrogators sit down with Colonel Vilk.
20:04And what he tells them explains why Aachen burned.
20:08At first, he had refused to sign anything that used the word unconditional.
20:13When he finally broke down, he admitted he was no Nazi.
20:17He had been a close friend of Field Marshal von Witzeleben
20:20and of other officers from the July plot against Hitler.
20:23The interrogator wrote that he had acted as he did out of fear for his family.
20:27He believed, as definite knowledge, that the families of those officers had been executed.
20:33Keep that sentence in mind.
20:35A German colonel, a man who did not believe in the regime,
20:39held the city against the United States Army
20:42because of what he was sure had happened to other men's wives and children.
20:47That was the real enemy of the American voice.
20:50Not rifles. Not mortars.
20:52A picture inside a German soldier's head of what would happen at home.
20:57In February of 1945, American interrogators in the 7th Army
21:02questioned a German sergeant named Rooster.
21:05He had been captured with Eisenhower's pass in his pocket.
21:08He had never used it.
21:10What kept it in his pocket is one of the strangest facts in this whole story.
21:15Because the threat he feared was very real, on paper.
21:19Whether it was real anywhere else is a different question.
21:22February 15th, 1945.
21:25An interrogation cage of the American 7th Army in eastern France.
21:30The prisoner in front of the American interrogator is a German sergeant named Rooster.
21:35When he was searched, the men who took him found a folded piece of paper in his pocket.
21:40Eisenhower's safe conduct pass.
21:43He had carried it.
21:45He had never used it.
21:47The interrogator wanted to know why, and Rooster told him.
21:51The report puts it in one flat line.
21:54He had been deterred from using the pass by the thought of what might happen to his family.
21:59Rooster was not unusual.
22:01That same day, the intelligence staff of the 7th Army
22:05summed up what they were hearing from prisoners in general.
22:08Many of them, the report said, were seriously afraid of having their families suffer.
22:14Over the next weeks, the American interrogators kept building the picture.
22:18One prisoner told them he had stood in the room while his own commanding officer wrote a letter
22:23to the local Nazi party leader back home about two men who had deserted.
22:27The purpose of the letter, as the prisoner understood it, was that action could be taken against their families.
22:35On February 24th, another 7th Army report listed everything German units were now doing to keep men from walking across
22:42the line.
22:44Roll calls by the sergeants, barbed wire, pay books taken away so a man had no identity papers if he
22:51ran,
22:51and cases in which the families of deserters had been arrested, with the punishment made known to the men.
22:59Allied intelligence even got hold of a German army leaflet from early 1945.
23:04It announced that two deserters from the 980th Volksgrenadier Regiment had been punished,
23:10and it made a point of saying that retribution would also fall on both men's families.
23:16So here is the German soldier at the start of 1945.
23:20The American pass in his pocket.
23:22The American voice across the field.
23:25And in his head, a picture of his wife, or his mother, being taken away.
23:30Now here is the question almost nobody asks.
23:34How often did that actually happen?
23:37The honest answer surprised the historians who went looking.
23:40A historian named Robert Leffel went through what survives.
23:44One study of German military court records in the Austrian archives
23:48looked at a sample of 3,001 cases.
23:51Only 35 of them, about 1%, even possibly involved punishment of a soldier's family.
23:58In many of those, nobody can tell whether the punishment was ever carried out.
24:02And in the surviving Gestapo files of three German cities,
24:07Düsseldorf, Speyer, and Würzburg, not a single case of it turned up.
24:12It was not a pure bluff.
24:13Some families were arrested, above all the families of men from territories Germany had annexed,
24:19like Luxembourg and Alsace.
24:21But for an ordinary soldier from inside Germany,
24:23the thing he feared most was, far more often than not, a threat on paper.
24:30Now remember Colonel Wilk in his bunker in Aachen.
24:33He held that city because he was certain the family of his friend,
24:37Field Marshal von Witzleben, had been executed.
24:41Leffel found no sign that Witzleben's relatives had even been detained.
24:46The German regime itself knew the rumors had grown bigger than the reality.
24:51On December 14, 1944, the head of the Nazi security police, Ernst Kaltenbühne,
24:57sent out a memo trying to calm them down.
25:00He complained about bloodthirsty fantasies and rumors of children being liquidated
25:05and old women being exterminated.
25:07Ten days later, on Christmas Eve,
25:10a captured German major from the 17th Panzer Division
25:13was secretly recorded in a British prisoner-of-war camp.
25:17He had just heard that a relative of one of the July plotters was still alive.
25:22His reaction was pure surprise.
25:24Wasn't he killed?
25:26I thought all those families had been liquidated.
25:29Leffel's conclusion fits in one sentence.
25:32Terror in a modern state can rely as much on myth and rumor as on reality.
25:39Think about what that means for the American voice.
25:42It was not fighting a regiment.
