Why Khrushchev Said The Soviet Army Would Have Starved Without US Spam

In December of nineteen forty four, General George S Patton did something the German general staff believed was operationally impossible. With the city of Bastogne surrounded by panzer divisions and the One Hundred First Airborne Division running out of ammunition, Patton turned his entire Third Army ninety degrees in the middle of an active winter campaign and drove one hundred thirty three thousand vehicles north through ice, snow, and German resistance to break the siege on December twenty six. This documentary tells the full story of Patton's march to Bastogne, the Verdun conference where Eisenhower told him don't be fatuous, the secret contingency plans his staff had drafted four days before the German offensive even began, the famous Nuts reply from Brigadier General Anthony McAuliffe inside the perimeter, and the breakthrough at Assenois by the Fourth Armored Division and the Sherman tank Cobra King under Lieutenant Colonel Creighton Abrams. More importantly, it tells the story from the German side, drawing on the postwar writings and interviews of Hasso von Manteuffel, Friedrich von Mellenthin, and Hermann Balck, who admitted in their own records that the speed of the American pivot violated every planning rule the German general staff had carried in their heads since Helmuth von Moltke. This is the operation, not the legend. It is the trucks, the wires, the frozen mud, the five thousand mattress covers cut up to make camouflage tunics, and the men whose names history almost forgot. Sources include Hugh Cole's official United States Army history of the Ardennes campaign, the Third Army after action reports, the Foreign Military Studies series, S L A Marshall's Bastogne the First Eight Days, and the Carlisle transcripts of nineteen seventy nine. If you care about getting the history right, with the names, the numbers, and the inconvenient details intact, subscribe for more chapters of the war told the way it actually happened. 📚 Sources for those who want to dig deeper: The National WWII Museum, "Lend-Lease to the Eastern Front" https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war... The Army Historical Foundation, "The Persian Gulf Command and the Lend-Lease Mission to the Soviet Union during World War II" https://armyhistory.org/the-persian-g... US Army Center of Military History, T.H. Vail Motter, "The Persian Corridor and Aid to Russia" https://history.army.mil/books/wwii/p... Boris Sokolov, "The Role of Lend-Lease in Soviet Military Efforts, 1941-1945," Journal of Slavic Military Studies, Vol. 7, No. 3, 1994 Khrushchev Remembers, translated and edited by Strobe Talbott, Little Brown and Company, 1970 W. Averell Harriman and Elie Abel, Special Envoy to Churchill and Stalin, 1941-1946, Random House, 1975 Albert L. Weeks, Russia's Life-Saver: Lend-Lease Aid to the U.S.S.R. in World War II, Lexington Books, 2004 Roger Munting, "Lend-Lease and the Soviet War Effort," Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 19, No. 3, 1984 Jenny Leigh Smith, "Tushonka: Cultivating Soviet Postwar Taste," M/C Journal, Vol. 13, No. 5, 2010 https://journal.media-culture.org.au/... Hektoen International Journal, "Saving the starving Soviets with Spam," 2024 https://hekint.org/2024/01/22/saving-... Library of Congress, Howard R. Hollem photograph collection, Office of War Information, June 1943, Kroger plant Cincinnati https://loc.gov/item/2017856942/ The National WWII Museum, "Horror in the Arctic: The Catastrophe of Convoy PQ-17" https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war... The National Security Archive, George Washington University, Anastas Mikoyan documents and 1936 US visit records https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/