Didn't most guys not even shoot at people, but shoot overhead?  Things were different back then.  They had a hard time taking a life.  Our men fought it, but it was our industry that won the war.  The German military was very highly trained before they even started.  The Japanese fought on their own territory, which gave them a huge advantage.

Median vs Mean.

The US came late into the war and so we had green troops going up against veteran troops. US troops got better as they got more experience.

The majority of troops that landed on D-day had NOT seen combat.

This.  Or the 442d RCT, which slogged its way through the mountains of Italy and France, eventually becoming the most decorated unit in the history of the Army (IIRC).

This has been endlessly debated for years.  The US fought a different war than the Germans or Japanese.   Comparing the performance of the infantry is difficult and probably pointless in the end.  The US was all about firepower.  Use high explosive instead of lives.  Neither Germany nor Japan could match us in that category.  Aftter about mid 43 we had such material superiority, especially in the form of air dominance, that its not really a fair comparison.  The early campaigns did not reflect well on us.  The Germans arguably fought us to a standstill in North Africa but ulitimately lost the logistics battle.  Sicily was better, Salerno better still, but neither was a walk over in any sense of the word. Anzio was a very near run thing, we still had some hard lessons to learn.   By Normandy we had largely figured out how to beat the Germans and proceeded to do just that.  But it was brutal, overwhelming inelegant firepower that did it.  

The Pacific Campaign was different still.  The Marines and the Arrmy had dramatically different styles.  The Marines were all about get ashore fast, attack hard, take the casuualties but get the battle over quickly.  Marine units didn't have the staying power of Army units.  The Army was much more deliberate, and yes, slower.  Again use explosives not lives if at all possible.  

Short answer;  we won, they lost. Ultimately we were "better" but not in the sense of this question.

I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree then. Guadalcanal and New Guinea say otherwise.

The NG campaign and Army involvement in Guadalcanal starte in 43

Something about piccolo's description puts a tear of happiness in my eye.  Especially that last part.  I don't know why, but it does.

The heart and soul of a true American is purposeful rebellion.

That idea was discredited already. Read a few pages back.

That's it!   I feel like I'm floundering a bit in life.  I need to find something to purposefully rebel against.

There is actually validity to it, there are numerous oral histories in which WWII vets from both the Army and Marines have said they had to be retrained when they got to their units because of being conditioned in during their basic to only shoot at identified targets

us infantry did not have to be good they were well supported and supplied.  if we got resistance we lwveled the building with tanks, arty or airpower, both theaters japan & europe were the same.  

Every platoon leader had a radio and could call all arty in range onto any target he saw fit no one else germany, brit or ruski could do that.to nake it better our artillery was well supplied with ammo and never short.

WE HAD CONTROL OF THE SKIES.

We were fighting some of the best modt experiences units ever in the history of the world the german SS units of 44, 45 had nearly 4 years of constant experience and had better tanks (panzer V & Tigers), stg-44s, panzerfaust, all great equipment, they were good but just over whelmed by superior firepower.

The japs were also very good and fantical as hell.  but thier equipment was shit with the exception of the knee mortar which is basically a 40mm grenade launcher like m203.  But the japs were great soldiers tough as hell they dug in deep and were experts at comoflage from air observation.

Our boys did plenty good they in no way wre the worst infantry of WWII that honor goes to Italy, France, and Belgium. all of whom were aweful

FO procedures during WWII were vastly different than post Korean techniques we are all familiar with today, only FOs would have been calling in artillery.  

Also Common Wealth observed fire procedures were similar and was in ways superior to US practices (other than a lack of ammo) and unlike our FOs they issued fire orders not requests, so they were actually more responsive than US calls for fire.

Ok, but history is history.

 

Lol I was the one in mutlicam. I remember standing in that hanger thinking "shit you really did it this time."

But seriously, Mississippi sucks...

You are correct. In addition to being the book that convinced me to go 11B after college, now-LTG Bolger was the one who led me to GEN Paul Gorman's monograph "The Secret of Future Victories", written right after Desert Storm. Gorman looked at the evolutionary process of Marshall, McNair, and then GEN William Depuy leading the Army from 1941 to 1991.

Depuy is a fascinating character and I almost got a master's thesis out of him. When the build-up started in 1941, he was a 2LT in the 12th Infantry Regiment. Two years later he's a major and a battalion S-3 in the 90th Division. The 90th was a unit so dismal that it was almost deactivated for infantry replacements, and had a couple commanding generals relieved in Normandy for mission failure and ridiculous casualty rates. Having been through the Army's official Mobilization Training Plan with the 90th "two and a half times", Depuy was as much a historian of WWII infantry training as he was the post-Vietnam architect of newer training methods when he was the four-star general commanding TRADOC. TRADOC was itself the heir to McNair's Army Ground Forces.

Cutting and pasting big pieces out of my thesis will not format correctly, especially the footnotes, but here's a few pieces.

The Army continued to wrestle with the problem of raising and training infantry between the wars, but there was little institutional will to change. The senior leaders were veterans of the trenches, and there was little money for riflemen after aviation, artillery, and armor were funded. Through these years, George C. Marshall moved up through the ranks. While assistant commandant of the US Army Infantry School at Fort Benning, Georgia in 1935, Marshall wrote “At the present time we are still stumbling around trying to find a satisfactory method for training infantry.”  Instead, things proceeded slowly at sleepy Stateside garrisons until world events intruded upon the routine.

As the Army slumbered, Europe slouched toward another war, and Marshall continued his rise. He headed the War Department’s War Plans Division then was appointed the Army’s Deputy Chief of Staff.   He had seen various modernization proposals work their way through the bureaucracy, including the 1937 field tests of a triangular division built around the existing 2nd Division headquarters. In August 1939, he was tapped to become Chief of Staff. Sworn in on 1 September 1939 as Germany’s invasion of Poland made headlines, Marshall inherited command of a force totaling 190,000 men that was ranked “nineteenth among the world’s armies after Portugal.”  Marshall was now in a position to win the force structure debate that he had lost in 1919 and 1920. The world was embroiled in a war larger than any ever seen, and there was not a single combat-ready division in the United States Army. It was 1917 all over again.

