Somewhere in a quiet American town, a photograph sits in a box of wartime keepsakes. It shows a young lieutenant standing in the Tunisian sand beside a burned-out Sherman tank. February 1943. The old soldier never spoke about that month, but most of them never did.

This is the story of why. On the road outside the Tunisian town of Sbeitla, the wind carried the smell of burnt oil and charred rubber. On both sides of that road lay the hulks of American armor, blackened and abandoned in the sand. Stuart tanks with their turrets twisted sideways.

Brand-new M4 Shermans that had never been hit, left behind with their ignition keys still in place and their fuel gauges reading full. Their crews were gone. Some were dead. Others stumbled west in dazed columns, having thrown down their weapons.

Officers were missing. The rest were being marched east toward three years of captivity. This was not a rearguard action. This was a mass rout.

In the hills above the burning wreckage, German soldiers moved slowly among the ruins, laughing, collecting souvenirs, taking American cigarettes, coffee, and chocolate rations. The world would later call this the Battle of Kasserine Pass. But that name is misleading. What happened on that ground was not really a battle.

It was a diagnosis, rendered by the veterans of the Afrika Korps on an army they had never faced before. And that judgment, brilliant, confident, and utterly convincing, would travel back to Berlin in intelligence reports. Sixteen months later, it would help destroy an entire German army group on beaches called Omaha, Utah, Gold, Juno, and Sword. Because the man who held that victory in his name, the Desert Fox himself, Erwin Rommel, was about to make the most consequential mistake of his career.

Not on the battlefield, but in his mind. And in the minds of every officer who read his reports. To understand what happened, you must understand how everyone arrived there. In November 1942, the course of the war in North Africa changed.

At a remote railway station called El Alamein, Bernard Montgomery finally broke Rommel’s line and sent the Panzer Army Africa retreating west. Almost simultaneously, a massive Anglo-American fleet landed on the shores of Morocco and Algeria. Operation Torch, the largest amphibious assault in history up to that moment. The strategic pincers were closing.

Rommel, withdrawing from Egypt through Libya, realized immediately what was coming. He would be trapped between Montgomery’s Eighth Army from the east and fresh Anglo-American forces from the west. The German response was swift and desperate. Hitler ordered a new command established in Tunisia.

Fresh troops were flown across the Mediterranean. New panzer divisions for a new army, led by the Prussian aristocrat General Hans-Jürgen von Arnim, cold, precise, and hardened on the Eastern Front. He landed in Tunisia in December 1942. The Axis had two commanders, two armies, and one shrinking pocket.

They did not like each other. That mattered more than anyone could have imagined. The Americans were coming from the west. Ports from Casablanca to Oran were unloading a steady stream of men and equipment.

New tanks, new trucks, new rations, and new soldiers, most of whom had never heard a shot fired in anger. Their commander in North Africa was a former staff officer named Dwight Eisenhower. He had never led men in combat. But he possessed a talent the war needed more than any other: he could hold the alliance together.

For the American ground forces advancing east toward Tunisia, Eisenhower needed a corps commander. The choice was Major General Lloyd Fredendall. At fifty-nine, he was bald, gruff, and a failed West Point graduate who had returned to the army through the back door. His superiors adored him.

His subordinates were about to learn why they should not. He had led the Central Task Force during Operation Torch and taken Oran with reasonable competence. That success made him Eisenhower’s choice to command II Corps. On paper, he commanded one of the finest units in the US Army, the 1st Armored Division, led by Major General Orlando Ward.

Ward believed correctly that armored power must be concentrated or it would be destroyed. His division would be split into small groups across a front of a hundred miles. The order came not from Fredendall but from Lieutenant General Kenneth Anderson, commander of the entire British First Army, blunt, contemptuous of American troops, and unwilling to trust them with concentrated armor. By early February 1943, the 1st Armored Division existed only as isolated combat commands, each too small to face a real German panzer division and too far apart to help each other.

One of those isolated positions was a hill called Djebel Lessouda, defended by a force under Colonel John Waters, a tall, blond cavalryman who was also the son-in-law of George S. Patton. On February 14, 1943, the storm broke. At four in the morning, the first shells began falling on Waters’s positions.

