The same Americans who had been humiliated learned to respect their enemy’s skill. Then, they discovered what some of those skilled soldiers had been doing. American soldiers thought they knew exactly what to expect from German troops. They had never fought them before.
Most had never seen combat. The army showed every soldier a series of propaganda films before they shipped out. They told American soldiers exactly what to expect from their German enemies. The films presented Germans as disciplined but misguided, trapped under a system that had hijacked their natural abilities.
But first came the weapons. The German MG 42 machine gun earned its nickname from the men who faced it: Hitler’s buzzsaw. The sound of its rapid fire was unmistakable. Letters home told a more complex story than anyone expected.
Some soldiers wrote about their German prisoners with genuine surprise at how normal they seemed. As 1943 progressed, American forces prepared to push deeper into Tunisia. Most of those assumptions wouldn’t survive the first week. His target was the Kasserine Pass, a two-mile gap in the Atlas Mountains defended by green American troops.
The German attack came with surgical precision. Panzer IV and Tiger tanks smashed through positions held by M3 Stuart light tanks that couldn’t even scratch German armor. They knew exactly how to coordinate tanks, infantry, and artillery. The 1st Armored Division lost more than half its tanks in two days.
The numbers told the story. Three hundred killed, three thousand wounded, three thousand captured. German casualties: two thousand total. Letters home from this period reflected a fundamental shift: grudging respect for German skill mixed with determination to learn from that disaster.
While the attack succeeded tactically, he noted that American soldiers fought hard once they recovered from the shock. The Americans wouldn’t make the same mistakes twice. By May 1943, those same Americans were advancing again. They had learned to respect German military skill.
The M4 Sherman tanks that replaced the outgunned M3 Stuarts could finally match the German armor. American units moved with a combined arms precision they had practiced but never mastered. Tank-infantry cooperation, artillery support, air-ground coordination. The Americans were finally fighting the way the Germans had been fighting all along.
When cornered, German soldiers fought with the same skill and determination Americans had witnessed at Kasserine, but now they understood what they were seeing. Where earlier correspondence had blamed defeats on German luck or superior numbers, soldiers in Sicily wrote about German professionalism. They noted how German prisoners carried themselves: confident, disciplined, unbroken even in defeat. By the time the campaign ended on August 17th, the German and Italian garrison had executed one of the most successful withdrawals of the war, evacuating over one hundred thousand troops across the Strait of Messina.
American soldiers had won the battle but learned to respect an enemy who could turn defeat into tactical success. They were about to discover that respect for military skill was only the beginning. They had learned to respect German tactics and equipment. They knew the individual German soldier was skilled and disciplined.
On December 16th, three German armies smashed through the Ardennes Forest. The surprise was complete. What happened at the Baugnez Crossroads became the deadliest single incident against American POWs in the entire war. The German unit assembled the prisoners in a field and opened fire with machine guns.
A handful survived by playing dead and escaped to tell what had happened. When investigators examined the scene weeks later, they found gunpowder burns on twenty corpses, evidence of execution-style shots to the head. “No SS troops or paratroopers will be taken prisoner, but will be shot on sight. ”
Other units received similar guidance.
American attitudes toward German soldiers became more complex, mixing respect for military skill with awareness of war crimes. That complexity would deepen when they discovered what else had been happening. They found more than thirty railroad cars filled with bodies and thirty-two thousand prisoners barely alive. An investigation followed, but no charges were filed.
After Dachau, everything changed. The men who walked through those camps understood the war had never been about military skill alone, but what they really thought about their enemy wouldn’t be found in any official report. The real story of what American soldiers thought about Germans wasn’t found in official reports. It was hidden in a secret facility outside Washington, recorded when no one thought anyone was listening.
High-value German prisoners passed through its gates. Hidden microphones captured what German soldiers said in barracks, mess halls, even while walking outside. American interrogators, many of them German Jewish refugees, gathered intelligence without torture. Paul Fussell, who had served as a twenty-year-old lieutenant, wrote about the gap between official stories and battlefield reality.
American soldiers developed genuine respect for German military skill. Letters home praised German engineering and acknowledged the quality of German units. Even after Malmedy, many veterans distinguished between Wehrmacht soldiers and SS troops. The men who liberated Dachau never forgot what they saw.
Others refused all contact with anything German for the rest of their lives. These conflicting memories shaped everything that followed: occupation, reconstruction, eventually alliance with West Germany. NATO required Americans to work alongside former enemies they respected as soldiers but could never fully forgive. When they were finally released in the 2000s, they confirmed what soldiers had written in letters and told in surveys.
The enemy they fought was both more capable and more terrible than anyone had expected. The truth was exactly what those first GIs had discovered in Tunisia. If you found this video insightful, watch What Did German Soldiers Really Think of Soviet Soldiers Next.
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