With war having come, time was scarce to both rebuild the existing divisions and create new ones. Since virtually every element of the Regular Army was a skeleton formation after twenty years of peace and parsimony, this was an opportune time to do so. New flesh could be applied to those bones in new ways, and after so long without any large-scale maneuvers there were few bad habits to unlearn. On 16 September, Marshall approved the War Department Modernization Board’s recommendations to reorganize the existing three divisions in the continental United States to the triangular MTOE and to reactivate the 5th and 6th Divisions.  The idea was not universally acclaimed. The First Army’s commander, MG Hugh Drum, argued stalwartly for the Army to retain the “sustained combat ability” of the 22,000 man square division he’d helped advocate to GEN Pershing nineteen years before.

The redesigned triangular division had to adapt to a vast range of environments around the world. The new division was easier for leaders to control and could move far more swiftly when the requisite number of trucks were on hand. There was a negative to that advantage. The smaller division could afford to lose far fewer men than the World War I-style organization had allowed through the 1940 edition of Field Manual 7-5, Organization and Tactics of Infantry- The Rifle Battalion.

Though no longer specialized for trench warfare, the division’s leading edge was still its riflemen. The platoon was 1914’s 41 men again, with the battalions varying from 916 to 860 depending on the date.  The infantry squad was expanded to 12 men, exceeding even the “wartime” authorization of the inter-war years. One man was armed with a M1918A2 Browning automatic rifle, while the rest the bolt action M1903 Springfield rifle. The Springfields were to be replaced by the semiautomatic M1 Garand as production caught up to demand.  

While the division’s infantry regiments were smaller than their World War I equivalents, each regiment could generally count on one of the division’s three battalions of eighteen 105mm howitzers firing in its direct support. The division’s artillery commander owned an additional battalion of eighteen 155mm guns, and additional artillery battalions could be attached from the corps or army level as needed. Overall, American infantry could count on a level of supporting firepower the Germans and Japanese could only envy. The Germans could slander American reliance on supporting fire afterward, but the field artillery was a major advantage for American divisions throughout the war.  American industrial production allowed for vast numbers of various artillery pieces and their supporting equipment, everything from the shells they fired to the survey equipment that accurately positioned them.  
Now that the divisions had been designed, they had to be inducted, trained, and deployed. The infantry training system was an afterthought to everyone outside the War Department. In an age of tanks and aircraft, infantry still had their own often-overlooked skills to master:

Ground combat in World War II required complex skills, which were in
large part technical. Even in the Infantry, the ground arm requiring the least
technical training, the private had to understand the use of a dozen weapons.
He had to acquire at least an elementary knowledge of many things besides:
camouflage and concealment; mine removal and the detection of booby traps;
patrolling, map reading, and combat intelligence; recognition of American,
Allied, and enemy aircraft, armored vehicles, and other equipment; the use and
disposal of captured equipment; the processing of prisoners of war; first aid,
field sanitation, and maintenance of life and health out of doors over long periods
and under conditions of extreme difficulty. Thus the trained ground soldier was,
on the basis of military instead of civilian skills, almost as much a specialist as
anyone in the Army."

The prevailing belief was that infantry were easy to train and could be created out of the personnel system’s unskilled leftovers. “Infantry became the last resort for all men with no obvious skills.”  

GEN Marshall was not unaware of the casualties endemic to sustained infantry combat. After the end of the 1918 Meuse-Argonne offensive, only a quarter of the 1st Division’s original men Marshall had sailed to France with were still on the unit’s rosters. While on the AEF staff, Marshall coordinated the movement of 176,000 wounded men to the rear in ambulances from that battle.  But with Marshall concentrating on his geopolitical duties as the President’s principal ground force advisor, the duties of organizing the Army itself fell to his old roommate from the 1st Division, then-Brigadier General Lesley McNair.

McNair was a career artilleryman with extensive staff experience at the divisional and AEF levels. In 1940, he was commandant of the Army War College when the General Headquarters, US Army, was activated on 26 July using the College’s personnel and its classes were suspended for the duration of the war.  GEN Marshall was GHQ’s titular commander, BG McNair its Chief of Staff.  As training and training supervision functions were pushed down from the War Department to GHQ, they became BG McNair’s responsibility.  Mrs. Marshall later told the Saturday Evening Post that GEN Marshall had told McNair “"Now that I have put this in your hands, I can forget all about it."  

McNair had a reputation as a magnificent trainer of troops, but the training system he designed and supervised was almost entirely one to build divisions and engage in collective training for divisions and echelons above (corps and field army). Building a system for realistically training large numbers of capable infantry companies, battalions, and regiments then sustaining them in the face of wartime casualties was out of his professional experience. Worse yet, when his old comrade Marshall told him it was all in his hands and he thusly planned to forget all about it, it became a failure of command supervision of the highest order. Marshall’s worldwide campaign was doomed to fail if McNair’s apparatus could not produce a sufficient number of well-trained units. It was Marshall’s responsibility as the Army’s Chief of Staff to ensure McNair did so. The latter did not happen. The former almost did.

*****

The original Mobilization Training Plan developed by GHQ then approved by the War Department called for basic training and MOS qualification training to be conducted under the auspices of Replacement Training Centers. These centers belonged to the Chiefs of the various branches (Infantry, Artillery, Engineer, etc.), and were to feed trained personnel to units. Once formed, the units conducted collective training up to and including divisional maneuvers prior to overseas movement. The system was to replace the World War I system of recruit depots at the divisional level.  It was judged an “eminently satisfactory” operation and a “far superior” method right up until it failed.  

Some of the problem was simply a matter of space. In 1940 and 1941, priority of construction went to divisional cantonments. The scattered battalion-size garrisons of the prewar Army were wholly inadequate to hold a war-strength unit. With the few RTCs that had been built being undersized for the growing task, and no new ones being built in a timely manner, the divisions had revert to 1917’s pattern and become their own basic training centers.

