How GE Engineers Cracked The Secret To Destroying Panzer Armor
In Belton Cooper’s accounting, Cooper was an ordinance lieutenant assigned to drag the burned hulks back to the maintenance battalion of the third armored division. His division entered Normandy with 232 Sherman tanks. By the time the war ended in May 1945, 648 had been totally destroyed in combat.
Another 700 had been knocked out, repaired, and put back into the line. A loss rate, in his words, of 580%. Now, hold that number and hold this. The very thing that could have made those Shermans into panther killers, a small, dense cylinder of pressed metal that could be fired through a Panther’s frontal armor at combat range, had been deliberately, profitably, and quietly suppressed inside the United States for 16 years.
Suppressed by an agreement signed in Skenctity, New York. Suppressed by an American corporation. suppressed by a partnership with the same German steel trust that was building the tanks now burning Lafayette Pool’s friends to death. To understand why American tanks were burning in 1944 and how a small group of GE engineers eventually answered for it, we need to go back 16 years back to a corporate boardroom in upstate New York.
back to the moment when an American company sat down with a German one and decided that a metal hard enough to win a war was worth more if it stayed locked in a vault. Part one. The metal in question was tungsten carbide. Picture this. A piece of pressed and metal, gray, dense, harder than almost anything else humans had figured out how to make at industrial scale.
A tip of tungsten carbide on a lathe tool would cut steel for a thousand operations before needing to be regground. The same job done with the older high-speed tool. Steel had to be redone after roughly a hundred. So one piece of tungsten carbide was worth 10 of what came before. In an industrial economy that is not a refinement.
That is a different planet. The technology had emerged in Germany in the early 1920s out of work originally meant to find a substitute for the diamond dyes used in drawing tungsten lamp filaments. By 1925, the German firm Friedrich Crook had patents on a cemented tungsten carbide they marketed under the name Whittia.
By the late 1920s, General Electric and Skenctity had its own engineering work in the same field. The Hoit and Gillson patents developed inside G’s lamp department covered competing American processes. American engineers had a path forward without German cooperation. What happened next is not a story about engineers. It is a story about what executives do when they look at engineering and see a price tag.
In 1928, instead of using its own patents to compete with CRUP, GE created a subsidiary called Carbaloy Inc. Carbaloy was incorporated for one purpose to exploit tungsten carbide in the United States. Then GE sat down with Crup and pulled the patents. Crup would control the world outside the United States and Canada.
Carbaloy would control everything inside. Now read this number carefully because it matters. Tungsten carbide could be manufactured by GE’s own books for about $6.50 per pound. The pre-cartel price had been around $48 a pound. After the agreement was signed, Carlloy raised the price to $453 a pound, $1 per gram, 70 times the production cost, almost 10 times the pre-cartel price.
That is what economists call a monopoly rent. What it meant on the shop floor of America was that almost no machine shop in the country could afford to use the better metal. By the start of the war, the United States machine tool industry was still using inferior malibdinum tipped tooling for most of its work.
Germany’s machining industry, by contrast, had switched almost entirely to tungsten carbide. The Nazi state had an abundance of the very metal that had been priced out of American factories by an American company. I want you to imagine being a GE engineer in those years. You had helped build a thing that should have made America’s industrial output faster, sharper, more efficient.
The Hoy patent had your colleagues names on it. Then somewhere up the chain, men in suits decided your work would be locked behind a price almost no customer could pay. Through the 1930s, requests for tungsten carbide licenses came into GE from the Crucible Steel Company in 1936, from Chrysler Corporation, from others.
They were refused. By 1936, Crup had agreed to stop importing tungsten carbide into the United States entirely. Carbaloy and Crup had pulled the world. What flowed back across the Atlantic was even worse. Through Carbaloy’s royalty reports, GE was sending Crup a complete list of every American lency, every plant producing tungsten carbide on American soil, and the exact quantities being produced.
The Nazis knew where the metal was. They knew how much there was. They knew because the Americans were telling them by contract. Letters between the two firms later admitted into evidence at the 1947 antitrust trial in New York ended with the words Hyle Hitler that is not a metaphor. The validiction is in the trial record.