Then came the Stukas, screaming out of the dark sky, bombing communications lines, telephone wires, radio towers, and command posts. Within twenty minutes, Waters was deaf and blind. From the dust, the German tanks appeared. The 10th Panzer Division, with about 110 tanks, advanced like water around rock, flowing around the American positions, isolating them, leaving them for the infantry to destroy.

The 21st Panzer Division did the same. Within hours, both American positions were islands surrounded by a sea of German steel. By late afternoon of the first day, the situation on Djebel Lessouda was hopeless. Waters ordered his men to hold as long as possible and try to break out after dark.

He was captured himself within twenty-four hours, along with nearly 1,400 of his men. The son-in-law of the man who would soon be sent to fix this disaster was now a prisoner of war. And the disaster had only just begun. From his headquarters seventy miles behind the front line, Fredendall did what commanders do when they are afraid and do not understand what is happening.

He ordered a counterattack. He did not know the terrain. He did not know the enemy’s strength. He drew an arrow on a map, and that arrow would kill young Americans.

The order passed down the chain of command to Lieutenant Colonel James Alger, commanding the 2nd Battalion, 1st Armored Regiment, with fifty-four brand-new Sherman tanks. At dawn on February 15, Alger’s battalion advanced east across open ground toward Sidi Bou Zid. The Germans watched them come from ten kilometers away. They did exactly what the Afrika Korps had been doing to British armor for two years.

Panzer IVs appeared on the horizon. The Shermans opened fire. A few German tanks seemed to stagger, then turn, then withdraw. It looked like the beginning of a rout.

Alger pressed forward to pursue. He led his tanks into the kill zone. As his battalion crested a low rise, the 88mm guns opened fire. At two thousand meters, the 88 did not just damage a Sherman.

It destroyed it completely. The high-velocity round pierced the front armor like tin. Tank after tank exploded in columns of black smoke. In less than an hour, Alger’s battalion was annihilated.

Fifty of fifty-four Shermans were destroyed or disabled in the valley. The crews fled on foot. Most did not survive. James Alger was captured, wounded, before sunset.

In two days, the 1st Armored Division lost more than 100 tanks. The survivors who walked west in the dark did not stop until they had covered fifty miles. While the Americans burned in the valley, Rommel turned north. His own operation, Morgenluft, had gone on schedule.

His forces seized the town of Gafsa almost without a fight. He read the reports coming in from von Arnim’s front. The American armor had been destroyed. The road west to the great Allied supply base at Thala seemed wide open.

For a moment, standing in the dust of Gafsa, Erwin Rommel saw that the North African war might still be winnable. If he moved fast and struck deep, he would not just embarrass the Americans. He would break the entire Allied flank in Tunisia. He drafted a plan, an offensive, everything on one blade thrust into one artery.

He presented it to Kesselring in Rome on February 18. The answer came back on the 19th. Kesselring had approved the attack, but he had also changed it. Instead of one concentrated thrust northwest through Kasserine toward Thala, Rome divided his forces.

A column would attack through Kasserine Pass toward Thala. Another would attack farther north through Sbeitla. Rommel’s spearhead had been split in half. He was furious.

He wrote in his diary that the decision from Rome was a catastrophe. But there was no time to argue. He sent his tanks into a plan he did not believe in. That decision, not the later American recovery, was the moment when the possibility of an Axis strategic victory in Tunisia died.

The Battle of Kasserine Pass would still be a tactical disaster for the Americans. But it would not be the decisive blow Rommel wanted. The German attack on Kasserine Pass began on the night of February 19. An Italian colonel named Luigi Bonfatti led the first breakthrough.

His men, Bersaglieri with rooster feathers on their helmets, pierced the American defensive line in a brutal night battle. Bonfatti died at the head of his regiment. Through the gap, the panzers flowed. Over the next three days, fighting spread across rocky hills and dry riverbeds.

The German drive toward Thala met a hastily organized British battle group under Brigadier Cameron Nicholson, drawn from the 6th Armored Division and called Nickforce. It was an improvised collection of British and American units thrown together in twenty-four hours. It held. To the south, an American brigadier named Paul Robinett took command of Combat Command B of the 1st Armored Division and secured the road toward Thala.

His artillery observers worked with their British counterparts to produce the first truly coordinated American artillery barrage of the campaign. It was not enough to defeat the Germans. It was enough to slow them down. And on this ground, at this hour, slowing them down was enough.