According to GHQ plans, 10 to 12 months were required from a division’s activation to its earliest readiness for shipment overseas into combat. Thirteen to seventeen weeks were allocated for conducting individual training for the soldiers. This was longer than World War I, and deemed ample for a private to learn his duties sufficiently from more experienced men around him.  This was a problem if there were no experienced men in a newly forming unit. Unit training through regimental level took another eleven to thirteen. A final eleven to fourteen weeks was for division-level combined arms training. This was to include at least one division versus division maneuver. Overseas requirements permitting, divisions were to receive eight to ten weeks of "post-graduate" training oriented toward their theater of operation.  The whole system was closely managed by GHQ for the practical reason that there were few skilled trainers available.  

The 4th Division’s emergence from its peacetime routine in its Georgia and Alabama garrisons was fairly typical, and the experience of its 22nd Infantry Regiment echoed that of the 26th two decades before and was being mirrored across the other Regular regiments. Soldiers with prewar service were encouraged to apply for Officer Candidate School, men deemed too old for wartime service were transferred out, and the 4th Division was levied three times for activation cadres for other divisions. By 1943, most of the 4th Division had less than two years’ total military service, this before its first combat.  

While BG McNair and GHQ planned how to build an army, other planning was needed regarding that army’s design and employment. At the War Department’s War Plans Division, it was acknowledged that the nine Regular divisions and the mobilized National Guard were not equal to the German threat. Calculating that shortfall was the WPD staff’s focus through the spring and summer of 1941.

Germany was not the only threat. In October 1941, the War Department authorized the Hawaiian Division to adopt the new MTOE. Two regiments from each of its two brigades became the 24th and 25th Infantry Divisions, with their third regiments supplied by the Hawaii National Guard. These new divisions were to defend American territorial interests in the Pacific against the mobilizing Japanese.  The Philippine Division also prepared for war with its lone American regiment, the “Polar Bears” of the 31st Infantry, reinforcing American-officered Philippine regiments.

Back in Washington, MAJ Albert Wedemeyer was one of the one of the very few American officers to have attended the German Kriegsakademie. Assigned to WPD, by default he became one of the Army’s in extremis experts on all things German. On 8 July 1941, he was ordered to design a land force to defeat the Wehrmacht at its own specialty of combined-arms mechanized warfare.  
Wedemeyer first assumed that the United States could “afford” to mobilize the traditional ten percent of its population, or approximately 13.5 million men, without affecting agriculture or industry. America’s WWI roles as the world’s breadbasket and as the “Arsenal of Democracy” were still seen as its greatest contribution to the next war. “From the very beginning, American manpower calculations were closely correlated with the needs of war industry.”

The Navy estimated their needs at 1.5 million when asked, leaving a theoretical maximum of 12 million for the Army. This total included the quasi-independent Army Air Forces.  Wedemeyer wrote in 1958 that “he made some errors in planning”, since he “underestimated” the logistical needs of a global war. This necessitated more service troops versus combat divisions. In 1945, the number of troops in the Army Service Forces almost equaled those assigned to combat divisions.  By his numbers, he’d predicted an army of 8,795,658, and the force peaked at 8,291,336 on 31 May 1945.
How those eight million men were eventually arranged differed vastly from MAJ Wedemeyer’s initial plans. Echoing 1917, the higher formations of the US Army did not exist, so he had the proverbial blank piece of paper on which to design. Despite prodding from the Roosevelt Administration to lay out his materiel requirements first so industry could be mobilized, Wedemeyer began with the force’s structure. The new head of War Plans, BG Leonard Gerow, stalled the White House’s demands. “It would be wrong to assume that we can defeat Germany simply by outproducing her…Wars are won on sound strategy implemented by well-trained forces which are adequately and effectively equipped.”

MAJ Wedemeyer’s Kriegsakademie experience was reflected in the force he designed. His “several” armored corps were made up of two armored divisions and one motorized division, mirroring the German ideal.  He planned fifty-one motorized divisions, though none were ever activated and committed to action as such. Ten airborne divisions and ten mountain divisions were intended to either seize ground in advance of the armored forces or handle rough terrain where those forces could not go. Instead of ten and ten, the Army activated five airborne and one mountain division.  Wedemeyer stated he planned a force of 200 divisions and “we ended up with about 110.”  

Though Wedemeyer simplified the details in his memoir, the actual force structure details of the Victory Plan were far more fluid and in some cases extravagant. In the summer of 1941, a structure totaling some 215 divisions of all types and 60,000 aircraft for the Army Air Forces was on the drawing board, chiefly to confront the Germans in Europe.  Anticipating a Soviet collapse in the face of the 22 June German invasion, no help could be counted upon from Germany’s east. Little more was expected from the British as they recovered from Dunkirk. This force Wedemeyer planned was intended to do the job of defeating Hitler’s Wehrmacht without allies. The details of Wedemeyer’s closely held Top Secret plan leaked to the press and were the front page story in the Chicago Tribune on Friday, 5 December 1941.  After that Sunday, America was now in the war, and building an army to win it was no longer a staff exercise.

The next divisions for “The Victory Plan” were in the Organized Reserve. These 27 divisions were administrative leftovers from the “National Army” of 1917-1918 that had survived the inter-war years by cheaply existing mostly on paper. These would be activated by a mix of Regular and reserve officers and filled with draftees through 1942. Most of these divisions had World War I battle honors to their names, if few of their combat veterans were of age to serve again below the general officer ranks.

Recruiting posters went up in the wake of Pearl Harbor, and an advertising war for the service of America’s young men commenced. There has always been a certain snobbery among branches of service that establishes a pecking order of prestige, and for most of World War II the non-parachute infantry was near the bottom of it. The Navy had been engaged in the Battle of the Atlantic even before America’s official entry into the war. It had then taken the bulk of the casualties at Pearl Harbor before going on to the victories at Coral Sea and Midway. The Marines were in the headlines for Wake Island. The Army Air Forces soon had the Doolittle Raid. So with popular culture in mind, the most motivated and patriotic young men who did not wait to be drafted headed for the Marines and Navy. Even those who went in the Army realized volunteering for the paratroops could get them fifty dollars a month in “jump pay”, doubling a PFC’s paycheck.  

