#25 Enemy: The Germans' War, ep. 1 - We Are The War

In a bar in East Africa, a pot-bellied older man cracked a young Darrell Cooper in the jaw before he could even react. Cooper, then a fit 30-year-old with the US Department of Defense, was surrounded by fellow military men, all younger and bigger than their antagonist. The bartender later explained the old man had served with a famous South African special forces unit. When one of Cooper's friends protested that Americans had lost wars too, the bartender replied: "Bob's mates died for a country that don't even exist now." That encounter, and the question of what it means to truly lose a war, frames this first episode of Enemy: The Germans' War.

The Moment Before the Fall

Every country that has lost a war has a moment when everything still hung in the balance—a last chance to turn back or to gamble everything. Cooper draws on William Faulkner's description of the instant before Pickett's Charge at Gettysburg, when "it's still not yet two o'clock on that July afternoon in 1863" and the outcome is still undecided. Germany had such a moment in early 1918. After four years of war, Russia was out, Italy was reeling, France was exhausted from mutinies, and Britain was licking its wounds from Passchendaele. The Americans had declared war but hadn't yet arrived in force. For the first time since 1914, Germany could concentrate its forces on a single front. The man directing the