6 Orders From Hitler That Helped the Americans Win

Picture a hill above a small Normandy town, August 1944. Fog on the ground, German tanks rolling west below it, and about seven hundred Americans about to be cut off with no food and no medicine. On paper that is a disaster. Omar Bradley looked at the same map and called it a chance that comes to a commander once in a century. The man who sent those tanks had been handing America chances like that for three years. He was not done. So nobody writes in about it, here is where I stand. Germany did not lose the war because of one bad order, and the German soldiers in these six stories fought hard, often better than the men facing them. Kasserine Pass was a humiliation. The Ardennes produced the largest American surrender of the war in Europe. None of that is softened here. What this video is about is the orders that came from the top, and what each one cost in men Germany could never replace. It starts in December 1941, at a moment when Hitler did not have to do anything at all. Roosevelt had asked Congress for war against Japan, and only Japan. The Tripartite Pact was defensive, and Japan had not been attacked, Japan had attacked. Hitler had a clean exit. Four days after Pearl Harbor he stood in front of the Reichstag and threw it away. The six orders: Declaring war on the United States when nobody made him, and what the U-boats actually bought with it Pouring men into Tunisia after Torch, the Palm Sunday massacre of the Junkers 52 air bridge, and a surrender more than twice the size of Stalingrad Holding the panzers back on D-Day until one man signed the form, while the Fifteenth Army waited in the Pas-de-Calais for Patton's phantom army Operation Lüttich at Mortain, Hill 317, shells packed with bandages, and the drive west that became the Falaise pocket The Ardennes, tanks sent toward Antwerp without the fuel to reach it, Saint Vith and Bastogne, and the last armored reserve in the West spent in the snow Fighting west of the Rhine with the river at their backs, the bridge at Remagen that would not fall, and the four officers shot for it Said plainly on the numbers: a lot of these figures are still argued over. Pilots at Mortain claimed far more tanks than investigators found on the ground. Bayerlein's road losses were likely inflated. Tunisia prisoner counts run from about 230,000 to 250,000. Bulge casualties on both sides depend on who is counting. And the German generals who later blamed a dead Hitler for everything were writing for American army historians, which was very convenient. Where the record is thin, I say so. There is no trick in any of this. An army that will not give up ground it cannot hold, and will not pull back across a river it cannot defend in front of, spends men on the wrong side of the line. Hitler did it at Mortain, and he did it again on the Rhine. Today the stone towers of the Ludendorff Bridge still stand at Remagen with nothing between them. No span, no road east. Just the river he refused to put between his armies and the enemy. Tell me in the comments where you are watching from, and whether anyone in your family served in Normandy or the Ardennes. And tell me this: which of the six do you think cost Germany the most? #IvansWarArchive #WW2 #WorldWar2 #Hitler #Normandy #DDay #Mortain #FalaisePocket #BattleOfTheBulge #Remagen #Tunisia #KasserinePass #Patton #MilitaryHistory #WW2History