On February 22, Eisenhower made a decision that revealed what he was thinking about Fredendall. He did not relieve him. Not yet. Instead, he sent Major General Ernest Harmon, commander of the 2nd Armored Division in Morocco, to be Fredendall’s deputy corps commander.

In practice, he would carry the actual burden of corps operations. Harmon arrived at Sbeitla on February 23. He entered the tunnel complex and found Fredendall in his private quarters. Fredendall did not ask for a report.

He did not brief him on the tactical situation. He handed Harmon a note authorizing him to take command of II Corps. Then Fredendall went to sleep. Harmon stared at the paper.

He went out into the valley, found the operations map, and spent the next seventy-two hours running the battle in Fredendall’s name while Fredendall remained functionally absent. Under Harmon’s steady hand, and thanks to the resistance at Thala and Sbeitla, Rommel’s offensive began to lose momentum. On the night of February 22, the tanks began to withdraw. The Battle of Kasserine Pass was over.

By any meaningful measure, the Axis had won. Ten thousand Allied casualties, six thousand of them American. Nearly two hundred American tanks destroyed, six hundred vehicles lost, two hundred artillery pieces abandoned. Axis losses were under two thousand.

It was one of the most lopsided tactical defeats the American army would suffer in the entire war. It was also the beginning of the German catastrophe. Because a defeat this brutal, this public, this humiliating, could not be absorbed by an army that intended to fight for four more years. It had to be answered.

And in the answering, something was forged in the American army that the Germans did not yet believe possible. On February 25, Eisenhower flew to the front. He did not send a staff officer. He got into a jeep himself and drove through the wreckage of II Corps.

He saw abandoned equipment, burning Shermans still smoking in the valley. He spoke to soldiers who could not tell him where their officers were. He visited Fredendall’s tunnel complex with an expression his aides later said they never wanted to see again. He returned to Algiers and wrote the message that ended Fredendall’s field career.

On March 6, 1943, he replaced him. The man who arrived at Sbeitla that morning in a command car with large stars painted on the fenders, a siren screaming to announce his approach from a mile away, was Major General George S. Patton Jr. He found Fredendall still eating breakfast.

The change of command was quiet. Fredendall packed his bags. He left Tunisia. He left the war.

Patton walked through the tunnels once in silence, then came out. His aide recorded in his diary that the general’s face was hard as granite. He ordered the corps headquarters moved forward out of the mountain, into tents where the sound of artillery could be heard. That night he wrote in his own diary: I have never seen so much disorder or lack of discipline.

I cannot see what Lloyd did to justify his existence. The next morning, he began rebuilding II Corps. The reforms came like machine-gun fire, overnight, all at once, mercilessly. The mess hall closed its doors at seven-thirty.

Every soldier in II Corps, without exception, would wear his helmet at all times. Every officer would wear a necktie. Any violation cost twenty-five dollars, nearly half a soldier’s monthly pay. Men who had just survived a brutal battle against the Afrika Korps could hardly believe what they were hearing.

They did not understand it yet. Discipline is not just appearance. It is habit. If a soldier could not be trusted to wear his helmet in Thala, he could not be trusted to hold his position at Sbeitla.

Patton was not trying to make his men look like soldiers. He was trying to make them into soldiers by forcing them to act like soldiers until the acting became real. The Germans were watching. But they did not see the truth.

They looked at the same men, the same divisions, and concluded that nothing important had changed. They believed they were watching a defeated army. They were watching an army learning. On March 9, 1943, three days after Patton took command of II Corps, Rommel flew out of Africa for the last time.

Exhausted and frustrated, he boarded a plane at Sfax bound for Hitler’s headquarters in Rastenburg, East Prussia. Officially, he was going on sick leave. In reality, he was going to argue his case. He believed the Axis position in Tunisia was indefensible.

He wanted to evacuate the theater to save the panzer army. Hitler would not listen. Hitler flew into a rage that his most famous marshal had abandoned his post. He ordered Rommel never to return to Africa.

Command passed entirely to von Arnim. The Desert Fox never saw the desert again. He would spend the coming months recovering, then in command posts in Greece and northern Italy, before being given the assignment that would bring the story of Kasserine back to haunt him. In November 1943, he was placed in command of Army Group B in France, charged with fortifying the Atlantic Wall.