While American workers were buying war bonds, while Croo was running the slave labor camps that would be uncovered at the end of the war, the company that made the lights burn in American homes was exchanging royalty figures with the company that built the tanks that would kill American boys. And signing off, Hy Hitler.
The cartel agreement was extended in 1936. It was supposed to run until 1950. Pearl Harbor did not break it. The first federal indictment returned in September 1940 did not break it. The Senate Patents Committee hearings of April 1942 did not break it. At those hearings, the president of Carbaloy, a man named William G.
Robbins, leaped to his feet and said something that is in the official record. He said, “I refuse to be called unamerican or that our company is unamerican.” Hold that sentence for a minute. In April 1942, four months after Pearl Harbor, the head of the GE subsidiary that had been pooling tungsten carbide patents with corrupt stood up and refused to be called unamerican.
The sentence is so brittle it almost shatters when you read it. Behind it, Lafayette Pool was still in basic training. He had not yet sailed to England. He’d not yet learned that the metal he would eventually need to fire through a Panther’s armor had been priced out of his country’s factories by a corporation that wanted to be paid in American dollars and German respect at the same time.
How did GE engineers ever fight back? You will see them fight in part three, but first you have to see what their countrymen were dying for. Because in the summer of 1944, the bill came due. Part two. June 6th, 1944. Omaha Beach. The Third Armored Division, the Second Armored, the Fourth Armored, the First Infantry. American Shermans coming ashore.
Six weeks later, in the Bokeage South of St. Low, Cooper, the Ordinance Lieutenant, made a remark in his memoir that explains the rest of the war on the Western Front. He said the maintenance battalion had to clean out the inside of recovered tanks before they could put new crews in them. Sometimes that meant scraping out what remained.
Sometimes that meant white paint applied over the inside to cover what had soaked into the steel. The men who came out alive remembered the same things. The sound, the smell, the speed of the fire. By the time the British and Canadian and American armies were fighting their way through Normandy, statistical reports were beginning to reach SHF.
From the end of July to the beginning of September, US First Army rode off 237 75 millimeter Shermans, plus 38 of the new 76 mm models. From August into September, Third Army lost more than 200 more. Through the European campaign as a whole, US tank and tank destroyer losses ran into the thousands of Shermans alone.
Why was the loss rate so high? The Sherman had decent reliability. American crews were well trained. The problem was the gun on the front and the metal that the gun was firing. The Sherman’s standard 75 mm gun could not penetrate the front of a German Panther tank at combat range. Period. The improved 76 millm gun rushed into production had been told by ordinance to be the answer. It was not.
In July 1944, after Operation Cobra and the breakout, General Eisenhower sat in a meeting and learned something that he had not been told before. The 76 millimeter gun, which had been described to him as the wonder gun of the war, could not reliably penetrate the glasses plate of a Panther tank from the front. The army’s own histories preserve his words very close to this.
He asked with rising temper whether his men had been told a 76 millimeter gun could knock out anything the Germans had. And now he was being told it could not. The official record quotes him asking why he was the last to hear about it. He’d been told one thing. The men in the field had learned something else by the only method available by dying.
In August, a board of officers convened at a firing range near France. They had three captured Panthers. They had every variety of American anti-tank ammunition then in service. They fired the rounds. They wrote down the results. The conclusion of the ISI tests was unsparing. Neither the standard 76 mm armor-piercing capped round nor the British 17 pounder armor-piercing round could be depended upon to penetrate the front glasses of a Panther on a fair hit on average quality plate.
The American tanks at the front were being asked to fight a tank they could not with the rounds they had kill from the front. Now Lafayette Pool, he had been given a new in the mood, an M4 A1 with a 76mm gun in early July. He fought through fillets through the closing of the gap into Belgium. His crew was loyal.
Wilbert Red Richards drove. Bertc close, a teenager they nicknamed school boy, manned the bow gun. Willis Aller, they called him Groundhog because of the goggle stains around his eyes, was the gunner pool, said could shoot the eyebrows off a gnat at 1500 yards. Dell Bogs was the loader. They led in 81 days of combat 21 full-scale attacks.
They destroyed 258 enemy vehicles by the official count of the third armored division. 12 confirmed German tanks, captured 250 prisoners. Pool’s nickname, War Daddy, would later be lifted almost word for word into Brad Pitt’s character in the film Fury, September 19th, 1944. Outside Stolberg, Germany.
