Over the last weekend, I was doing some personal research on German POWs here in America. It was just a personal curiosity, really, and nothing more serious than that. While I was doing this, I was also monitoring the Charlie Kirk memorial service. It was from that strange combination of activities that I came to a recognition of something I’ve not seen anyone talk about.
BACKGROUND: In 1943, the first wave of what would be just under a half million German prisoners of war would land at the Norfolk Naval base. Among the many shocks to their systems, things that ran directly in the face of what Nazi propaganda had been poured into their heads over the previous few years, was the normalcy they observed.
Here was an America that was unquestionably at war but refused to act like it. Vendors sold coffee and doughnuts, as well as lunches, within sight of military ships. Women operating machines in the process of loading an amount of freight that the docks in Germany couldn’t hope to match, both because of the size and technology of the machines themselves, but also because of work rules being much different than what German workers had. Americans of many races working together to accomplish what was needed to support the war effort, such mingling of the races was strictly verboten in their own country.
And moving freight? One POW observed that they were able to move in the morning at Norfolk alone, which would have taken a week to move at German docks. And where was that freight coming from? Without even seeing evidence of it (which they would see firsthand later), the Americans' manufacturing ability far exceeded what they’d been told.
Then, too, German POWs were treated to healthcare that surpassed not only what civilians in Germany had, but certainly beyond what their government had told them to expect, were they ever made prisoners.
Food surprised these prisoners as well. They were eating the same food our soldiers and civilian workers were eating, often in the same rooms, and there was seemingly (at least from their point of view) no shortage of it. Yes, there was food rationing among American civilians but not nearly as stringent as what German civilians were dealing with back home. They marveled at the quantity and quality of food available to them, and that was passed out to the prisoners so casually. The Americans seemingly had an endless supply of the basic needs that the German people had to scrounge for and often couldn’t obtain.
The comment was made in various forms in the memoirs of these POWs, indicating that this was the time they began to recognize that the war had been lost. If they had enough to feed both the civilian population AND the military, AND the POWs, while Germany struggled to give its people what amounted to a small amount of substandard food. If what they saw in terms of capability in manufacturing as they went from the docks to the POW camps in which they would remain for the duration of the war, if what they saw in Norfolk in terms of moving those goods to where they needed to be, this was a solid indication that Germany had already lost the war.
We know all of this from memoirs written years later by Germans who survived the war.
When they arrived here in the States, these people were, to a man, working under misconceptions force-fed to them by their leaders, falsehoods enforced into reality by their government. They expected starvation and possibly torture. When reality was far different than what they had been told, and a lot of them really didn’t know how to handle that disparity. It didn’t take long for them to recognize that if this small slice of America was of any indication of what was happening in the remainder of the country, Germany had no hope of winning the war. They’d already lost.
As I pored over my research on this, I was keeping an eye on the Charlie Kirk memorial service. It was at some point during the service that a random thought snuck in, and it hit me rather hard.
The services, the sheer number of people from around the country and the world that attended, on short notice (some 200,000 by some reports), the number of people streaming the event (by some reports, some 200 million) are staggering enough on their own. Add the individuals who have watched the YouTube recordings of the event as they become available, and the total number of people exposed to the event will be far greater; I doubt we will ever see the true extent of that viewership.
However, the lack of hatred and thirst for reprisal displayed by the attendees must have given the hard left a bit of a shake. Certainly, what went down at State Farm Stadium last Sunday was not what they expected on any level, certainly not what they’d been telling themselves would happen. I couldn’t help but draw a parallel between those German POWs and the American left watching those proceedings. What we all saw must have been a shock to their systems.
It’s easy enough to wonder if a lot of them didn’t reach the same conclusion that those German POWs recorded in their notes of the time — that they’ve already lost.
Back on Sept. 13, 2001, in my first posting on my own Blog (BitsBlog), I noted:
It is recorded in our history books that when he looked down at the ship full of smiling, victorious faces… faces of his flyers, just having returned from Pearl Harbor, Japanese fleet Admiral Yamamoto was quiet, pensive, even apprehensive. He later wrote in his private diary, “I fear all I have done is awakened a sleeping giant and filled him with a terrible resolve.”
It’s not hard to imagine the people who were just last week celebrating the death of Charlie Kirk, and who were angry that the attempts on Donald Trump’s life were not successful, looking at this situation with the same trepidation Yamamoto felt. At the very least, they’re aware with startling clarity that popular opinion is strongly running against them.
The question before us now is: How will they react? I’m sure most of us hope and pray that the reaction isn’t what you’d get from a cornered raccoon, for cornered they certainly are. Will this come to a peaceful resolution? It's kind of up to them now.
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