He carried with him from the hills of Tunisia an image of the American soldier. He would trust that image. He would build a strategy around it. And he would die because of it.

The American army that Rommel believed he had broken forever attacked in the spring of 1943. The place was called El Guettar, a dusty crossroads village eighteen miles southeast of Gafsa. On March 17, the 1st Ranger Battalion under Lieutenant Colonel William Darby seized the town in a skillfully executed night attack. Behind them, taking up defensive positions across the valley, came the 1st Infantry Division, the Big Red One, under Major General Terry de la Mesa Allen.

They were veterans now, survivors of Kasserine, and they were angry. At six in the morning on March 23, the 10th Panzer Division surged from the eastern hills to attack. It was the same 10th Panzer Division that had annihilated Alger’s battalion at Sidi Bou Zid. The Germans had been told, based on intelligence reports still reflecting the diagnosis of Kasserine, that the American infantry in their path would collapse under armored pressure.

They did not collapse. The Big Red One dug in deep. They laid mines and anti-tank guns forward. Their artillery observers were up front, in radio contact with the guns of II Corps hidden in the rear.

When the panzers descended into the valley in the dawn light, they entered a kill zone. The 601st Tank Destroyer Battalion, equipped with M3 half-tracks and 75mm guns, fought and died to buy time. The battalion lost 14 men and 21 of its 31 vehicles in less than an hour. But the sacrifice served its purpose.

The panzers slowed. They were channeled. Then the American artillery opened up. The barrage that fell on the 10th Panzer Division that morning was unlike anything the Germans had faced in North Africa.

Corps artillery, operating through fire direction centers that had not existed a month earlier, poured its full weight of 105mm and 155mm howitzers onto the German armor. In less than an hour, nearly thirty panzers were destroyed or disabled. The attack broke before it even completed. Von Arnim withdrew, reorganized, and tried again late in the afternoon.

The result was the same. The American line did not move. A major German armored offensive against American forces had failed decisively for the first time in the North African campaign. Patton wrote in his diary that the American soldier had matured.

The after-action reports sent through von Arnim to Kesselring and then to the intelligence branch in Berlin told a different story. They described the battle of El Guettar as an exception. They noted the stubbornness of the Big Red One but attributed it to the unusual quality of that particular division. They described the hidden artillery as luck.

In their files and their doctrinal documents, they preserved the picture painted at Kasserine a month earlier. Everything they had concluded about the American soldier that February still stood. El Guettar changed nothing. The man responsible for this diagnosis was a colonel named Alexis von Roenne, chief analyst for American forces in the intelligence branch known as Army Group West.

He believed in his data. He selected the reports that confirmed the Kasserine picture to sit on his desk. The reports that complicated it, like El Guettar, were logged, filed, and largely forgotten. A lie born of a real defeat, preserved by intellectual laziness, hardened into doctrine.

In the United States, the man whose failures had led to the catastrophe of Kasserine was welcomed home as a hero. Fredendall returned to America in the spring of 1943 to a hero’s reception. The American public had not been told what had really happened. He was not disgraced.

He was not court-martialed. To maintain morale and protect the reputations of the officers who had promoted him, the army promoted him instead. He was advanced to lieutenant general, three stars. He was given command of the Second Army in Memphis, Tennessee, where he would spend the rest of the war training young Americans to fight a war he himself had proven unable to wage.

He would die in retirement in 1996 with a full lieutenant general’s pension and a public record free of any blemish. By mid-May 1943, the Axis position in Tunisia was finished. More than a quarter-million German and Italian soldiers, trapped in the Cap Bon peninsula, laid down their arms in the largest mass surrender the Wehrmacht had yet suffered. Von Arnim was captured.

The Afrika Korps, the desert army that had fought from El Alamein to the gates of Alexandria and back again, ceased to exist. Yet in Berlin, in the file cabinets of Armed Forces Command West, something strange happened. The loss of the army in Tunisia was treated as a logistical accident, a failure of supply, a Mediterranean tragedy. What remained, what was preserved, what was transmitted, was the diagnosis.

Americans are fragile. Americans cannot coordinate combined arms. Americans will collapse under a strong first blow. This was the picture that would travel west with Rommel when he took up his new command on the coast of France.

This was the picture that would shape every mine laid, every bunker poured with concrete, every panzer division positioned during the year of preparation before the great Allied invasion. The picture was beautiful. The picture was coherent. The picture was based on evidence.