25:44It was fighting a rumor.
25:46And you cannot shell a rumor.
25:49You cannot drop a leaflet that disproves it,
25:52because the man reading the leaflet assumes that's exactly what the enemy would say.
25:57A rumor like that loses to only one thing.
26:01What a man sees with his own eyes.
26:05Meanwhile, the music was still getting through.
26:08In February of 1945,
26:11a German war reporter noted something his superiors would not have wanted to read.
26:17Wehrmacht soldiers were still listening to Allied radio stations,
26:21and partly because they preferred the music the Allies were playing.
26:25Hundreds of German prisoners told Allied interrogators the same thing about Soldaten
26:29Zender West, a station run jointly by the American Office of Strategic Services and the British.
26:36The music, they said, was the main reason so many of them tuned in.
26:41But the man who had put his own name on music for the Wehrmacht was no longer there to hear
26:46any of it.
26:47On December 15, 1944,
26:51Glenn Miller climbed into a small, single-engine UC-64 Norseman
26:56at an airfield called Twinwood Farm, north of London.
27:00The weather was cold and foggy.
27:02The pilot was Flight Officer John Morgan.
27:05The only other passenger was Lieutenant Colonel Norman Basel.
27:10The aircraft took off toward France, flying low under the clouds, and was never seen again.
27:17The next morning, the German army attacked through the Ardennes.
27:22Three days later, Miller's band landed at Orly Airport outside Paris.
27:27He was not there to meet them.
27:29His sentence was still out there, somewhere in the dark over the German lines.
27:33German soldiers going home to their families and listening to whatever they may please.
27:39It could make a man want to go home.
27:42It could not get him out of his hole.
27:45So by early 1945, the United States had three ways to reach a German soldier.
27:51Music he could hear.
27:53Paper he could carry.
27:56A voice he could hear from 50 yards away.
28:00And against all three, the German side had a rumor and a field telephone to its guns.
28:06What the Americans still did not have was a way to prove the promise in the next 60 seconds,
28:12in front of a man's own eyes.
28:15A lieutenant who had gone into the army straight out of school in 1942 was about to find one.
28:21He did not ask anyone's permission.
28:24And his method put the choice in the title, words or artillery,
28:28straight into the German soldier's ear.
28:30March 27th, 1945.
28:33The 2nd Armored Division crosses the Rhine.
28:36In the next two weeks, its columns will run more than 200 miles across the heart of Germany,
28:41all the way to the Elbe.
28:43And somewhere in those columns, over those three weeks of fighting,
28:47is one American light tank that the division will later credit with something like 5,000 German prisoners.
28:54It does not look like much.
28:56A light tank, smaller than a Sherman.
28:58But look at the front of the turret.
29:00Bolted onto the forward slope,
29:02under a metal casing thick enough to stop light machine gun fire,
29:05there is a loudspeaker.
29:07Now look inside, because this is the detail worth remembering.
29:11To make room for the amplifiers,
29:13the crew had pulled out some of the tank's ammunition racks.
29:16The amplifiers were fastened to the bare steel,
29:19where shells used to sit.
29:21Think about that for a second.
29:22In a story about German soldiers choosing between American words and American artillery,
29:28here is an American tank that had literally traded some of its ammunition for words.
29:34The crew was small.
29:36A driver up front,
29:38an electrician in the assistant driver's seat,
29:40keeping the equipment alive,
29:41and in the turret,
29:43the man who did the talking,
29:45Sergeant Walter Freund.
29:47The officer who had put this machine together
29:50was First Lieutenant Arthur Hadley.
29:52He had enlisted at 18,
29:54straight out of school,
29:55in 1942,
29:56and he had served in tank destroyers
29:59before the army sent him into psychological warfare.
30:02By 1945,
30:04he was a liaison officer,
30:05and his proper place was at a corps headquarters,
30:08well behind the fighting.
30:11Hadley did not stay at corps headquarters.
30:13For about a week,
30:14he simply disappeared.
30:16His commanding officer,
30:18reasonably enough,
30:19assumed he had gone absent without leave,
30:22and filed charges against him.
30:23What Hadley had actually done
30:25was attach himself and his talking tank
30:27to the armored columns racing east.
30:30Whenever the tanks ran into resistance,
30:33they would send Hadley's tank up to the head of the column,
30:35and Sergeant Freund would start talking.
30:38Later,
30:39Hadley gave his explanation
30:40with a perfectly straight face.
30:43I just interpreted my orders to mean
30:45that I should do as much psychological warfare as possible.
30:48Now,
30:49you can't do much of that at corps headquarters,
30:51can you?
30:52Remember that line.
30:54Because the way Hadley broke his orders
30:56is exactly the reason the tank worked.
30:59Go back to what we learned in the last part.
31:02The German soldier's real fear
31:04was not the American rifle.