Pool was leading a column when his third in the mood was struck by a German anti-tank weapon at close range. The first shot hit. P was trying to back his damaged tank up when a second shell hit. The impact threw him out of the commander’s hatch. A fragment opened his right leg. The leg was so badly mangled it had to be amputated.
He spent 19 days unconscious in a Belgian hospital from morphine and double pneumonia. The war for him was over. P and his crew had been the best the US Army produced. And the best they could do with the gun and the ammunition they had been given was destroy German tanks one at a time at close range by maneuver by flanking shots, by hitting tracks and side armor and turret rings anywhere but the place a panther’s armor was thickest.
They never had what they needed to kill a panther through the front. They were sergeants and corporals and privates fighting a tank duel with a hand tied behind them. Some of them Carl Kelner of the 32nd Armored Regiment. Thousands of names you have never heard did not come out. This is the second piece of the puzzle. American tanks were burning.
Their gun could not solve the problem. There was a round sitting in ordinance laboratories that could solve the problem. But the round needed something that the United States, the most industrially powerful nation on Earth, barely had. It needed a metal that had been priced out of American factories 16 years earlier by a contract written in skenctity. It needed tungsten carbide.
And in the summer of 1944, the United States was scrambling to find enough of it. Men like Lafayette P didn’t fight to be remembered. Many Americans have never heard of him. If this story matters to you, hit the like button. It takes one second. It pushes this video toward the people who care about getting the history right, and it keeps Pool’s name and his crews names visible a little longer. Part three.
Now we go inside the puzzle. We go to the men in white coats and dirty aprons, the ones who had to make the metal the soldiers needed. The round ordinance had developed was called the T4. After February 1945, it was redesated the M93. The technical name was high velocity armorpiercing, HVAP. It was an armor-piercing composite rigid round, meaning the part of the projectile that did the killing was a separate denser core inside a lightweight aluminum body and a steel windshield.
The 76 mm version weighed about 18 lb, 15 o. It came out of the gun barrel at 3,400 feet per second, more than a third faster than the standard armorpiercing round. At 500 yards, it could punch through six and 2/10 in of armor at 30° of slope. At 1,000 yards, more than 5 in, that core, that little dense hard cylinder at the heart of the round, that was tungsten carbide, the same metal that GE had spent a decade and a half pricing out of American industrial reach, was now the only thing standing between an American tank crew and a Panther’s frontal armor
at combat range. In July 1944, Ordinance shipped a thousand T4 rounds to the European theater by air in a hurry for the Eini tests. After Ezini, production was ordered for both the 76 mm Sherman and the 3-in gun in the M10 tank destroyer. The initial order was for 20,000 rounds. The army then set a target of 43,000 rounds per month for the rest of 1944.
Then when reality caught up with planning, 10,000 per month production was, in the dry words of the Army’s own records, slow to ramp up. The 10,000 rounds per month target was not reached until November 1944. As late as the winter of 1944 and 1945, an individual Sherman or tank destroyer crew could expect on average one HVAP round per month.
One round a crew might roll into a fight against a panther carrying a single shot of the only ammunition that gave them a fair chance. They had to choose, like a man with one bullet, when to use it. Why so slow? Why so few? The metal. Always the metal. The tungsten carbide steel used as the core of HVAP rounds was, in the army’s phrase, a critical war material.
It was needed in machine tools. It was needed in cutting tips. It was needed in dyes. Now it was needed for shooting at Germans. And the United States had never built the production base for it that the country’s size and industrial capacity should have allowed. This is where the second war begins. Not the war in France, the war in Washington, in New York.
While Lafayette P was leading in the mood across France, while Belton Cooper was scraping out hulks, a separate fight was being waged inside the United States by the federal government, by the Senate, by the Department of Justice, and in the trenches, by G’s own engineers and machinists against the cartel that their own employer had signed with Crup.
Assistant Attorney General Thurman Arnold testified before the Truman Committee in March 1942. In a now famous formulation, Arnold said the underlying problem was simple. There was no essential difference between what Standard Oil had done with synthetic rubber, what Alcoa had done with magnesium, what DuPant had done with tetracine priming compound for ammunition, and what General Electric had done with tungsten carbide.
