The US Secret Mission Against Germans That Brought The Reich To Its Knees — Wolfsberg 1944 | WW2

[00:00:00]The valley below smelled of pine resin and cold mud, and the fog that morning sat so low and so thick that Sergeant Dale Mercer could not see his own boots when he looked down.

[00:00:13]He had been lying still on that hillside for 4 hours. His left hand, the one he always pressed flat against the earth when he needed to feel something real, had gone numb an hour ago.

[00:00:26]In his breast pocket, folded into a square no larger than a playing card, was a photograph of a boy sitting on a porch step holding a fishing rod. The boy was seven.

[00:00:38]Mercer had been gone 2 years and 3 months.

[00:00:42]He did not unfold the photograph. He did not need to. He had memorized every shadow in it the way another man memorizes scripture.

[00:00:53]Somewhere [music] below, inside the fog, was the valley town of Wolfsburg, a place that appeared on no Allied military map, that existed in no intelligence summary, and that the Germans had decided, with considerable confidence, the Americans [music] would never find.

[00:01:12]That confidence was about to cost them everything.

[00:01:17]And what Mercer's team had come to do [music] had never been tried before, not like this, not by four men with 7 days, four sets of stolen papers, and one single piece of information that the Germans did not know they had lost.

[00:01:35]Stay with me now, because what happened in that valley across 7 days in November of 1944 was something that none of the men who survived it ever put in any official record. And once you understand what they were carrying with them, not in their packs, but in their heads, you will understand why it had to be that way.