31:05It was a rumor.
31:07A picture of his family paying for what he did.
31:11And a rumor like that
31:12loses only to what a man can see for himself,
31:15right now,
31:16with his own eyes.
31:18A leaflet dropped from a plane could not do that.
31:21A radio station in London could not do that.
31:24A 25-watt truck that had to be pulled back
31:26the moment the mortars found it
31:28could not do it either.
31:30A tank,
31:31at the head of an armored column,
31:32could.
31:33Here is how Hadley described the method
31:36he and his sergeants worked out.
31:37Listen to the order of the three steps,
31:40because the order is the whole secret.
31:43We would first outline the German position.
31:46Then describe the weight of artillery and air power
31:48that was about to fall on them.
31:51Then end with assurances
31:52that those troops who surrendered
31:54would be well treated under the Geneva Conventions.
31:58Step 1.
31:59The voice tells the German soldier
32:01exactly where he is.
32:03Which hedge?
32:04Which farmhouse?
32:06Which crossroads?
32:07Think about how that lands in a foxhole.
32:10The Americans are not guessing.
32:12They can see you.
32:15Step 2.
32:16The voice tells him what is coming.
32:19Not in general,
32:21the weight of the artillery and aircraft
32:23that are about to fall on the ground
32:24he is lying on.
32:26And step 3.
32:28The way out.
32:29Do you see what just happened
32:30to the choice in our title?
32:32Up to now,
32:34the German side had always chosen artillery
32:36on its own terms,
32:37by picking up a field telephone
32:39and calling fire onto the American voice.
32:42Now the American voice
32:44was offering the choice itself,
32:46out loud,
32:47to every man in the position
32:48at the same moment.
32:50American artillery on your heads
32:52or
32:53American words
32:54and a way home.
32:56And this was not a bluff
32:58that could be called later.
32:59The column was right there.
33:01The guns were right behind it.
33:03When a broadcast failed,
33:05the attack went in
33:06and the Americans
33:07held back the final phase
33:09to broadcast one more time
33:10before mopping up.
33:12The Germans who stayed in their holes
33:14learned within minutes
33:15whether the voice
33:16had been telling the truth.
33:18Hadley understood that part
33:20better than almost anyone.
33:21Before he ever climbed
33:23into that tank,
33:24he had set up
33:25the artillery section
33:26of the 9th Army's
33:27Psychological Warfare Detachment,
33:29the men who fired
33:31leaflets from guns.
33:32His whole argument then
33:33was that the artillery
33:34had to fire those leaflets
33:36accurately
33:36at the exact German units
33:38they were written for.
33:40Headquarters gave him
33:41a formal commendation for it.
33:43He had learned early
33:44that words and shells
33:46worked best
33:47when they landed
33:47on the same spot.
33:49Now watch the method work.
33:52During the fight
33:53to break out
33:53through the Teutoburger Wald,
33:55the wooded ridges
33:56where the German army
33:57made one of its last stands
33:58in that part of Germany,
34:00an American infantry platoon
34:02was pinned to the ground
34:03by German automatic fire.
34:05Nobody could lift his head.
34:07Hadley's tank
34:08swung around the flank
34:09of the German position.
34:11It did not fire.
34:12It broadcast.
34:14The German fire stopped
34:15and the American riflemen
34:17who had been pressed
34:18into the dirt
34:19a few minutes before
34:20got up off the ground
34:22and accepted
34:23the German surrender.
34:25Just think about the men
34:26behind that German machine gun.
34:28A few minutes earlier,
34:29they were doing
34:30exactly what German soldiers
34:31had been doing
34:32to American loudspeakers
34:33since Normandy.
34:35Shooting.
34:37What changed
34:38was not their courage
34:39and not their weapons.
34:40What changed
34:41was that the voice
34:42now came from the same direction
34:43as the tanks.
34:45It knew where they were.
34:47It told them
34:48what was coming.
34:49And for once,
34:50the way out
34:51was in plain sight.
34:53Over the week
34:54of his unofficial absence,
34:56Hadley made more
34:56than 100 broadcasts.
34:58By his own estimate,
35:00only five of them
35:00brought in no prisoners at all.
35:03Five out of a hundred.
35:05Hold that number up
35:06against Victor Brombert
35:07in his sunken road
35:08in Normandy,
35:09where not a single German
35:11came out.
35:12Same language,
35:14same promise.
35:15Often the same
35:16Geneva Conventions.
35:18Something else
35:19had changed.
35:20Part of that change
35:22was simply the calendar.
35:23By April of 1945,
35:25the German army
35:26in the West
35:26was collapsing,
35:27and any honest account
35:29has to say so.
35:30But collapse alone
35:31does not explain
35:31a machine gun crew
35:32that stops shooting
35:33in the middle
35:34of a firefight.
