Posted on 05/01/2014 7:23:39 PM PDT by Retain Mike
The Army deployed 67 infantry divisions for the Second World War. Each was like a small town with its own equivalents for community services plus the 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. Except for the Purple Heart and the coveted Combat Infantryman’s Badge, recognition was often missing because so few came through to testify to the valor of many. The infantryman faced the most dismal fate of all whose duty was uninterrupted by missions completed or a fixed deployment time.
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 those 67 divisions suffered 100% or more casualties. However, regimental staffs saw their frontline units obliterated three to six times over. To deal with this problem there were never enough infantrymen coming from the states. Replacement centers continually reassigned artillerymen, machine gunners, cooks, and clerks to infantryman 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.
For example the 4th and 29th Infantry 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, frost bite, pneumonia, hernia, heart disease, arthritis, etc. Many of these men never returned to duty. In the jungles of the Pacific non-combat losses exacted an even greater price. But somehow such assault divisions crossed Europe and the Pacific and always remained in 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. And good soldiers went back to them because they were good soldiers and they had a duty they could not define.”
Partial bibliography: A Soldier’s Story by Omar N. Bradley
Brave Men by Ernie Pyle
The U.S. Infantryman in World War II by Robert S. Rush Links for Listings of United States Divisions during WW II http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_Army_divisions_during_World_War_II http://www.historyshots.com/usarmy/
Army Battle Casualties and Non-battle Deaths in World War II http://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/USA/ref/Casualties/index.html
3rd 'Marne' Infantry Division http://www.custermen.com/ItalyWW2/Units/Division3.htm
National 4th Infantry (IVY) Division Association http://www.4thinfantry.org/content/division-history
quiet sectors like Bastogne and the Ardennes
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My father made it through til then with 2 purple hearts for relatively minor wounds,,, in the Ardennes he was hit bad and left for dead for 2 days in the snow with just a hit of morphine... on the 3rd day they evacuated him on a c47 to England where he stayed for 3 months...
If the war had gone into 1946 I suspect that you’d have seen a much larger contribution along the lines of French African Troops in WW1.
Thank you for the information. I said in another response that I wondered how could anyone be aware of the last several centuries of history and still decide the Ardennes would ever be a quiet sector?
This brings to mind the essay and letters I have developed about dropping the atomic bomb on Japan. Here is a portion.
In support of dropping the atomic bombs historians often cite the inevitability of horrifying casualties, if troops had landed on the home islands. They extrapolate from 48,000 American and 230,000 Japanese losses on Okinawa to estimates of 500,000 American and millions of Japanese casualties for mainland invasions. However, these optimistic figures arise from studies preceding the unfolding recognition by planning staffs of the American experiences on Saipan, Iwo Jima and Okinawa. These sanguine estimates are also over seven times the dead and wounded suffered by Americans during The Battle of the Bulge; casualties that shocked the American public.
Such estimates could have greatly understated casualties. Kyushu and Honshu at over 100,000 rugged square miles mathematically enable at least 500 defensive redoubts; fortifications comparable to that General Ushijima constructed to inflict most losses at Okinawa. This rapid increase in killing efficiency extended to planned stubborn defenses of their major cities just as the Germans had maintained in Berlin. The American “island hopping” strategy had ended, because the Japanese had determined the few regions within their mountainous country that could accommodate the huge armies and air forces needed. Harry Truman contemplated increasingly dire estimates causing him to reflect on the possibility of “an Okinawa from one end of Japan to the other”.
The Greatest Generation and their parents would have been enraged to discover a cabal had ignored the nuclear option for ending the war simply to indulge some personal moral orthodoxy. If there was any alternative, Harry Truman, Henry Stimson, and George Marshall were not about to procure the deaths of countless Americans in protracted ground campaigns following amphibious assaults exceeding D-Day.
Would be great to hear from archy on this...
By all accounts, Tarawa was a meatgrinder. Everyone got hammered, but the second wave, having to wade ashore from landing craft hung up on the surrounding reef, must have been especially horrifying.
One wonders if current generations of American kids could manage something like that, but it seems that our servicemen (and women) are doing great things in the Middle East and Afghanistan.
Here is part of an essay I wrote on repeal of DADT and I believe it applies even more to women serving in an MOS likely to engage in combat. The context here is the survey that said 70% of those in the military saw no problem serving with homosexuals
“The entire military exists to serve Marine and Army combat infantrymen and their associates in Special Forces. DOD accomplishes nothing of lasting significance until these people walk the ground formerly held by an enemy, and well over half of those trigger-pullers opposed repeal. Only they understand the unimaginable totalitarian leadership and obedience demanded by their chaotic, barbaric, and brittle environments.
I have heard objections in terms of having to shower with homosexuals, but the problem really begins when showers, hot food, and regular sleep fade into memory to be replaced by exhaustion, brutality, turmoil, and trauma. The leadership and discipline of a sub-culture that enables victory or at least survival in those environments cannot be turned on and off. It must continually penetrate throughout the military services. A mental disorder involving sexuality when thrust into the midst of that totalitarian structure warps the relationships that must be maintained.”
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