Comments by "David Himmelsbach" (@davidhimmelsbach557) on "6th Army's Rations at Stalingrad" video.

  1. Germans didn't have cigarettes -- they had ersatz cigarettes -- these were NOTHING like American cigarettes. The Germans also didn't have access to bona fide coffee or tea, either. It's a fact that GIs blowing cigarette smoke and coffee fumes were able to get German troops to surrender on that basis alone. Bradley reported -- in total disgust -- that one GI got over a hundred German soldiers to surrender via this gambit. He, the offender, was taken-out by a German sniper called up just to stop his action. Things were getting totally out of hand. He was bringing back yesterday's surrenders and getting them to call their buddies on over... speaking through K-rations... munch... munch... munch... Clueless Bradley slammed this GI -- in his second autobiography of the war. What a dunce! There is a fair amount of footage of surrendering Germans (1945) to the USA. They are extremely relaxed. It's a wholly different vibe than Germans taken captive by the Russians. In such cases, the strain is plain to see. The Germans are terrified, at their wit's end. BTW, at the end, half of most German combat formations are runts just entering puberty. They can barely tote their sleeping gear. But for the war, it'd be a funny sight. &&& The big unknown: how much access did the trapped 6th Army have to horsemeat? I've read that by the time of Uranus, most of the horses had been withdrawn to the rear. Hauling fodder up to Stalingrad was murder on their fuel supplies and truck repair. Further, there were no stables that would shield the draft animals from the horrific weather. By now, the Germans had figured out that you just about couldn't use horses in such weather. Any such attempt sickens or kills the beast. Further, their feed tab goes into orbit... just like the troops.
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  2. @give Was there ENOUGH. Every account I've read was that German ersatz tobacco was chit. They would've killed to get Turkish or Bulgarian tobacco. German chemists did come up with taste-alike concoctions. But still, the result was an evil brew that was dropped like a bad habit the second real American tobacco was to hand.
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