Posted on 05/08/2025 10:30:05 AM PDT by Retain Mike
The Army deployed 65 infantry divisions for the Second World War. Each was a small town with its own equivalents for community services within eight categories of combat arms. Units such as artillery, engineering, and heavy weapons engaged the enemy directly. Yet of all categories, the foot soldier faced the greatest hazard with the least chance of reward.
These civilians become warriors, confronted the most dismal fate of all, and their duty was uninterrupted by missions completed or a fixed deployment time. The infantryman was enveloped within a deranged, barbaric, and brittle existence against a resolute enemy where victory often required actions pushing beyond prior limits for impossibility. Except for the Purple Heart and the coveted Combat Infantryman’s Badge, recognition often eluded these common men become citizen soldiers, because so few came through to testify to the valor of the many.
Omar Bradley said, “Previous combat had taught us that casualties are lumped primarily in the rifle platoons. For here are concentrated the handful of troops who must advance under enemy fire. It is upon them that the burden of war falls with greater risk and with less likelihood of survival than any other of the combat arms. An infantry division of WW II consisted of 81 rifle platoons, each with a combat strength of approximately 40 men. Altogether those 81 assault units comprised but 3,240 men in a division of 14,000…..Prior to invasion we had estimated that the infantry would incur 70 percent of the losses of our combat forces. By August we had boosted that figure to 83 percent on the basis of our experience in the Normandy hedgerows.”
Nearly a third of the 65 divisions in the Pacific and European theaters suffered 100% or more casualties. However, their regimental staffs saw frontline units obliterated three to six times over. To deal with this problem there were never enough infantrymen coming from the states, even though large numbers were transferred from Army Service Forces and Army Air Forces to Army Ground Forces. Replacement centers overseas continually reassigned artillerymen, machine gunners, cooks, and clerks to infantry duties. The situation in Europe became so severe that rear area units in France and Great Britain were tasked to supply soldiers for retraining as infantrymen. Those suffering battle fatigue came off the line for a few days for clean uniforms, bathing, hot food, and sleep. However, scarcity compelled their repeated return until crippling wounds, mental breakage, death, or victory brought final relief.
For example, the 4th and 29th Infantry Divisions landed on D-Day and suffered about 500% battle casualties in their rifle platoons during the eleven months until VE-Day. Added to these numbers were half again as many non-battle human wrecks debilitated by trench foot, gangrene, frost bite, pneumonia, hernia, heart disease, arthritis, etc. Many never returned to duty. In the jungles of the Pacific, non-combat losses often exacted a greater price through plague, malaria, dengue, scrub typhus, trachoma, hepatitis, dysentery, roundworm, and hookworm. But somehow the infantry crossed Europe and the Pacific and always remained at the forefront of attacks.
Ernie Pyle said of them, “The worst experience of all is just the accumulated blur, and the hurting vagueness of being too long in the lines, the everlasting alertness, the noise and fear, the cell-by-cell exhaustion, the thinning of the surrounding ranks as day follows nameless day. And the constant march into the eternity of one’s own small quota of chances for survival. Those are the things that hurt and destroy. But they went back to them because they were good soldiers, and they had a duty they could not define.”
Eighty years ago on May 8, the survivors realized they could go home
Yet for many it would be 1946 before enough replacement troops were in place as a occupying force to allow them to go home.
And the bomber squadrons took terrible losses, too.
I didn’t really miss it. I have the book, but I didn’t see a quote to fit into the letter. I remember his last illustration though of this GI throwing his M-1 on the ground as a way of saying, “You are never going to be part of me again”.
I remember seeing a statistic that the 8th Air Force had more casualties than the Marine Corps. During the war, the 8th Air Force based in England suffered more than 26,000 dead compared to the Marine Corps which incurred nearly 20,000 killed for all its campaigns in WW II.
Read the Omar Bradley quote and you will see he does likewise I don't plan to contradict him.
Entire divisions were nearly wiped out again and again. His story of 8 months of combat from D-Day to the Battle of the Bulge.
Of all the men and officers who started out in Company F of the 4th Infantry Division with him, Wilson was the only one who finished. (out of 160 men)
“If you survive your first day, I’ll promote you.”
If You Survive: From Normandy to the Battle of the Bulge to the End of World War II, One American Officer’s Riveting True Story
https://tinyurl.com/23kp5bvv
Lt. Wilson takes you on the D-Day walking tour of Europe. The battles are all there, along with the names of places we all know from WWII history. His service was exemplary - three Purple Hearts, two Bronze Stars, and a Silver Star.
Rick Spell
The Ultimate WWII GI Book comment: A green officer who eloquently describes his fear on his first combat where he falls between two tanks doing battle and amazingly is spared. Of course when you are quickly in a battle where 6 of 80 are surviving, you grow up quickly.
One reoccurring theme from his book is replacements kept pouring in whenever they arrived at a point of stability, but they lasted only a few days, never distinguished themselves, so he never noted their names.
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