35:36Something happened
35:36in those few minutes
35:37that the German threat
35:39against their families
35:40could not beat.
35:42And the most striking proof
35:43came at a town
35:44called Hildesheim.
35:46There,
35:47Hadley's voice
35:47did something
35:48no gun in the American army
35:50could have done.
35:51It saved a bridge
35:52from being blown.
35:54And it did it
35:55by talking to people
35:56who were not soldiers
35:57at all.
35:57March 22nd, 1945,
36:00Hildesheim
36:01in Lower Saxony.
36:03In the space
36:04of about 15 minutes,
36:06some 250 British
36:08and Canadian bombers
36:09drop more than
36:10a thousand tons
36:11of high-explosive
36:13and incendiaries
36:14on the old town.
36:15The cathedral goes.
36:17St. Michael's church goes.
36:19By the end
36:20of the raids
36:20that March,
36:21nearly three-quarters
36:22of the city's buildings
36:23have been destroyed
36:24or damaged
36:25and around 1,500 civilians
36:27are dead.
36:29Keep that picture
36:30in mind for a moment.
36:31That is what
36:32the other choice
36:33looked like
36:34when it came
36:34to a German town.
36:36Not words.
36:38Steel from the sky.
36:40About two weeks later,
36:41an American light tank
36:42with a loudspeaker
36:44bolted to its turret
36:45rolls up to the outskirts
36:46of the same city.
36:48Hadley's tank starts
36:49where it always starts.
36:51It talks to the German soldiers
36:52on the edge of town.
36:54Roughly 200 of them
36:55come out
36:56and give themselves up.
36:57Then the crew
36:58runs into the kind
36:59of problem
37:00artillery cannot solve.
37:02There is a bridge.
37:03The Germans have laid
37:04explosive charges under it.
37:06If it goes up,
37:07the column stalls,
37:08and the fight
37:08for Hildesheim
37:09gets longer
37:10and bloodier
37:11for everybody.
37:13So the voice
37:13does something new.
37:14It stops talking
37:15to soldiers.
37:17Hildesheim,
37:18like every German city
37:19in 1945,
37:20was full of foreign workers.
37:22Men and women
37:23brought into Germany
37:24from across occupied Europe
37:25to keep the factories
37:26and railways running,
37:27most of them
37:28against their will.
37:29The tank broadcasts
37:31to them.
37:32It asks them
37:33to take the explosive charges
37:34off the bridge.
37:36And they do.
37:37Word comes back
37:38that the charges are gone.
37:40The tank rolls across
37:41into the town itself,
37:42and 50 more German soldiers
37:44surrender.
37:45Now,
37:46this story would be a lie
37:47if it stopped there,
37:48so here's the rest.
37:50Deeper in the town,
37:51the tank ran into
37:52heavy machine gun fire,
37:53and it had no support
37:55around it.
37:55It pulled back.
37:57Not every German listened.
37:59Some of them kept doing
38:00exactly what German soldiers
38:02had done since Santlo.
38:03They fired at the voice.
38:05But think about what happened
38:07on that bridge.
38:08The German army
38:09could still shoot
38:10at a speaker.
38:12What it could not do
38:13was stop a whole town
38:15from hearing it.
38:16The workers under
38:17that bridge
38:18were not in anyone's
38:20chain of command.
38:21No threat against
38:22their families
38:23would hold them.
38:24The voice had found
38:25listeners that no
38:26German officer controlled.
38:29A few days later,
38:30on April 10th,
38:31American tanks
38:32of the 66th Armored Regiment
38:34were filmed
38:34rolling through
38:35the ruined streets
38:36of Hildesheim
38:37on their way east.
38:38Now come west again,
38:40a little earlier
38:41in that same run
38:42across Germany,
38:43to two small towns.
38:45The first is Bad Piemont.
38:47Before the war,
38:48it was a spa town,
38:49the kind of place
38:50Germans went
38:51to take the waters.
38:52By 1945,
38:54its hotels and guest houses
38:55had been turned
38:56into military hospitals.
38:58The town was full
38:59of wounded German soldiers.
39:01The second is Blomberg,
39:03a small old town
39:05in the hills of Lippe.
39:06In both towns,
39:07the German commanders
39:08did something
39:09that would have been
39:09unthinkable
39:10a year earlier.
39:12They came out
39:13and personally surrendered
39:14their swords
39:15to the commander
39:16of the talking tank.
39:18And they guaranteed
39:19that the soldiers
39:20in their towns
39:21would not fire
39:22a single shot.
39:24I want you to stop
39:25on that for a moment,
39:26because this is the turn
39:28in the whole story.
39:30Go back through
39:31everything we have seen.
39:33At St. Lowe,
39:34it was privates
39:35and paratroopers
39:36who walked out,
39:36while somebody behind them
39:38tried to kill the voice.
