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U. S. correspondents who were taken along by the Germans in their pursuit of the Allies to the sea repeatedly expressed amazement at the Hitler machine's fitness and efficiency. They saw windrows of Allied but few German corpses, the German system being to bury their dead within an hour for reasons of morale as well as hygiene. Even before Dunkirk's final fall, masses of German troops began moving to the new southern front. German mechanics drove back long lines of abandoned Allied motor trucks, camouflaging them with their own blue-grey paint, loading them with salvaged parts such as batteries, tires, spark plugs or with captured gasoline and other supplies. German engineers were already at work reconditioning the captured Channel ports (but the British, after two tries, effectively blocked Zeebrugge with four ships full of concrete).
Reported by U. S. correspondents were some fine points of Nazi technique: > In bombing enemy columns, German pilots aimed their missiles at the roadsides, whence their fragmentation was just as devastating, rather than blowing holes in the road surface, which might impede pursuing German columns. Similarly, in razed towns, whole blocks of houses were destroyed without damage to the streets.
>Cultivated fields, in which harvests will soon be ripe for the German conquerors, were virtually unscathed by bombing or artillery fire.
>German officers called the stench of death "the perfume of battle.
* Official German figure for the Polish campaign was 10,572 German officers and men killed-317 more than admitted in fighting the combined Allies.