Number 3 is horse manure. My grandfather went over the top seven times before he was hit. Maybe adding the number of total soldiers and of that total that included REMFs and other rear area support that would not be involved in combat, that number sort of fits. Just counting line soldiers you would not have a number like that one- they were involved in heavy close combat with most all shooting. Men back then were men, not snowflakes.
I have heard similar stats regarding WW2 soldiers and
that even at the front the highest percentage of grunts
never fired their weapons in anger. Asked my WIA WW2
paratrooper dad about it once and he basically said that
if there was ever a guy in his Company on Leyte who didn’t
fire his weapon then he would have sure wanted to have
the guy’s ammo.
I assume that a lot of soldiers 1) showed up in the trenches 2) died from artillery, and were never even in a situation where they would fire their weapons.
Lt. Hiroo Onoda heard many times that the war was over...he just didn’t believe it. He was part of a special infiltration unit deposited on Lubang Island late in the war, and they had been told to disregard any such reports as propaganda. Even when he and his men captured a modern Japanese transistor radio and were able to pick up Radio NHK out of Japan itself, they believed it was an elaborate plot...though they were quite interested in the race reports and news of the royal family.
In the end, Lt. Onoda finally surrendered when his old commanding officer—by then a bookshop owner in Tokyo, who had long since given Onoda up for dead—read him the Imperial order of surrender, in person.