39:40In Normandy,
39:41Brombert's broadcasts
39:42brought mortar rounds
39:43and rockets,
39:44which means an officer
39:45somewhere had picked
39:47up a telephone.
39:48At Aachen,
39:50the commander chose
39:50American artillery
39:51over American words
39:53and let his city burn.
39:55All through the autumn
39:56and winter,
39:57it was the German officers
39:58and generals
39:59who wrote the orders,
40:00called in the fire,
40:01and threatened the families.
40:04In Badpirmont
40:05and Blomberg,
40:06the voice had reached
40:07the officers.
40:07The men whose job
40:09had been to call fire
40:10onto the American speaker
40:11were now walking up to it
40:13and handing over
40:14their swords.
40:15The last line
40:16of German resistance
40:17to the voice,
40:18the chain of command itself,
40:20had started to give way.
40:22Hadley later counted
40:24it all up.
40:25Counting the garrisons
40:26of towns
40:26and the men
40:27in their hospitals,
40:28over 5,000 prisoners
40:29of war were taken.
40:31The 2nd Armored Division
40:33credited the talking tank
40:34with about 5,000 surrenders
40:36in three weeks of fighting
40:37beyond the Rhine.
40:39Here is a way
40:40to feel that number.
40:41At St. Lowe,
40:42in July,
40:43a 25-watt truck
40:45brought in 18 men,
40:46and an infantryman
40:47was so surprised
40:48he said he had been wrong.
40:505,000 is nearly
40:52300 times that,
40:53and every one
40:54of those 5,000
40:55was a German soldier
40:56the Americans
40:57did not have to shoot at,
40:59and who did not
41:00shoot at them.
41:01On April 15, 1945,
41:04the story reached
41:05Stars and Stripes,
41:07the Army's own newspaper.
41:08The records that survive
41:09say very little
41:10about what became
41:11of the absence-without-leave charges.
41:13They say a great deal
41:15about the prisoners.
41:16The 12th Army Group,
41:18the headquarters
41:18over the American armies
41:20in the North,
41:21wrote its own verdict
41:22on the loudspeakers
41:23when the fighting was over.
41:25The combat loudspeakers
41:27were responsible
41:27for the capture
41:28of thousands of prisoners,
41:29for the surrender
41:31of strong points
41:31and roadblocks
41:32held by enemy rear guards,
41:34and for the capitulation
41:36of many towns
41:37without a shot being fired
41:38by their garrisons.
41:40Without a shot being fired.
41:42Think about how many
41:43American lives
41:44are folded
41:45inside that phrase.
41:47Every roadblock
41:48that surrendered
41:49was a roadblock
41:50no American rifle company
41:52had to assault.
41:53Every town that gave up
41:55was a town
41:56no American tank crew
41:58had to fight through
41:59street by street
42:00the way the infantry
42:01had fought through Aachen.
42:03So now we are close
42:04to the answer
42:05to the question
42:06we asked at the very beginning.
42:07Why did the German side
42:09spend its shells
42:10on a voice?
42:11You have most
42:12of the pieces already.
42:13The rumor about families,
42:15the field telephone,
42:17the pass that stayed
42:18in a sergeant's pocket,
42:19the music men
42:20kept listening to
42:21against orders,
42:22the tank that told men
42:23where they were
42:24and what was coming.
42:25But one piece
42:26is still missing
42:27and it is the one
42:29that makes all
42:29the others fit.
42:30It is a single sentence.
42:33Hadley said
42:34he and his sergeants
42:35repeated it over and over
42:36from Normandy
42:37to the Elbe
42:38in tanks
42:39and in foxholes.
42:41It was not a threat.
42:43It was the most dangerous
42:44thing the Americans
42:45said to the German army
42:46in the entire war.
42:48You will be well handled
42:49according to the
42:50Geneva Conventions.
42:52That is the sentence.
42:54Hadley and his sergeants
42:55said it in German
42:56so many times
42:57from Normandy
42:58to the Elbe
42:59that he remembered it
43:00for the rest of his life.
43:01It is not dramatic.
43:03There is no threat in it.
43:04It sounds like something
43:06a clerk would say.
43:07And it was the one sentence
43:09the German army
43:09had no answer to.
43:11Here is why.
43:13Everything the German command
43:14did through the autumn
43:15and winter
43:16rested on one idea.
43:18The German soldier
43:19must not believe
43:20that it was safe
43:21to cross the line.
43:23Every order about families,
43:25every rumor about executions,
43:28every roll call
43:29and every confiscated paybook
43:31was built on that one foundation.
43:34If the man in the hole
43:35thought surrender meant a bullet
43:36or a broken life
43:38or his mother in a camp,
43:40he would stay in the hole
43:41and fight.
43:42The German side
43:44even tried to fight
43:44the promise head on.
43:46Its propagandists
43:48printed a parody
43:48of Eisenhower's pass.