The pattern was the same. American corporations had before the war signed agreements with German firms that restricted American production of materials critical to American war fighting. They had fixed prices high enough to keep the materials out of American factories. They had shared royalty data with their German counterparts.
After Pearl Harbor, those agreements had been hard, slow, and politically difficult to break. A magazine writer named Michael Strait writing in the New Republic in April 1942 captured the core of the tungsten carbide piece in one paragraph. He wrote that the conspiracy between General Electric and Friedrich had given the crop works the power to decide who in America might be permitted to produce tungsten carbide.
He added that tungsten carbide was so vital to the process of hardening machine tools that if America had it in quantity at that moment, the country could raise its industrial production by 20%. Read that again. 20% of American industrial output. That was the size of the gap GE had carved into the country’s productive capacity for the sake of price fixing royalties.
And in 1942, it could not be filled with a snap of the fingers. It took years to build factories. It took years to train men to work the metal. The country had been deliberately de-industrialized in this corner of metallurgy by its own largest corporation. There is a documented detail from the trial that shocks even now.
The government introduced in evidence a cabled message from Crook to GE about an inquiry from Carbaloy regarding the export of tungsten carbide. Croo’s reply, understand that you are offering carbaloy for export to Russia. Stop. We point out you are prohibited from doing so. The Germans were directing American export policy on a strategic war material to America’s allies through a contract with an American company.
And the American company in 1947 when the case finally came to trial defended itself on the grounds that the deal had created jobs. Here is the most painful part of the story, the part the engineers carried in their heads. The men in the lab coats inside Carbaloy and inside G’s lamp department in Cleveland and Skenctity.
The engineers who had developed the Hoy and Gillson patents. The metallurgists who knew the powders and the cintering temperatures. The machinists who pressed the carbide cores. These men had not signed the cartel. They had built the technology. The contract had been signed above their heads. Now in 1942 and 1943 and 1944, the same engineers were being asked on emergency wartime priority to scale up the production of the very thing their company had spent 15 years suppressing.
They had to fight two enemies. One was Berlin. The other was sitting in their own corporate office. This is the answer to the question the title raises. The genius invention was not a single device. It was the cemented tungsten carbide technology itself, married to the HVAP shell design developed by Army Ordinance and the genius was buried for years by the men in the suits above the engineers heads.
When the war forced the suits to step aside, the engineers work came out. But knowing that the round existed was not the same as having enough of them. To get enough, the United States had to do something else first. It had to choke the Germans off from the same metal. And that fight took place not in a factory but in the Iron Mountains of Iberia. Part four.
If you want to understand why the war in 1945 looked nothing like the war in 1942, look at the price of wolfrram or in Portugal. Wolfrram is the older European name for tungsten ore. It comes out of the ground in lumps. You smelt it, refine it, mill it. You can put it in light bulb filaments. You can put it in armor-piercing cores.
By 1942, both sides knew it was a strategic mineral. The catch was that the deposits were not where the war was. The largest accessible deposits in the European theater were in Portugal and in Spain. Both were neutral. Both were willing in the Iberian way to sell to whichever side paid the most and pressed the hardest.
In 1942, Portugal exported about 6,500 metric tons of tungsten, more than two and a half times the pre-war level. By 1943, the price of Portuguese wolfrom had increased 775% over pre-war rates. Spain under Franco was selling wolf from to Germany at a scale that made tungsten exports nearly 1% of the entire Spanish gross domestic product and roughly 20% of Spanish exports.
For Germany, this was the lifeline for the German PAC 40, the PAC 41 with its tapered bore, the 75mm armor-piercing rounds with tungsten cores. Every one of them needed wolfrom. The Vermach’s minimum estimated annual requirement according to Allied intelligence was 3,500 tons. In November 1943, the US ambassador to Spain delivered a memorandum demanding the unconditional end of Spanish tungsten exports to Germany.
Franco initially refused. On January 3rd, 1944, Ambassador Carlton Hayes issued an ultimatum. When Madrid did not satisfactoryy respond, the United States imposed an embargo on oil supplies to Spain. The embargo bit. On May the 2nd, 1944, a secret deal was signed in Madrid. Spain agreed to drastically limit tungsten exports to Germany, capped at 20 tons in May, 20 in June, and 40 per month thereafter.
