Young American soldiers, many of them in combat for the first time, threw down their equipment and ran.

Over the next 9 days, the Americans were pushed back more than 50 mileS.

By the time the line finally held at Thala and Sbiba, approximately 6,300 American soldiers had been killed, wounded, or captured.

General Omar Bradley would later describe the opening days of that battle as the worst performance in the long history of the United States Army.

And yet, fewer than 18 months later, those same American divisions would break the German army in Normandy, race across France faster than any field army in modern history, and close the jaws of the vice on the Third Reich from the weSt.

They would do it not by copying the Germans, not by that looked to every other army on the continent strange, wasteful, sometimes reckless, and profoundly unlike anything European soldiers had seen before.

This is the story of why American infantry advanced differently than every European army in the Second World War.

What that difference cost and what it boughT.

To understand what American infantry became, you first have to understand what it waS.

The basic building block of the United States Army was the triangular infantry division, roughly 15,000 men organized around three infantry regiments, each containing three battalions, each battalion containing three rifle companies, three into three into three, all the way down to the rifle squad of 12 men.