43:50Surrender,
43:51it told the soldier,
43:52meant ten years
43:53in captivity
43:54and coming home
43:55a broken old man.
43:57It sneered
43:59that no German soldier
44:00would let himself
44:01be lured into surrender
44:02by ham and eggs.
44:05Think about that.
44:06The Reich
44:07had to print leaflets,
44:09arguing with a leaflet.
44:12Now go back to the pass itself.
44:14One German soldier
44:16walked into the American lines
44:17and announced
44:18that he had a document
44:19bearing General Eisenhower's
44:21personal signature,
44:22as if it were a ticket.
44:25In one single day,
44:2644 men of the German
44:29256th Volksgrenadier Division
44:31came over to an American unit
44:33and nearly all of them
44:35were carrying that pass.
44:37Why did the piece of paper
44:39work for them
44:39and not for Sergeant Rooster?
44:42The paper was the same.
44:44What differed
44:45was whether the man
44:46holding it
44:46believed the Americans
44:47would keep their word
44:49and whether he could see,
44:50right in front of him,
44:52that they already had.
44:54And this is where
44:55the promise
44:55had something behind it
44:56that no propaganda
44:58could fake.
44:58The Americans kept it.
45:00German prisoners
45:01taken by the U.S. Army
45:02were disarmed,
45:03fed,
45:04treated for their wounds
45:05and moved back
45:06from the fighting.
45:07Hundreds of thousands
45:08of them were shipped
45:09across the Atlantic
45:10to camps inside
45:11the United States
45:12where they were held
45:13under the rules
45:14of the Geneva Convention
45:15of 1929.
45:17Word of that
45:18got back to the German lines
45:19in the way word
45:20always travels
45:21in an army.
45:22Through the men
45:23who had seen it.
45:25So now,
45:26put every piece
45:26of this story together
45:27and the answer
45:28to our question
45:29comes into focus.
45:31Why would German outposts
45:33spend precious shells
45:34on a speaker
45:35instead of on the American
45:36guns that were killing them?
45:38Because a German soldier
45:40could live with artillery.
45:42He had been living
45:43with it since June.
45:44Artillery kills some men
45:46and terrifies the rest.
45:48And the rest
45:49stay in their holes.
45:50That is exactly
45:51what a German commander
45:52needs from them.
45:53He can hold a line
45:55with frightened men
45:56who stay put.
45:57The voice
45:58did the opposite.
45:59It killed nobody.
46:01And it emptied the holes.
46:03To a German officer
46:04holding a position,
46:05American shells
46:06were a problem.
46:07An American promise
46:09that his men believed
46:10was the end
46:11of his command.
46:13Shells could take away
46:14some of his soldiers.
46:15The voice
46:15could take away
46:16all of them
46:17and leave the position
46:18standing
46:19with nobody in it.
46:21That is why
46:22the field telephone
46:22rang the moment
46:23the speaker started talking.
46:25That is why rockets
46:26came down on
46:27Victor Brombert
46:28in his sunken road.
46:29And why machine guns
46:30raked the truck
46:31at Saint-Lô
46:32and why the heavy guns
46:33at Hildesheim
46:34opened up
46:35on Hadley's tank.
46:37From the German
46:38side of the line,
46:39the voice was more dangerous
46:40than anything else
46:41the Americans
46:41could put in front of them.
46:43And the only defense left
46:44was to try to destroy it
46:46before the men
46:47heard too much.
46:48And the music?
46:50The music
46:51was the part
46:51that could not be shot at.
46:53Glenn Miller
46:54never promised
46:55the German soldier safety.
46:57He promised him
46:58something harder
46:58to put down.
47:00That there was still
47:01a world
47:01on the other side
47:02of all this.
47:03Families.
47:05Home.
47:06A man choosing
47:07for himself
47:08what he listened to.
47:10Every soldier
47:10who tuned in at night
47:11against the law
47:12had already heard
47:14that the other side
47:15was not what
47:15his officers said it was.
47:17When the voice
47:18finally came
47:19from the head
47:19of an armored column
47:20and told him the rest,
47:22part of him
47:23was already listening.
47:24This is the whole picture.
47:27The music
47:27opened the door
47:28in a man's mind.
47:30The pass
47:30put the proof
47:31in his pocket.
47:33The artillery
47:34made the choice real.
47:35And the voice
47:36put all of it
47:38in front of him
47:39at one moment.
47:40While the German command
47:41was left with a rumor
47:43and a telephone.
47:45Now listen to how
47:46that moment played out
47:47the way the 12th Army group
47:49recorded it
47:49for towns
47:50across Germany.
47:51The American troops
47:53hold their fire.
47:54The tank moves up
47:55and talks to the garrison.
47:57It tells the Germans
47:58where they are.
47:59It tells them
48:00what is about
48:01to fall on them.
48:02It tells them
48:03how they will be treated.