By August 1944, the border with France was closed and the ore stopped flowing. The effect on the German army was almost immediate. By July 25th, 1943, the Vermacht Supreme Command had already noted that PAC 41 anti-tank guns, the high velocity tapered bore weapon that depended on a tungsten cord projectile, were being pulled out of frontline service due to ammunition shortages.
By April 1943, only 78 P41 guns were left in service across all of Army Group Center. The Germans had developed a steel cord substitute round, but it performed significantly worse. By the summer of 1943, on the orders of Albert Spears armaments ministry, German production of tungsten cord armor-piercing penetrators was effectively banned.
Germany still had Panther tanks. Germany still had Tigers. But the rounds those tanks would have to take with them into combat against American Shermans, against British Cromwells, against Soviet T34s, those rounds were now, in the technical sense, second class. Meanwhile, the Americans went the other way.
In a single year, US and Allied buying programs hoovered up Iberian wolf from production. Now, read this carefully because this is the engineers part of the war. The same carbaloy plants in Detroit that had been the bottleneck for 16 years were now ramping up under wartime priority orders. The men who had developed the cemented tungsten carbide processes inside G’s lamp department a decade earlier.
Their names obscured, their patents pulled away, were now setting up production lines to feed the US Army. The shell cores that came out of those lines went to arsenals where they were married to the aluminum bodies and steel windshields and propellant cases of the T4 and T30 E16 series of HVAP rounds. September 19th 1944 Lraine France.
The same day by coincidence that Lafayette P was being blown out of his tank in front of Stolberg. Not far away, the German fifth panzer army under Hasso von Monttofl was launching what was supposed to be the major German counterstroke against Patton’s third army. The 111th and 113th Panzer Brigades were brand new, freshly equipped with Panther tanks straight from the factory.
Crews were inexperienced. They had perhaps two weeks of training. The fourth armored division of the US Third Army under Major General John Wood was waiting near a place called Aracort. Combat Command A under Colonel Bruce Clark dug in around a thinly held salient. Over 11 days between September 18th and 29th, the Battle of Aracort produced one of the largest tank engagements on the Western Front before the Battle of the Bulge.
The Germans deployed 262 armored fighting vehicles. The terrain was flat farmland with rolling rises and patches of fog. The fog negated the longer effective range of the German Panther guns. American Sherman crews used the cover to maneuver into the German flanks. They struck Panther side armor where the plates were thinner and even a 75 mm gun could penetrate.
By the end of the 11 days, German losses ran to roughly 200 armored vehicles. Of the original 262 German armored fighting vehicles deployed, only about 62 were operational when the dust settled. The American Fourth Armored Division’s Combat Command A had lost on the order of 25 to 30 tanks and tank destroyers. Aricort is the moment in the textbooks when the US Army stopped pretending that it could lose the tank war on the Western Front. But notice what happened.
The fourth armored had won mostly with 75 mm Shermans. The German fifth panzer army had been beaten by green German crews in superior tanks against veteran American crews using inferior tanks but fighting the right way. After Araort Patton’s Third Army, which had previously been refusing the new 76 millimeter Shermans because the 76 millimeter gun had a weaker high explosive capability, finally accepted them.
The Sherman fleet at the front began slowly to shift to a configuration that could carry HVAP. The HVAP itself, as fast as the Carbaloy lines could produce it and as fast as ships could carry it, began to filter forward. By November 1944, the 10,000 round per month production target was reached. The first month, a Sherman crew might have two HVAP rounds in the rack instead of one, then three.
If you have read this far, I want to ask you a question. If your father, your grandfather, or an uncle served in an armored division, in a tank destroyer battalion, in any unit that depended on those rounds, I would be honored to hear his story in the comments. Which division? Where did he fight? What did he tell you about the guns and about the rounds and about the way the war changed in the last six months? Those details mean more than any archive.