The 1942 move by Army Air Forces commander Lieutenant General Henry H. “Hap” Arnold to skim off the top-quality recruit intake of Army draftees for the AAF did not help matters. Marshall and Arnold had known each other since they were lieutenants in the Philippine Department’s 1914 Luzon maneuvers.  They were friends to the extent that the often taciturn Marshall was friends with anyone.  As strategic bombers from Britain could reach German-held territory long before the first rifleman could set foot on it, the personnel priority made sense to a point. But the sort of tall, healthy, intelligent young men that Arnold wanted to make into aircraft mechanics and tail gunners were precisely the sort to make good squad leaders and platoon sergeants in the forming infantry divisions. They and their units needed that time being bought by the air campaign to learn their own trade. But the AAF took 44 percent of the top two recruit categories in 1942, and the ground services made do with what was left.  

****

When the Replacement and School Command stood up on 27 March 1942, four sources of enlisted infantry replacements were already active. These RTCs were at Camp Fannin, Texas and Camp Croft, South Carolina, plus Camps Wheeler and Wolters in Georgia. No matter how priorities for construction and incoming personnel shifted, the RTCs remained configured for delivering personnel to forming units rather than replenishing the battle casualties of engaged units. The casualties of World War I were even discussed as a planning consideration for future wars in the 1930s:

Previous combat had taught us that casualties are lumped primarily in the rifle platoons. For there 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 in any other of the combat arms

Yet that planning did not design a personnel system that allowed that future Army to sustain itself in combat. 37 percent of a division was infantrymen, so the percentage of RTC output dedicated to producing infantrymen was 37 percent.  Worse still, the command could not meet its quotas. Newly activating divisions were forced back into the 1917 role of being their own basic training centers.
The list of military leaders who should have realized this was a flawed method from the beginning begins at the top with Marshall himself.  As a staff officer in the 1st Division, he knew how many men the division had lost in its relatively short World War I combat career. Having moved up to the AEF staff, he knew how many of the AEF’s follow-on divisions had been stripped to provide the divisions at the front with replacement personnel. McNair, the right-hand man entrusted with the responsibility of organizing and training the force, had very similar World War I experience to Marshall’s at the 1st Division and AEF. Waiting until 1943 to plan an infantry replacement capacity was ignoring their careers’ early lesson that casualties always exceeded projections and operational necessity rarely conformed to the plan.

The first case where operational necessity trumped the Mobilization Training Plan and its promised “post-graduate training” came just weeks after Pearl Harbor. Despite postwar mythologizing of the Pacific as the Marine Corps’ war, the first Army infantrymen to be committed to action were in the Pacific. As American positions in the Philippines collapsed, Australia was recognized as an undefended target in the path of the rapidly advancing Japanese. Most of Australia’s forces were in North Africa under British command. American forces were to hold the continent under the command of GEN Douglas MacArthur.  

Originally intended for deployment to Europe and promised a year’s pre-combat training once they were encamped in Northern Ireland, the 32nd and 41st Infantry Divisions were rushed to Australia. The 32nd’s commander was MG Edwin Harding. He had worked for Marshall at Fort Benning and had an excellent record. He became just one of many American officers tapped for division command through personal connections to Marshall.  Optimistic assessments of the National Guardsmen’s readiness for combat were put forward, and MacArthur had no choice but to accept them since no other units were available. Like the other mobilized National Guard divisions, the 32nd was not ready for combat. What little training it had conducted was for motorized operations in Europe.  
The 32nd was committed to action to support the Australians in New Guinea that September. Marching toward action through the mountains on 14 October, it was the first Army division to enter World War II.  But the division’s artillery had not made it ashore, leaving the 32nd without fire support in “a tropical Verdun” against an entrenched enemy.  Ill-equipped, ill-supplied, and barely trained, the division largely collapsed under the strain of jungle combat. Rather than acknowledge these faults, MacArthur believed the fault lay with Harding. Based on a cursory visit by his chief of staff BG Richard Sutherland, McArthur sent Harding’s West Point classmate MG Robert l. Eichelberger up from Australia:

Bob, I'm putting you in command at Buna. Relieve Harding [32d Infantry Division commander] ... I want you to remove all officers who won't fight. Relieve regimental and battalion commanders; if necessary, put sergeants in charge of battalions and corporals in charge of companies ... Bob, I want you to take Buna, or not come back alive ... And that goes for your chief of staff, too.

Through draconian efforts by MG Eichelberger, the 32nd and accompanying Australian infantry forced the Japanese out of New Guinea and removed the threat to Australia’s north coast. But the cost was steep. By the end of the Buna campaign, the 32nd Division, reinforced by part of the 41st, lost 787 men killed, 2,172 men wounded, plus another eight thousand evacuated to hospitals in the rear for various tropical diseases. Combat casualties alone were 21.5 percent.  The 32nd needed a year’s refitting before it re-entered combat.

Like the 32nd, the divisions overseas would eventually wither away if they could not be sustained. Operation TORCH, the invasion of North Africa, added six divisions to those already committed in the Pacific. Yet the War Department’s priority was still creating and fielding new units. Plans for cross-Channel-invasions were on the drawing board , and new divisions were needed to make those plans a reality. Again, a compromise was needed. In October 1942, the War Department revised its division mobilization schedule downward from over 200 to only 100 divisions by the end of 1943, with additional units remaining an option. The overall manpower goal for 1943 was still 8,208,000.  In January 1943, an additional 12 divisions scheduled to activate in 1943 were postponed into 1944. The delay in activations prompted the first adjustment to RTC output since 1941.  The RTCs at Camp McClellan, Alabama and Camp Robinson, Arkansas shifted to producing infantrymen in January 1943.

