This book is based on the report from Brigadier General Isaac D. White, Commanding General Second Armored Division, U.S. Army by request from General Dwight D. Eisenhower. The report compares U.S. and German equipment, from tanks to small arms.The report was originally classified as SECRET and the reader of this heavily illustrated book will see why.20. March 1945, Gen. I.D. White responded to a request from the Supreme Commander of Allied Expeditionary Force.

A tank man recalls:
Suddenly, across the platoon officer’s voice came a sharp click. We’d heard it before. We couldn’t see the tank but we knew what the click meant. Charlie took over the radio network. The others obeyed his orders calmly, resolutely, as if it were the most natural thing in the world for their comrade to depart suddenly like that - with a click.Second World War technology made it possible to be killed in virtual silence - at least so it appeared. When in a tank battle a tank was hit and penetrated by an armor piercing projectile, the only sound heard by those connected in same radio network was a light “click”.

On Page 65, Exhibit No.3 - Clyde D. Brunson,Sgt. Tank Commander, 2D Armored Division:
“One day a TIGER Royal tank got within 150 yards of my tank and knocked me out. Five of our tanks opened up on him of ranges of 200 to 600 yards and got five or six hits on the front of the TIGER. They all just glanced off and the TIGER backed off and got away. If we had a tank like the TIGER, we all would be home today”.

Explaining what this meant in military effectiveness, he pointed out that the IIIrd Army had lost l,136 tanks between August 1, 1944 and mid March 1945. In the same period it had knocked out 2,287 German tanks, of which 808 were TIGER or Panther heavies. “As we always have attacked”, he went on, “70% of our casualties have been from dug in anti-tank guns, whereas most of the enemy’s tanks have been put out of action by our tanks.”

The book “Wartime” by Paul Fussell, Oxford University Press, 1989 quotes: “The Real War Will Never Get in the Books”.
Excerpt from page 267: They knew that despite the advertising and publicity, where it counted, their arms and equipment were worse than the German’s. They knew that their automatic rifles (World War One vintage) were slower and clumsier, and they knew that the Germans had a much better light machine gun. They knew that despite official assertions to the contrary, the Germans had real smokeless powder for their small arms and that they did not. They knew that their own tanks, both American and British, were ridiculously under-armed and under-armored, so that they were inevitably destroyed in an open encounter with an equal number of German Panzers. And they knew that the greatest single weapon of the War, the atomic bomb excepted, was the German 88 mm flat-trajectory gun.