48:05If the talk fails,
48:07the attack goes in.
48:08And before the last phase,
48:10before the mopping up,
48:11the attack stops.
48:13And the voice speaks
48:14one more time.
48:16Picture the German soldiers
48:17in that town
48:18during the pause.
48:19They have just been hit
48:20by exactly what the voice
48:21said would hit them.
48:23Now the same voice
48:24is back,
48:25saying the offer
48:25still stands.
48:27Everything it has told them
48:28has come true so far.
48:30That is where the choice
48:31in our title
48:32finally came down
48:33to a single man
48:34in a single hole.
48:35Keep taking American artillery.
48:37Or,
48:38believe the American voice.
48:40And in town after town
48:42in the spring of 1945,
48:44German soldiers
48:45chose the voice.
48:46The Americans
48:47who ran this campaign
48:48drew their own conclusion
48:50when it was over.
48:51One of them,
48:52Daniel Lerner,
48:52wrote the history
48:53of the psychological
48:54warfare division's
48:55work against Germany.
48:56His verdict on the loudspeakers
48:58was not that they
48:59had been overrated.
49:00It was the opposite.
49:02A primary lesson of the war,
49:04he wrote,
49:04was that they were
49:05not used enough.
49:07Think back to that
49:08infantryman at St. Lowe
49:09in July.
49:10Why the hell don't you guys
49:11bring that thing up here
49:12all the time?
49:14Nine months later,
49:15the army's own history
49:16came to the same conclusion
49:18he had reached in a hedgerow
49:19in one afternoon.
49:21But the answer
49:22is not quite complete.
49:24There is one more thing
49:25the German command
49:26could not see
49:27from its side of the line,
49:28and it only shows
49:30when you follow
49:30the Americans home.
49:32Because the men
49:33who carried that voice
49:34paid for it.
49:36One of them
49:37came back from the war
49:38with a silver star
49:39and a purple heart.
49:40One of them
49:41never came back at all.
49:43And Glenn Miller's sentence,
49:45the one you were asked
49:46to remember,
49:47still had one more meaning
49:49waiting for it.
49:50Go back one last time
49:51to where this began.
49:53July 15th, 1944.
49:57A hedgerow
49:58outside St. Lowe.
50:00A truck
50:00with a 25-watt speaker
50:02less than 50 yards
50:04from German paratroopers.
50:05Rounds hitting its sides.
50:08A voice
50:08that keeps talking.
50:11Eighteen men
50:12climbing out of their holes.
50:13And an American infantryman
50:15who had not believed
50:16in any of it,
50:17asking out loud
50:18why they didn't bring
50:19that thing up there
50:20all the time.
50:22We never learn his name.
50:24The records kept his question
50:26and lost the man.
50:28We do not know
50:29the names of the crew
50:30in that truck, either.
50:32What we know
50:33is what they did.
50:34They drove into rifle range
50:36on purpose.
50:37They stayed there.
50:39And they kept talking
50:41while they were being shot at.
50:43That is the part
50:44of this story
50:45the German side
50:46of the line
50:46could never see.
50:48From across the field,
50:49the voice was a weapon,
50:51something to be silenced
50:52with a mortar round
50:53or a machine gun burst.
50:55From the American side,
50:56it was a handful
50:56of soldiers
50:57who chose,
50:58day after day,
50:59to make themselves
51:00the target
51:00so that the men
51:01in front of them
51:02would have a way out
51:03and the men behind them
51:04would have one less
51:05position to storm.
51:07Arthur Hadley
51:08was one of them.
51:10The charges for absence
51:11without leave
51:12did not end his war.
51:13Something else did.
51:15In the final stages
51:16of the fighting in Germany,
51:18he was severely wounded.
51:19He came home
51:20with the Purple Heart
51:21and the Silver Star,
51:22and he left the army
51:23as a captain.
51:25Then he did what a great
51:26many young Americans
51:27did in those years.
51:28He went back to school.
51:30He finished Yale
51:31in three years
51:32and graduated in 1949,
51:35magna cum laude.
51:36He joined Newsweek.
51:38He covered the Pentagon
51:39during the Korean War
51:41and the White House
51:42under Truman and Eisenhower.
51:44He became assistant executive editor
51:46of the New York Herald Tribune.
51:48He wrote ten books,
51:50one of them
51:50about the American
51:51armed forces themselves,
51:53called The Straw Giant.
51:54He gave land
51:55on Martha's Vineyard
51:56for a wildlife refuge
51:57at Long Point.
51:59Arthur Hadley died
52:01on November 25, 2015.
52:03He was 91.
52:05He left six children
52:06and six grandchildren.
52:08When he looked back
52:09on that tank,
52:11what stayed with him
52:12was not the 5,000 prisoners.
52:14It was the sentence.