By March 1943, stressed for both men and materiel, the War Department was seeking to cut 2,109 men and 509 vehicles from the infantry division MTOE.  At the same time the War Department was trying to cut the divisional MTOE, commanders in the field were seeking its reinforcement. With the US forces in North Africa having to endure both a hostile environment and sustained combat, and Operation HUSKY in the works to invade Sicily, more resources were being sought by field commanders. When LTG McNair went to North Africa to discuss the proposed cuts, he received a cold reception.  

The scarcity of transportation was another motive for the War Department to rearrange the division. Getting the divisions from the Zone of the Interior to the fighting front took shipping space that was at a terrible premium through 1942 and into 1943. Merchant ship losses to German U-boats had been staggering. 4,700 British-flagged merchantmen were lost in the course of the war, most in the Atlantic, and after America’s entry into the war 733 American-flagged transports were lost.  These losses were not something to be shrugged off. An American division required between 2,322 vehicles (infantry) and 3,698 (armored), and a minimum of 6,700 tons of gasoline every ten days. A ten-day supply of 105mm shells for the division’s three howitzer battalions weighed in at 5,582 tons. “Just the gasoline and 105mm shells (not counting all other ammunition) of one deploying division would require three or four ships, assuming they all survived the crossing.”  Many ships did not. But the Army was parochially indifferent to the Navy’s problems in the Battle of the Atlantic. Ground forces had to be combat-capable when they arrived, and the Army saw it as the Navy’s end of the bargain to get those forces from the port of embarkation to the fighting fronts.

Making up the division’s shortfalls in-theater was no real advantage. Reducing a division’s artillery or vehicle strength to make the division fit into fewer shiploads might seem an advantage on paper at the War Department. Regardess, if a separate artillery battalion or a quartermaster truck company had to be attached to restore that lost combat power once that division reached its destination, it was merely dishonest bookkeeping. Just as Pershing’s cuts to the AEF’s rifle company MTOE did not lessen the need for infantry replacements in 1918, every man, truck, or cannon still had to be transported across a hostile ocean from America regardless of whether it was counted as a divisional or a corps-level asset.

*****

Just as had happened in World War I, the replacement system was breaking down. Casualties exceeded what the personnel managers had anticipated or what the training pipeline could supply. The AGF’s own historical section examined the enlisted replacement system in the immediate aftermath of the victory, and Major William R. Keast stated “the productive capacity of infantry replacement centers was insufficient.”  Rear-area service organizations, especially those of the AAF, had swollen to the point the War Department had to convene a Manpower Board to trim and reallocate the fat.  By January of 1944, even LTG McNair acknowledged the problem had exceeded all attempts to solve it, writing “At no stage in our operations, including the present, has the supply of replacements been adequate.”  Considering it was McNair’s job to have formed the units and trained the replacements in the first place, and his responsibility to advise his old roommate GEN Marshall, it was a damning admission.

Just as had happened in World War I, the first available sources of trained manpower were those units that had been trained but not yet sent overseas. Higher-numbered divisions started a grim process of training personnel, losing them, refilling, and training more personnel sometimes to lose those as well. The difference between World War II and World War I was that no one from GEN Pershing downward expected the AEF’s depot divisions to give up their trained personnel, then somehow reconstitute the units and enter combat.

AGF policy allowed divisions to be raided for replacements up to ninety days before their scheduled movement overseas.  Those three months, much of it spent in transit from camp to port, were somehow intended to make up the wasted effort of the “orderly” ten to twelve months it had taken to build a serviceable infantry division in the first place. Any divide that AGF had intended between the replacement pipeline and the pool of deployable divisions was temporarily eliminated.

The 90th Division was refilled from the 63rd, the 8th refilled from the 94th, the 71st, 78th, and 87th stripped to feed units already overseas, and so on. The 69th Infantry Division at Camp Shelby, Mississippi held an unhappy distinction as the unit most abused by the process. It was ransacked for a final total of 1,336 officers and 22,235 enlisted men between its activation on 15 May 1943 and 1 November 1944 when it departed New York harbor. “In effect, the commanders and staff of the 69th Infantry Division trained two divisions’ worth of replacements and a third division, which they took into combat.”

All the divisions AGF trained and deployed had spent at least a year in training, but the higher-numbered late-sequence divisions had been more training depots than they were prospective tactical organizations. When they finally entered combat, sometimes hastily as in the case of the “final fifteen” divisions rushed to the ETO following the Battle of the Bulge, they were “to a regrettable extent crazy-quilt conglomerations hastily assembled from sundry sources, given only a minimum of training, and loaded on transports.”  These divisions were expected to be in the reserve pool for months before their eventual movement to Europe or the Pacific. Cutting back on combined arms training and cancelling maneuvers could mark their training calendars as completed, but it made for less capable units.  Collectively, they were the worst-trained units of the war. The men left behind by the stripping process had come in two incompatible varieties- those few the unit commanders wished to hold on to and could protect, and those “least qualified for overseas service or promotion.”  In 1956, no less an observer of the whole process than GEN Marshall himself admitted “It was a completely mistaken illusion that [infantry] was easy to train. It's been easy to badly train, and it's been badly trained in every war we've had.”  

The worst case of this was the unfortunate 106th Infantry Division. “The Golden Lions” were the highest-numbered division to be activated for World War II. Since their activation on 15 March 1943, and mostly in the first half of 1944, Army Ground Forces pulled 1,215 officers and 12,442 enlisted men of all grades from the 106th.  It was yet another case where one division was trained, disassembled for parts, and another outfit wearing the same patch was begun. The commander, MG Alan Jones, was another officer selected for division command after serving under Marshall at Fort Benning.  An AGF inspection in September 1944 found the freshly refilled and barely trained division to be unprepared for combat. In October the 106th began its overseas movement anyway. The tightly crafted mobilization schedule had no tolerance to allow for the training failures of any particular unit.

Assigned to the VIII Corps, the 106th was placed in a nice quiet sector of the front lines for gentle an acclimatization as conditions could allow.  But on 16 December 1944, that nice quiet sector became the hottest spot in the ETO when the German Sixth Panzer Army rolled through their lines. The remains of two of its infantry regiments ended up in POW camps while the rest of the division either scattered to the rear or fell in with other outfits. It was the largest mass surrender of American soldiers in World War II.  British historian Charles Whiting titled his 1981 account of the battle Death of a Division, but as further proof of the Army’s troop shortage, even this debacle was not sufficient to kill off the “Golden Lions.” The survivors were scraped back together and two replacement regiments were pulled in.   The 106th was used for rear-area security duties like guarding POW enclosures while it refitted and retrained.