But the engineers work in the shell and the metal were going to face a final test. The Panther was not the only thing they had to kill. Behind it, in a city in western Germany, an even heavier German tank waited in the streets, hidden in the ruins of a cathedral square. And on the morning of March 6th, 1945, the men inside an American tank that had not existed when the war began were going to fire a round that almost no one in 1942 had imagined. Part five.
By March 1945, the Allies were across the Rine in some sectors and pressing hard in others. Cologne, the fourth largest city in Germany before the war, had been hit by more than 260 Allied air raids. Roughly 95% of its population had fled or been killed. The medieval cathedral, the Coner Dome, still stood in the ruins.
Around it, inside the rubble of the city, were fragments of German units that did not understand or did not accept that they had lost. Among them was at least one Panther tank hidden between buildings with a crew commanded by a man named Wilhelm Bartleborth. The American advance on Cologne was led by the third armored division, Lafayette Pool’s old division, the Spearhead.
6 months earlier, P had been blown out of his tank near Stolberg. The men around him had kept fighting through the west wall in the Battle of the Bulge. Among them was a corporal from Lee Heighten, Pennsylvania named Clarence Smooyer. Smooyer had landed in France a few weeks after D-Day, served as a loader, was promoted a gunner, watched friends die in burning Shermans through the autumn and winter.
In late February 1945, Smooyer’s crew had been picked along with 19 others to receive the United States Army’s first heavy tank. This was the M26 Persing, formerly while it was still in field trial, the T-26E3. 46 tons, 90mm main gun, front armor that could stop most of what the Germans could throw at it.
20 of them total in Europe at first, split between the third and the ninth armored divisions. Smooyer’s tank was named Eagle 7. Commander Staff Sergeant Robert Early of Fountain, Minnesota. Driver William McVey. Loader Private John Deriggy of Scranton, Pennsylvania. Radio operator Homer Smokey Davis. Smooyer in the gunner seat, 21 years old.
Earlier on the morning of March 6th in the Cathedral District, two Shermans of Fox Company, 32nd Armored Regiment, had been advancing parallel to Eagle 7. The lead Sherman was commanded by Lieutenant Carl Kelner. Kelner had earned a silver star eight days earlier. His column was funneled into a narrow street by a pile of rubble that needed to be cleared.
While they waited for a dozer, Bartleborth’s panther, invisible behind the debris, fired. Two 75mm shells went into the turret of Kelner’s Sherman in quick succession. The first killed his gunner and his driver and tore off his left leg. He died inside the tank. A third Panther round disabled the Sherman behind him.
Among the men hit was Corporal John Gallica, who survived with shrapnel through his legs and the recollection of being pinned to his seat as the tank burned around him. Eagle 7 was on a parallel street early dismounted with an army cameraman named Jim Bates and went into a building called the Deutsche Arbitr headquarters.
From there he and Bates could see the side of Bartleborth’s Panther. Early walked back to his Persing. He told Smooyer they would slip into the intersection and fire on the side of the Panther. When Eagle 7 came around the corner, the Panther was traversing its turret toward them. Bartleborth was experienced. He understood somehow that something was coming.
By the time the Panther’s gun was fully around, Smooyer had already fired. He fired three rounds in quick succession. The first was 90 mm HVAP, a T30e16 round with a tungsten carbide core. The Panther was hit. The crew began to bail out. Smooyer fired again and again. The Panther burned in the Cathedral Square. Bartleborth was killed.
Two of his crew escaped. The whole thing was filmed. The Bates footage of the Persing rolling forward and the Panther burning in front of the clone cathedral became one of the most famous reels of the war. What the film does not show is what was inside the round. Inside the round was a small, dense, almost black cylinder of pressed tungsten carbide.
The same metal that had been priced at $453 a pound by an American corporation in 1928. The same metal that the same corporation had spent 15 years keeping out of American factories. The same metal whose royalty reports had been mailed to Crop under cover sheets ending Hile Hitler. In other words, when the gun on Eagle 7 fired through the side of Wilhelm Bartleborth’s Panther on the morning of March 6th, 1945, the round it fired was carrying in its core the answer to a 16-year-old corporate question.
The answer was, “This is what your engineers built. This is what your contract suppressed. This is what we needed in 1942. This is what got here at last. Smooyer survived the war. So did Earlyie Derrigy Davis McVey. Decades later, Smooyer returned to Cologne, found Gustaf Schaefer, the German gunner of a Panzerfor, who had also been in the city that day, and they walked the same street together as old men.