The picture was the embodiment of an army that no longer existed. A year and three months later, that picture reached a strip of Normandy coastline Rommel had already begun to walk. The real American army, forged in the wreckage of Kasserine and hardened at El Guettar, arrived having learned its lessons, rebuilt its systems, centralized its artillery, rewritten its air-ground doctrine, and removed its incompetent commanders. In November 1943, a gray morning on the Normandy coast, a tall exhausted man in a gray military overcoat walked along a seawall, his boots crunching on the frozen sand.

He carried a marshal’s baton. Erwin Rommel was fifty-two years old. He had less than a year to live. He walked the beaches in silence.

He looked at what others had built and shook his head. The Atlantic Wall of 1943 was a fraud, a propaganda film, a few concrete strongpoints separated by miles. Beaches without mines. Cliffs without barbed wire.

Fortresses without interlocking fields of fire. He was sent to defend a wall that did not exist. So he began with the enormous energy that always seized him at the start of any project. He ordered four million additional mines laid.

He designed beach obstacles that would pierce landing craft at high tide. He ordered the low fields inland flooded to drown paratroopers. In every conversation with his subordinates, in every argument with his superiors, he returned to one conviction: the invasion must be defeated on the beaches in the first twenty-four hours. He told them the American soldier was materially formidable but morally fragile.

If you could hit him hard enough and fast enough in his moment of greatest weakness, while he struggled through the surf, his morale would shatter. His command structure would collapse. His officers would freeze. He did not use the word Kasserine.

He did not need to. Every officer in the room knew what he meant. The argument that consumed the German command in France through the early months of 1944 was not about whether to defeat the invasion on the shore. Everyone agreed on that.

The disagreement was about how. Rommel wanted to keep the panzer divisions forward, a few hours from the coast, ready to strike the moment the first landing craft hit the sand. His superior, Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, commander of the entire western theater, belonged to the classical school. He wanted to hold the panzers in depth, in a massive reserve, to be launched in a coordinated counterattack once the direction of the main Allied thrust was known.

Rommel called this an illusion. Von Rundstedt called Rommel’s plan a waste of effort. They could not agree. In the spring of 1944, the dispute was referred to Hitler.

As always, he refused to choose. Rommel was given control of three panzer divisions near the coast. Von Rundstedt kept four divisions in reserve, but those four could not be moved without Hitler’s personal permission. Hitler had paralyzed both plans at once.

Rommel did not have enough armor forward to crush a major landing. Von Rundstedt did not have the freedom to launch the strategic counterattack he wanted. Every panzer division in France on the morning of June 6, 1944, would be in the wrong place. Rommel, the man who understood Allied air power better than any other German, did not fight against this compromise hard enough.

Because deep in his thinking, he still believed the diagnosis of Kasserine. He still believed that if his forward divisions could reach the beach, if they hit the Americans hard enough in the first hours, morale would do the rest. He would be wrong. Catastrophically, unspeakably wrong.

June 6, 1944. The sky over Normandy was not empty. It was full of aircraft. Eleven thousand planes: fighter-bombers, medium bombers, heavy bombers, transports, gliders, reconnaissance aircraft.

The Allies had achieved something the German army and Rommel personally had never faced in three years of war: absolute air supremacy. The moment a panzer division began to move in daylight, it was doomed. The 12th SS Panzer Division Hitlerjugend, sent late to the front, suffered terrible losses on the roads before ever reaching the fight. The Panzer Lehr Division, the elite formation made up of the German armor school’s training units, was bombed and strafed every mile of its march toward the front.

Its commander was a name familiar to the man who had once stood beside Rommel in Tunisia and watched Americans burn his comrades. Fritz Bayerlein. He had served under Rommel as chief of staff of the Afrika Korps in 1941 and 1942. He believed what he had learned.

He believed the Americans he had crushed at Kasserine were the same ones he would meet in Normandy. On July 25, 1944, near the town of Saint-Lô, the American army taught him what it had learned. The operation was called Cobra. Nearly 1,500 American heavy bombers, followed by some 400 medium bombers, dropped almost 4,000 tons of high explosives on a strip of German front line four miles wide and one mile deep.