Another solution for the troop shortage was the “Infantry Advanced Replacement Training Center.” These were created at vacant posts where a division had departed, leaving firing ranges and training areas sitting idle. Originally intended as finishing schools for already trained infantrymen, like the Second Army’s 1943 Ranger School at Camp Forrest, Tennessee, by late 1944 the concept had a more pedestrian execution. These centers were now retraining centers. This task required the Army’s small scattering of separate non-divisional infantry regiments. Regulars that had taken then held the Aleutians, National Guardsmen who secured the Caribbean, and odd square corners of now-triangular divisions were pulled back from around the world. Assigned to the Replacement and School Command, they took on instructor duty.  In six weeks, personnel from overstrength branches were retrained as infantrymen in order to make the most of the manpower pool.
The trainees came from a more widespread background than the instructors. With the death of the Luftwaffe, new pilots were needed in far lower numbers than the manpower-hungry Army Air Forces had needed the previous year. 71,000 aviation cadets were released from the USAAF’s pilot-procurement programs and reassigned to the infantry.  Antiaircraft units were similarly reduced.  Excess tank destroyer battalions, themselves a casualty of LTG McNair’s mistaken belief that a tank was not needed to kill another tank, were another source of men. The first IARTCs opened at Camp Gordon, Georgia and Camp Maxey, Texas on 17 October 1944. Camp Howze, Texas’s IARTC opened the next day. A month later, Camp Livingston, Louisiana opened an IARTC on 13 November 1944, and Camp Shelby, Mississippi did the same on 12 February 1945.  The centers produced almost a hundred thousand extra infantrymen by May 1945.

With the breakdown of the individual replacement system, some suggested modifying the “pool” system of individual replacements to a genuine unit replacement system. Substituting intact trained units by battalion or regiment in or out of the divisional structure was seen as an option. This had been done for the wounded “Lions” of the 106th. Here the objections from AGF were somewhat strange. In January 1944, the War Department operations staff opined that “use of nondivisional regiments to replace exhausted regiments of infantry divisions would conflict with ‘our national conceptions as to the sanctity of our divisional organization.’”  This only made sense if not thought about too hard. Less than half of the infantry divisions, one of the five airborne divisions, and none of the sixteen armored divisions had any prior combat lineage. None that had seen action in World War I was fighting with its complete 1918 set of regiments. Deactivations, reactivations, and triangularization had severed those ties. For just one of many examples, the 28th Infantry Regiment, the “Black Lions of Cantigny”, had departed the “Big Red One” for the 8th Infantry Division.

Turning the clock back further, the Army had fought for well over one hundred years with the regiment, not the division, being the touchstone of unit identity. The 7th Infantry Regiment had stood beside their cotton bales with Andrew Jackson at New Orleans long before the 3rd Infantry Division formed. The 165th Infantry Regiment of the New York National Guard, the old “Fighting 69th”, had followed its green flag from First Manassas to Gettysburg without a patch on its shoulder before its later incarnations had gone to France then the Pacific. The 14th had climbed the walls of Peking in the Boxer Rebellion without any divisional affiliation. The War Department pronounced that there was insufficient manpower to create a rotating pool of regiments. Instead those same men were expended as individual replacements, perhaps even faster.  Recriminations over the individual replacement system have raged for decades.

In the all-too-frequent absence of well-trained and cohesive infantry units, how did the divisions of 1943-1945 win? In 1971, former 90th Division battalion commander William DePuy was a lieutenant general. He would soon command the new Training and Doctrine Command, heir to McNair’s AGF. DePuy outraged his surviving contemporaries by asserting that the main function of the infantry in Europe had been to safeguard the advance of the field artillery’s forward observers.  “The artillery is easier to train because it's very mechanical and mathematical, and they do very well.”   Having been through the AGF-approved Mobilization Training Plan’s training process “two and a half times”, DePuy became as much a historian of World War II infantry training and its failures as he was an agent of reforming its mistakes. Where Marshall and McNair had glossed over World War I’s failings only to repeat them in World War II, DePuy did not want to repeat the pattern in a potential World War III:

“We expanded a 200,000 man Army into an 8,000,000 man Army, and set up a lot of Training Centers like Fort Jackson, and we trained a lot of people before they went overseas just enough so that the Army wouldn't be tarred and feathered by the populace. And we trained a lot of lieutenants just to the point where it isn't a national disgrace to put them on the battlefield. I was one of them, I know that, and we kind of went to war and let survival of the fittest [prevail] ... if one tank battalion wouldn't do, we used three.”

The American victory in the European Theater bore many lessons for the future. But in the summer of 1945, the most immediate of them would be studied for the Pacific Theater.

The Army set forth in the Victory Plan, even in Wedemeyer’s original 200-division extravagance, was only projected to engage and defeat Germany. The “ninety division gamble” never did take into account the commitment of Army divisions to the Pacific Theater. This was an exception to the “Germany First” agreement for Anglo-Allied strategy. When the troop projections for 1944 were made in 1943, Navy and Marine Corps planners sought to keep the Army frozen at that year’s levels while they grew to provide more amphibious forces for the Pacific.  Meanwhile 21 of the Army’s 89 active divisions were in the Pacific Theater by September 1944.  On V-E Day, “the triumph of American infantry divisions”  was incomplete.

While the forces in Europe celebrated and counted their days until discharge, those same 21 Pacific-based divisions had the worst of the fighting left ahead. War Department planners had to figure out how to subdue the Home Islands of Japan, something never before accomplished in military history.

******

By V-J Day, 2,670,000 men had been produced by the various training and replacement agencies of the ground arms. This was one million more than were actually serving in ground combat units that day. The raw manpower had certainly been there to produce replacement units, but the war ended before the reforms GEN Stilwell and GEN Devers made to the AGF’s replacement system had a chance to take hold.  

