They Mocked His “Stupid” Spike Pit — Until It Destroyed 27 German Tanks in 13 Seconds

Video Description

Uncover the astonishing true story of how a 37-year-old mining engineer from Minnesota, Captain David Mitchell Harris, used nothing but wood, dirt, and physics to annihilate one of Germany’s elite panzer battalions in just thirteen seconds south of Aachen in October 1944. While West Point–trained officers dismissed his idea as a “stupid spike pit,” Harris quietly applied the failure mechanics and load-bearing calculations he’d learned in the iron mines of the Mesabi Range to turn an unremarkable ravine into the deadliest anti-tank obstacle of the European campaign. In this gripping documentary, we follow how a single platoon with no concrete, no heavy guns, and almost no mines transformed a 40-meter-wide ravine into a three-layered killing ground: a false crust that collapsed under the weight of Panther tanks, precisely angled wooden stakes that shattered and twisted to rip off tracks, snap suspension arms, and flip 45-ton vehicles, and engineered collapse zones that buried or trapped anything that tried to maneuver out. When the Eleventh Panzer Division attacked at dawn, twenty-seven Panthers—nearly forty percent of its heavy tank strength—were destroyed or immobilized before American gunners fired more than a handful of rounds, forcing the Germans to halt their counterattack and shocking both First Army headquarters and the Wehrmacht’s seasoned tank crews. Drawing on after-action reports, captured German documents, post-war engineering analyses, and later interviews, this video reveals how Harris’s background in mining engineering allowed him to see what professional military engineers could not: that the most efficient way to defeat heavy armor was not to resist its weight, but to weaponize it. You’ll see how his “impossible” design rewrote anti-tank doctrine, inspired dozens of copycat obstacles along the Western Front, influenced NATO’s Cold War defensive planning, and became a legendary case study taught in military academies as proof that real expertise and fundamental physics can overturn entrenched doctrine. Discover how a soft-spoken engineer who was nearly relieved of command for refusing to abandon his wooden stakes ended up receiving the Distinguished Service Cross, becoming a special consultant on defensive engineering, and changing the way modern armies think about terrain, obstacles, and innovation in war.