52:16Over and over,
52:18from Normandy to the Elbe,
52:19in tanks
52:20and in foxholes,
52:21my sergeants and I
52:22would say in German,
52:24you will be well handled
52:25according to the
52:26Geneva Conventions.
52:28He said it
52:29because it was true.
52:30That was the whole secret.
52:32It is also the reason
52:34it worked.
52:35And Glenn Miller
52:36never came back at all.
52:39The small Norseman
52:40that lifted off
52:41from Twinwood Farm
52:42into the fog
52:43on December 15, 1944
52:45was never found.
52:47No wreck
52:48has ever been identified.
52:50No grave.
52:51His band played on
52:53without him
52:53through the last months
52:54of the war.
52:57Now it is time
52:58for the sentence
52:58you were asked to remember
52:59back at Abbey Road.
53:00I hope the day
53:01will soon come
53:02when German soldiers
53:03will be able to return
53:04to their homes
53:05and families
53:06to be happy
53:07and listen to
53:08whatever they may please.
53:10When Miller
53:11read those words
53:12off a phonetic script
53:13in October of 1944,
53:15they were a piece
53:16of psychological warfare.
53:18Words aimed
53:19across a front line
53:20at men who could be
53:20jailed for listening to them.
53:22Then the war ended.
53:24Most of the German soldiers
53:26who had walked
53:26toward those American voices
53:28did go home
53:29to their families.
53:30And within months
53:31of the surrender,
53:32the American forces network
53:34was on the air
53:35from inside Germany itself,
53:37playing the same kind
53:38of American music
53:39the Reich had banned
53:40from its radio in 1935.
53:42A great many Germans
53:44tuned in.
53:45Nobody came
53:46to arrest them for it.
53:47The day Miller
53:48hoped for came.
53:50He did not live
53:51to see it.
53:52But the promise
53:53in that sentence
53:54was kept,
53:54the same way
53:55the promise
53:56in Hadley's sentence
53:57was kept.
53:58That is the thread
53:59running through
54:00this whole story.
54:01The Americans said
54:02what would happen
54:03and then it happened.
54:04So here is the answer
54:06to the question
54:06we started with.
54:07Why did German soldiers
54:09turn their guns
54:10on American voices
54:11and American music
54:12instead of on the American guns
54:14that were killing them?
54:16Because shells
54:17could only kill them.
54:19A promise the Americans kept
54:21could bring them home.
54:23And no army
54:25can hold a line
54:26against that.
54:27That is what the German side
54:29feared about the voice.
54:30Not its volume.
54:32Not its words.
54:33The fact that
54:34time after time
54:36it turned out
54:37to be telling
54:37the truth.
54:39But the last word here
54:40does not belong
54:41to the men
54:42who fired
54:43at the voice.
54:44It belongs to the men
54:45who carried it.
54:47A German-speaking sergeant
54:49in a truck
54:49at St. Lowe,
54:5050 yards
54:51from the paratroopers,
54:52a 19-year-old
54:54named Victor Brombert
54:56crawling down
54:57a sunken road
54:58past dead men's helmets
54:59knowing the rockets
55:01would come.
55:01A lieutenant
55:02who walked away
55:03from a safe headquarters
55:04so he could sit
55:05in the front
55:05of an armored column
55:06with a speaker
55:07instead of a gun.
55:09A bandleader
55:10from Iowa
55:10reading German
55:11he could not understand
55:12into a London microphone
55:14because someone thought
55:15it might end the war
55:16a little sooner.
55:18None of them
55:19won their part
55:20of this war
55:20by killing.
55:21They won it
55:22by being believed
55:23and the reason
55:25they were believed
55:25is that the army
55:26behind them
55:27the American soldiers
55:29who held their fire
55:30while the tank talked
55:31who fed the prisoners
55:32and bandaged
55:33their wounds
55:34and moved them
55:35back from the danger zone
55:36kept every word
55:38those voices promised.
55:40At St. Lowe
55:41an American infantryman
55:43asked why they didn't
55:44bring that thing up
55:45all the time.
55:46By the end of the war
55:48the answer was
55:49in the towns
55:49that surrendered
55:50without a shot
55:51and in the American soldiers
55:53who came home
55:54because of it.
55:56Thank you for watching
55:57all the way to the end.
55:58If this story
55:59of the American soldiers
56:01who went into battle
56:02with a microphone
56:03meant something to you
56:04please hit like.
56:05It genuinely helps
56:06stories like this one
56:07reach people
56:08who have never heard them.
56:10Subscribe
56:10and turn on the bell
56:11so you don't miss
56:12the next one.
56:13And tell me in the comments
56:14where you're watching from.
56:15If your father,
56:17grandfather,
56:18or uncle
56:18served with the allied forces
56:20in the Second World War
56:21write his name
56:22and the unit
56:23he served in.
56:24Let's make sure
56:25they are remembered.