The book Adam Makos wrote about Smooyer and his crew, Spearhead, became a bestseller in 2019. Meanwhile, across the ocean, the legal reckoning continued. The original 1940 indictment had been suspended for the duration of the war so that war production would not be disrupted. In 1947 in a federal courtroom in New York, the case United States versus General Electric Company Friedrich Kup Achin Gazelle shaft at Alpa finally went to trial.
A reporter from the union paper UE news named Max Learner was at most sessions the only journalist in the room. By the second day of trial, the commercial newspapers had stopped coming. Learner described reading letter after letter from [ __ ] officials to GE officials ending in 1937 and 1938 and 1939 with the salutation Hyle Hitler. He described the documented crook message ordering GE not to export carbaloid to Russia.
He described the parade of American businessmen who testified that they had been making and selling tungsten carbide before the cartel agreement and had been driven out of the market by it. The court found GE in violation of antitrust law. The sentence in Learner’s account was modest. Most of the executives walked away. Most of the country did not know the trial had happened. Verdict. Now we add it up.
The German army in 1944 was not defeated in the tank war on the Western Front by superior American tanks. The Sherman, even in its 76 mm form, was not the equal of the Panther. The Tiger form and Tiger II outclassed the Sherman by far. American tankers spent a year dying to learn this and then dying again to overcome it.
The Persing arrived too late in too few numbers to change the order of battle. 20 Persings in February 1945, 200 or so in Europe by VE Day with only a handful of confirmed tank kills before the German collapse. What had defeat the German tank arm in the slow accumulation of months was the metal in the round. tungsten carbide cores in 76 millimeter 3-inch and 90 millimeter HVAP shells, the Wolf from Crisis blockade that strangled German access to the same ore, and the late painful contested ramp up of American tungsten carbide production
after 16 years of cartel induced underproduction. The engineers who knew the powders and the temperatures had been right since the 1920s. The technology was real. The patents had names on them. The price had been criminal. The verdict is this. The genius invention of the GE engineers was not a single device.
It was the cemented tungsten carbide technology that they had pulled out of the lamp department in the 1920s and proved on the bench would change industry. By purely engineering metrics, it should have made the United States the dominant producer of tooling and highdensity metallurgy on Earth by 1935.
It would have meant, Michael Strait estimated in 1942, 20% more American industrial output. It would have meant Sherman Cruz carrying 20 rounds of HVAP per tank by D-Day instead of one round per month by November 1944. It would have meant Lafayette Pool’s third in the mood not getting blown apart in front of Stolberg.
It would have meant Carl Kelner not bleeding to death in a turret in Cologne. It was suppressed not by Berlin, by skenctity, by a contract that paid royalties to a German firm running slave labor camps. by a price fixing scheme that turned a $6 medal into a $453 medal. By corporate executives who, in the words the president of Carbaloy used in front of a Senate committee in April 1942, refused to be called unamerican.
The engineers fought two enemies. One was the German army. The other was the contract above their heads. The contract was finally broken in slow motion by federal indictment, by Senate testimony, by Truman committee pressure, and by the simple physical fact that American boys were burning to death in tanks because nobody had built the production base.
By 1945, with their employer’s contract lying in pieces, the engineers work was finally on the front line. It came in cardboard tubes marked T4 and M93 with little dense cylinders of pressed gray metal at the heart of every round. There were the soldiers, there were the engineers, there was the metal, and there was between them a contract that for 16 years had stood in the way.
If this forensic audit gave you something to think about, hit that like button. It pushes this video toward the people who care about getting the history right, not just the history that gets written down by public relations departments. Subscribe if you want the next chapter because the story of how American industry actually won the war and the story of who inside that industry was working against it is bigger than one shell and one cartel.
War is mathematics. But the men who fought it were not numbers. They had names. Lafayette Pool, Carl Kelner, Clarence Smooyer, the unnamed carbaloy machinists who pressed the cores, the unnamed lieutenants who picked up the burned bodies. They deserve to be remembered by their names, not by the lines on a balance sheet that in 1928 decided what they would and would not be allowed to fight