The AGF’s own historians admitted a major flaw in the system had been “failure to calculate correctly the required number of replacements in time to provide them by the established process of training.”  The underlying cause “was the unanticipated severity of combat for ground forces, particularly for infantry units.” LTG McNair’s staff had worked out a set of prediction numbers for American ground losses that were more severe than the official War Department numbers, and neither prediction equaled the reality.  If there had been a lesson that the young Majors Marshall and McNair should had taken away from Cantigny, St. Mihiel, the Meuse-Argonne, or the other grim meatgrinders of 1918’s Western Front, it was that casualties almost always exceed expectations. Technology had not allowed American forces to escape World War I-style infantry combat. Instead, they were forced to repeat it globally from the “tropical Verdun” the 32nd Division faced at Buna to the "Passchendaele with tree bursts" in Germany’s Hürtgen Forest. Combat operations in World War II were rarely the fast mechanized advances beloved of newsreel photographers. It was more commonly groups of men with rifles and machine guns grinding away in a National Geographic-worthy variety of terrain and weather.

*******

In the Second World War, the United States Army made deliberate force structure decisions to under-man its conventional infantry units, and activated less than half of the divisions originally planned. The intent was to make smaller, more controllable, and more easily deployed units. Unfortunately, the result was an insufficient number of units sustained by a completely inadequate replacement training structure. That replacement structure was supervised by officers who had seen a nearly identical system fail in World War I and did not learn from the mistake.  

Official Histories
Bell, William Gardner. Commanding Generals and Chiefs of Staff, 1775-2005: Portraits and Biographical Sketches of the Army’s Senior Officer. Washington, DC: US Army Center for Military History, 2005.
DePuy, GEN William E. Changing an Army, An Oral History of General William E. DePuy, US Army, Retired. Carlisle Barracks, PA: US Army Military History Institute, 1979.
Greenfield, Kent R., Robert R. Palmer, and Bell I. Wiley. Army Ground Forces: The Organization of Ground Combat Troops. 1947. Washington. DC: US Army Center for Military History, 1987.
Keast, MAJ William R. Army Ground Forces Study #7: Provision of Enlisted Replacements. Washington, DC: Headquarters, Army Ground Forces, 1946.
Matloff, Maurice. Strategic Planning for Coalition Warfare, 1943-1944. Washington, DC: US Army Center for Military History, 1959.
Ney, Virgil. Organization and Equipment of the Infantry Squad- From Valley Forge to ROAD. Fort Belvoir, VA: Combat Operations Research Group, US Army Combat Developments Command, 1965.

Palmer, William R., Brent I. Wiley, and William R. Keast. Army Ground Forces- The Procurement and Training of Ground Combat Troops. 1948. Washington, DC: US Army Center for Military History, 1991.
Stewart, Richard W. American Military History Volume 2: The U.S. Army in a Global Era, 1917-2008. Washington, DC: US Army Center for Military History, 2010.
War Department. Order of Battle of the United States Land Forces in the World War, American Expeditionary Forces: Volume 2- Divisions. 1931. (Washington DC: US Army Center for Military History, 1988.
War Department. Army Ground Forces Study #2: A Short History of the Army Ground Forces. Washington, DC: Headquarters, Army Ground Forces, 1944.
Watson, Mark Skinner. War Department- Chief of Staff: Prewar Plans and Preparations. 1951. Washington, DC: US Army Center for Military History, 1991.
Wilson, John B. Army Lineage Series: Maneuver and Firepower- The Evolution of Divisions and Separate Brigades. Washington, DC: US Army Center for Military History, 1998.

Books

Allen, Thomas B. and Norman Polmar. Downfall: The Secret Plan to Invade Japan- And Why Truman Dropped the Bomb. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995.
Ambrose, Stephen E. Citizen Soldiers: The US Army from the Normandy Beaches to the Bulge to the Surrender of Germany, June 7 1944- May 7, 1945. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997.
Bergerud, Eric. Touched With Fire: The Land War in the South Pacific. New York: Penguin, 1996.
Campbell, James. The Ghost Mountain Boys: Their Epic March and the Terrifying Battle for New Guinea—The Forgotten War of the South Pacific. New York: Three Rivers Press, 2007.
Cray, Ed. General of the Army: George C. Marshall, Soldier and Statesman. New York: Cooper Square, 2000.
Drez, Ronald J. Twenty-Five Yards of War. New York: Hyperion Books, 2001.
Doubler, LTC Michael D. Closing With the Enemy: How GIs Fought the War in Europe 1944-1945. Lawrence KS: University Press of Kansas, 1994.
Eichelberger, LTG Robert. Our Jungle Road to Tokyo. New York: Viking Press, 1950.
Friedel, Frank. Over There: The Story of America’s First Great Overseas Crusade. New York: McGraw Hill, 1990.
Gorman, GEN Paul. Blue Spaders: The 26th Infantry Regiment 1917-1967. Wheaton, IL: The Cantigny First Division Society, 1996.
Gorman, GEN Paul. The Secret of Future Victories. Alexandria, VA: Institute for Defense Analysis, 1992.
Harrison, A. Cleveland. Unsung Valor: A GI’s Story of World War II. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2000.
Keegan, John. Six Armies in Normandy. New York: Penguin, 1982.
Mansoor, COL Peter R. The GI Offensive in Europe: The Triumph of American Infantry Divisions 1944-1945. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1999.
Marshall, S.L.A. World War I. 1964. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987.
McManus, John C. The Deadly Brotherhood. Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 1998.
Murray, Williamson and Allan R. Millett. A War To Be Won: Fighting the Second World War. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2000.
Rush, CSM Robert S. GI: The US Infantryman in World War II. London: Osprey, 2003.
Rush, CSM Robert S. Hell In Hürtgen Forest: The Ordeal and Triumph of an American Infantry Regiment . Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2001.
Stanton, Shelby L. WWII Order of Battle. New York: Galahad Press, 1984.
Wedemeyer, GEN Albert. Wedemeyer Reports! New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1958.
Weigley, Russell. Eisenhower’s Lieutenants: The Campaigns of France and Germany 1944-1945. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1981.
Yeide, Harry. The Infantry’s Armor: The US Army’s Separate Tank Battalions in World War II. Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Press, 2010.