The target of this saturation bombing, more than any other formation, was Panzer Lehr. Within three hours, Panzer Lehr ceased to exist as a coherent military unit. The bombing not only destroyed tanks and men. It destroyed the ground around them.

Craters swallowed craters. Roads vanished. Communications lines were crushed. Bayerlein reported to Field Marshal Hausser that his division had been completely annihilated.

He used the German word restlos, meaning wiped out utterly. The former student of Rommel, the man who had once helped write the diagnosis of American weakness at Kasserine, had been erased from the war by American industrial firepower. Rommel was not there to see it. Nine days before Cobra began, on July 17, 1944, his car was being driven down a country road in Normandy near the village of Sainte-Foy-de-Montgomery.

The car was spotted by an Allied fighter, believed to be a Spitfire. The aircraft swooped down. Its cannon fire raked the road. Rommel’s driver was wounded.

The car careered off the road and overturned. Rommel was thrown from the vehicle, suffering a fractured skull and severe facial injuries. He was taken to a hospital, then to his home in Herrlingen, the small Swabian village where his family lived. Three days later, on July 20, a colonel named Claus von Stauffenberg carried a briefcase into a conference room at Hitler’s headquarters in Rastenburg.

The briefcase contained a bomb. The bomb exploded. The conspiracy was exposed, and the revenge that followed killed nearly 5,000 people. Rommel’s name was mentioned by the conspirators under torture.

Whether he had known the full details of the plot remains a matter of debate eighty years later. What is not in dispute is what happened on the afternoon of October 14, 1944. Two generals from the Wehrmacht personnel office arrived at his home. They offered him a choice.

He could take a small vial of hydrogen cyanide, receive a state funeral, and have his family protected. Or he could refuse and face trial before the People’s Court, losing everything. He said goodbye to his wife, Lucie, and his son, Manfred. He put on his greatcoat.

He left with the generals in the back seat of a staff car, driven a few hundred meters into the woods outside the village. He took the poison. He was fifty-two years old. Two weeks later, the Third Reich buried him with full military honors.

The public was told he had died of his wounds from the air attack in Normandy. The truth was not officially revealed until after the war. The Desert Fox, the last German general his enemies genuinely respected, was killed on Hitler’s orders in a car outside his own village on a quiet October afternoon. Because at Kasserine he believed he had seen the true face of the American soldier.

He carried that belief with him west to the shores of France. He built an entire strategy on it. He built a fortress wall on it. He staked the outcome of the war on it.

He was wrong. The lesson of Kasserine was never that Rommel lost the battle. He won it. The mistake was in assuming that an army that had failed once, publicly and catastrophically, could not learn how to succeed.

The Germans had won the battle so completely that it confirmed everything they already believed. And in being confirmed in what they believed, they became intellectually lazy. The Americans lost the battle so completely that they were forced to question everything they thought they knew. And in questioning what they thought they knew, they became something new.

The greatest mistake of Erwin Rommel’s career was not a tactical error. It was intellectual. He looked at a defeated American army and concluded that the moment was permanent. He believed that because the Americans were poor soldiers on February 20, 1943, they would remain poor soldiers on June 6, 1944.

This belief, born of his own brilliance, confirmed by his own intelligence service, and carried with him to the Atlantic Wall, would cost him everything. The Americans, by contrast, looked at their own disaster at Kasserine and did not comfort themselves with talk of warrior spirit. They did not blame the weather or the enemy’s genius or bad luck. They examined their own bones.

They saw what was rotten. They cut it out. They wrote new doctrine. They fired their generals.

They rebuilt their training. They centralized their artillery. They coordinated their air and ground forces. They took the humiliation of Sidi Bou Zid and Kasserine and systematically transformed it into the machine that crushed the panzers at Saint-Lô.

Rommel was too brilliant a soldier not to see American weaknesses clearly. But he was not wise enough to imagine that those weaknesses could be repaired. And so, from the wreckage of Kasserine, two very different paths led forward. One led to Herrlingen in the autumn of 1944, to a vial of cyanide in the back of a staff car.

The other led to Saint-Lô in the summer of 1944, where a panzer division was erased from the face of the earth by an army the Germans had once dismissed as amateurs. That is the terrible irony at the heart of this story. Rommel’s greatest mistake was not that he lost at Kasserine. He won at Kasserine.

His greatest mistake was that he did not win enough to be afraid.