For decades, the German High Command, the most respected and feared military mind in the world, studied America. They read our journals. They watched our men train, and they came to one simple conclusion. We were a nation of soft, undisciplined shopkeepers. They believed we were not and could never be true soldiers. They were fatally wrong.

And the story of exactly how they discovered their mistake. The specific moments that shattered their worldview is a lesson in American grit that every one of us should know. It’s easy to look back now with the clarity of history and call it arrogance. And perhaps it was. But in 1941, their assessment wasn’t just cynical. It was by all European standards, entirely logical.

The German officer corps was the product of centuries of Prussian military tradition, a system that prized iron discipline, sacrifice and a deep, almost spiritual understanding of warfare as an art. They looked across the Atlantic at America and saw a nation they simply didn’t recognize from a military perspective.

They saw a people obsessed with comfort, with individualism, with profit. A nation that hadn’t fought a major war on its own soil since the 1860s, and seemed to them to have forgotten how. What they saw in our military only confirmed their biases. In 1941, as Hitler was unleashing the largest and most brutal invasion in human history against the Soviet Union, the United States Army was frankly, bit of a joke. It numbered about 1.6 million men.

To put that in perspective, that’s larger than the Army of Portugal at the time. Our tanks were often obsolete, thin skinned machines that would have been coffins on a European battlefield. Our officers, many of them fine and decent men, hadn’t seen a real fight since 1918. A full generation ago, in military terms. The Germans, by contrast, were the undisputed masters of the world. They had crushed Poland in a matter of weeks.

They had humiliated France, a nation with a proud military history and a massive army in just six weeks. As 1941 drew to a close, their armies were at the very gates of Moscow. They had rewritten the rules of war with their blitzkrieg, the lightning war. So when the news of Pearl Harbor shattered the peace on December 7th and America was suddenly violently thrust into the global conflict, the German planners in Berlin did their sums.