This is an I-Heart podcast.

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories,

the show where America is the star and the American people. To search for The Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people.

To search for The Our American Stories podcast, go to the I Heart Radio app or wherever you get your podcast.

Stephen Ambrose was one of America's leading biographers and historians.

At the core of Ambrose's phenomenal success was his simple but straightforward belief

that history is biography. History, he always said, is about people. Stephen Ambrose passed away

in 2002, but his epic storytelling accounts can now be heard here on our American stories thanks to those who run as his state.

Our next story begins in early 1943 during the Second World War.

Here's Stephen Ambrose with a story.

The first battle of the United States Army fought in the Second World War began on St. Valentine's Day of

1943 at a place called Casserin Pass in North Africa.

And the way that battle went, all this unconditional surrender business that we had been demanding a month before was just talk because the U.S. Army did not do well at the Battle of Casser and Pass.

There were a lot of reasons why it didn't do well. First of all, the training hadn't been rigorous enough.

The Army and the men in the Army, the Army officers who were doing the training, the old

regular Army officers who were the cadre around which this miracle took place to transform

the American Army from less than 200,000 men in 1940 to an army of 8 million men in

in 1943. This cadre of officers who trained these guys,

they thought they were putting them through the toughest training

that you could put somebody through, and indeed they thought it was up to the standards of the SS,

or the Red Army. And the men thought that they had, they were at the absolute peak of physical condition,

and that they had been very well trained and they were ready to take on the Verimach, and they all found out they weren't.

...