American forces suffered one of their worst defeats of World War II at Kasserine Pass in North Africa, a chaotic retreat that cost thousands of casualties and exposed assumptions about the German military that would never return. Over the next two years, the same Americans who had been humiliated learned to respect their enemy’s skill—and then discovered what some of those skilled soldiers had been doing. When American units landed in Morocco and Algeria in November 1942 during Operation Torch, most had never seen combat. What they knew about Germans came largely from Hollywood and Washington.
Director Frank Capra, known for films like It’s a Wonderful Life, created the seven-film Why We Fight series, which presented Germans as disciplined but misguided, dangerous but beatable. The reality began to emerge as American forces pushed into Tunisia and prepared to face Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps. On February 14, 1943, Rommel struck at Kasserine Pass, a two-mile gap in the Atlas Mountains defended by green American troops. The German attack was surgical.
Panzer IV and Tiger tanks tore through positions held by M3 Stuart light tanks that could barely scratch German armor. By February 20, American positions collapsed. Units retreated in a rout, abandoning equipment. The 1st Armored Division lost more than half its tanks in two days.
Radio communications broke down and command posts were overrun. American casualties reached 6,500 in four days: 300 killed, 3,000 wounded, 3,000 captured. Equipment losses included 183 tanks, 104 half-tracks, and 208 guns. German casualties were about 2,000 total.
General Dwight Eisenhower fired Major General Lloyd Fredendall and brought in George Patton. Letters home from the period reflected a fundamental shift: grudging respect for German skill combined with determination to learn from the disaster. Rommel himself noted that American soldiers fought hard once they recovered from the shock, that their equipment was excellent when properly used, and that their leadership was learning fast. The lessons came quickly.
On July 10, 1943, Operation Husky launched the largest amphibious assault in history up to that point. American forces hit Sicily with new equipment, new tactics, and new respect for their enemy. The M4 Sherman tanks that replaced the outgunned Stuarts could finally match German armor. Veterans of the campaign wrote home about German professionalism, praising captured Wehrmacht manuals as better than their own and noting how German prisoners carried themselves with confidence even in defeat.
By the time the campaign ended on August 17, the German and Italian garrison had executed one of the most successful withdrawals of the war, evacuating over 100,000 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. That respect would soon coexist with horror. On December 16, 1944, three German armies smashed through the Ardennes Forest.
The next day, near the Belgian town of Malmedy, SS troops under Joachim Peiper captured 120 American soldiers from the 285th Field Artillery Battalion. The unit assembled the prisoners in a field and opened fire with machine guns. Eighty-four Americans died, some finished with pistol shots at close range. A handful survived by playing dead and escaped.
Investigators later found gunpowder burns on 20 corpses, evidence of execution-style shots to the head. The 328th Infantry Regiment issued new orders: “No SS troops or paratroopers will be taken prisoner, but will be shot on sight. ” The Malmedy Massacre changed the rules of engagement for the rest of the war, and American attitudes toward German soldiers became more complex, mixing respect for military skill with awareness of war crimes. That complexity deepened when American forces discovered what else had been happening.
On April 4, 1945, they liberated Ohrdruf, a subcamp of Buchenwald. Generals Eisenhower, Bradley, and Patton toured the site together, and Eisenhower ordered every nearby unit to send representatives so his men could see what they had been fighting against. Three weeks later, soldiers from the 45th Infantry Division reached Dachau and found more than 30 railroad cars filled with bodies and 32,000 prisoners barely alive. Some Americans shot SS guards who had already surrendered; an investigation followed but no charges were filed.
The real story of what American soldiers thought about Germans did not appear in official reports. It was hidden in a secret facility outside Washington. From 1942 onward, the US Army operated PO Box 1142 at Fort Hunt, Virginia, where high-value German prisoners—U-boat commanders, generals, nuclear scientists—were held. Every conversation was recorded through hidden microphones.
American interrogators, many of them German Jewish refugees, gathered intelligence without torture, relying on patience and psychology. Meanwhile, the War Department ran the largest soldier survey in history. Samuel Stouffer’s team questioned over half a million American troops about everything from combat stress to enemy attitudes. The results, published in 1949 as The American Soldier, revealed truths that surprised Washington.
Decades later, historians pieced together the full picture. Peter Schrijvers analyzed thousands of letters and diaries. Paul Fussell, who had served as a 20-year-old lieutenant, wrote about the gap between official stories and battlefield reality. What they found was a paradox: genuine respect for German military skill alongside revulsion at what those same soldiers had been fighting for.
Even after Malmedy, many veterans distinguished between Wehrmacht soldiers and SS troops. The men who liberated Dachau never forgot what they saw; some carried photographs for decades, while others refused contact with anything German for the rest of their lives. These conflicting memories shaped everything that followed: occupation, reconstruction, and eventually alliance with West Germany. NATO required Americans to work alongside former enemies they respected as soldiers but could never fully forgive.
The Fort Hunt recordings stayed classified for 60 years. When 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.
It was complicated.