I doubt this story very much. It's well documented that McAuliffe rarely used profanity, and it's similarly well documented, including by the US Army official historian, that the official reply was indeed "nuts".

https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/40063/what-did-g...

People who rarely use profanity means they do use it, and when they do, they do it for effect. Certainly, a demand that he surrender Bastogne would justify profanity in a forceful response.

> including by the US Army official historian

An official US Army historian's job is to make the US Army look good.

As we are all painfully aware these days, the accounts of newspapers are rarely accurate, and often outright fabrications. Why would WW2 accounts be any different?

I doubt McAuliffe would want to besmirch his record after the war, had nothing to gain by contraindicating it, and would be content to let it stand.

My father was a carefully honest man, and was never known by me to lie. He held his tongue until after McAuliffe passed away. He also told me some family secrets after all involved had passed, and asked me to keep them to myself until after he died, which I did.

It never occurred to me to ask him to write down that story, and now it's too late.

I know my evidence is hearsay and inadmissible in court. You're free to draw your own conclusions.

P.S. I was once personally involved in an incident that made the local TV news. There was nothing political about it, but each of the three local news channels got essentially all the basic facts about it wrong. But that is the "record" of the event. It pretty much soured me on the veracity of news reports.

Well Walter, ask yourself why Kinnard, who was in the room at the time and Harper, who delivered the message, and Premetz, the non-commissioned medic who translated it for the Germans, all give repeated official accounts and interviews that contradict the account of your father, who by your own admission merely "worked for the general briefly".

Is it all a grand conspiracy to protect the good name and reputation of McAuliffe?

I'll say no more.

My father had a first hand account from McAuliffe, like the other three, and had no reason whatsoever to misrepresent it.

> Is it all a grand conspiracy to protect the good name and reputation of McAuliffe?

A small conspiracy is not at all far-fetched. First off, it's an inconsequential thing. Secondly, if one of the three told the truth, then he'd be called a liar by the other two. Who needs that? If you're in the military, you don't get ahead by contradicting the narrative. (My dad found that out the hard way - he was punished more than once for not writing reports that fit the narrative.)

For a grand conspiracy, consider how long Biden's staff held out insisting that Biden was sharp as a tack and writing off contrary reports as disinformation.

The most compelling bit about my evidence is the frankly laughable idea that a GI would use the word "nuts".

P.S. I understand you have no particular reason to believe me, and if I were in your shoes I wouldn't, either.

If there is any takeaway here, it would be that historical accounts are always suspect. History is written by the victors, as they say.

Whether or not it's true, I think it's a pretty good story because it aligns BAR with "Beyond All Recognition", which is exactly the point of a metasyntactic variable: to be so separate that that context is unrecognizable.

Obfuscating the context is what F's it Up. Usually that's a problematic thing, but in the case of foo and bar, the F'ed Up version is maybe better.

Next you’re gonna tell me it wasn’t “damn the torpedoes”

Maybe the communication went like this:

Germans: "Wie Sie vermutlich wissen, sind Sie und Ihre Leute von allen Seiten umstellt. Wir gehen davon aus, dass Sie bereit sind, sich zu ergeben. Bitte bestätigen Sie dies."

MCAuliffe: "Dies Nutz"