German POWs Saw US Prosperity—We Never Stood Chance

German POWs Saw US Prosperity — We Never Stood Chance The Liberty ship Robert E. Lee cut through the Atlantic swells in the spring of nineteen forty-three, its cargo holds packed not with munitions or supplies, but with men. Below deck, in conditions that would have been unbearable months earlier in the blazing heat of North Africa, sat three hundred German prisoners of war from Field Marshal Erwin Rommel's once-mighty Afrika Korps. They had surrendered after the collapse of Tunisia, their desert war finally over, their Tiger tanks and eighty-eight millimeter guns now scrap metal scattered across the dunes