Chapters and Articles
Maurice Matloff, “The 90-Division Gamble,” Command Decisions, Kent Roberts Greenfield, ed. 1960. Washington DC: US Army Center for Military History, 1987.

From my bibliography, you can't go wrong with CSM Rush's work, and COL Mansoor's book was also invaluable. Couldn't have written it without Wilson or GEN Gorman, either.

And BTW, that "chaos on a daily basis" line has never been reliably sourced to Rommel that I've seen. Considering it came from a postwar interview of German general officers, it was probably not Rommel, as the dearly overrated Erwin had been dead since '44. One of my profs believes it was Hasso von Manteuffel.

I really, REALLY wish y'all would read Geoffrey Peret's excellent book, "There's A War To Be Won," which is not only a
history of the U.S. Army during WWII, it also tells the STORY of the Army, i.e., how and why it did the things it did, how it
came about after the outbreak of WWII, and a lot of history on the weapons we used. A LOT of the myths and half-truths
related in this thread are addressed by Mr. Peret.

I cannot recommend this book highly enough.

Totally agree.   Read this book if you have any interest in wwii





 

Another interesting quote I've seen attributed to a Soviet document (though not sure of the validity of this):

"The problem with planning against American doctrine is that American soldiers don't read their manuals or follow their own doctrine".

I think the op is referring to the IQ test the inductees took initially .

From what I heard the Air corp got the best highest IQ then the NAVY then Marines ?

Army got all the duds IQ wise .

But by late 1944 and '45, the elite German troops were fighting mostly Soviets and the Americans fought some elite units, but also a lot of untrained young kids and old men armed with a mix of obsolete weapons and Panzerfausts.

The US Army had a TON of conscripts. Conscripts are generally considered by most as second rate warriors.


 

That's a myth.



Firstly, Germany's method of fighting was encircling enemy forces. Basically charging at the enemy going around the flanks and cutting the enemy off inside a pocket which was then destroyed. If you look at any of the large armored battled the USA took part in after WW2, we have never used the German's encircling technique.



Secondly, the Germans didn't "invent" fire and maneuver. US infantry were taught and were using those techniques as well in WW2. We are still using it to this day, we're just alot more professional now.



Thirdly, Iraq looked nothing like Germany's "playbook" from a strategic standpoint. Again, we didn't do any encircling. What would did do was use the Marine and some Army units as a diversion force that the Iraqis concentrated their manpower on thinking it was the main element, and then we'd hit them with the ACTUAL main element on their right flank.



 

I had a great uncle that was wounded 3 times in North Africa, he told me himself he had 3 tanks destroyed beneath him.  3 times he survived when his crews did not.  He had 8 weeks training before he shipped out at the very beginning of the war.   He did not participate after North Africa, his wounds the 3rd time took him out of the fight.  He only talked to me about it once while I was home on leave, no particulars and it was hard for him to talk about even in general terms.  

The amount of training he got prior to shipping out was criminal but it was a different day and time and the urgency to get units into the fight was great.  I don't think we can imagine today just how fearful the US was of losing.  In early 42 we were not really ready for the fight and probably threw men at it who were not ready to buy time.

Basically Hannibal at Cannae.  



 

Ah, that explains the failure at Stalingrad.  The German 6th Army couldn't manage "the pocket" in a big city such as Stalingrad like they could on the open steppe.  Especially since the Germans couldn't complete the encirclement due to the river on one side of Stalingrad.  So the Germans got bogged down in a meatgrinder, only to find themselves encircled by Russian reinforcement later on.

I know that is a vast oversimplification for Stalingrad, but it makes sense.

Fuck yeah!

History is written by the victors, and it's hard to beat the American propaganda machine.

I knew that would be too deep of a concept for the likes of you.

you mean the american historians who wrote about how sub-par american infantry were?

holy non-sequitour batman!

I never said they did. Only the 1st Division and the 82nd Airborne had seen combat by that time. What I said was that the Army had placed combat experienced troops within other, not al, but other divisions in prepartion for the invasion and that by late 44 most U.S. units had combat experience.

The following were engaged in combat NLT Oct 1944:
Infantry Divisions
1st
2nd
3rd
4th
5th
8th
9th
28th
29th
30th
35th
36th
45th
79th
80th
83rd
90th
104th

Armored Divisions
2nd
3rd
4th
5th
7th

Airborne Divisions
82nd
101st

This...according to my uncles' recount.  Basic + 6 weeks then driving a Sherman in the hedgerows facing Tigers with 88mm guns.  I think it is common knowledge that hedgerow warfare tactics were invented on the fly after the Normandy landing.  One uncle died after lingering two years full of shrapnel after the war in a VA hospital, result of taking a direct 88 hit in his Sherman in France that killed the rest of the crew.

I was speaking of contemporary and near post-war newspaper and film depictions of American heroics, which created the myth of the all-powerful GI to those not as versed as yourself in true history, if there is such a thing.





 

Hey man, I once rebelled and grew a mullet as a teenager.

Later I tried ditching school with some friends...except that my "friends" decided to ditch me and left me behind at school instead.

I failed in my attempt to be a rebel.

Tearing down your men who are still in combat was frowned upon during more patriotic times.  

Auftragstaktik or mission-oriented orders and combined arms. Pretty much the whole of armored warfare doctrine and mechanized operations were worked out by the Germans. William DuPuy was a great admirer of German infantry tactics and imported them wholesale at TRADOC in the 70's during the rebuilding of the Army after Vietnam. DuPuy literally wrote the book (FM 100-5) on US tactics.

See also papers like this: http://emma.informatik.unibw-muenchen.de/_portal/_content/professorships/systemScience/armedForces/Balck_Mellenthin.pdf

I know they had SOME experience troops in their ranks.





What I said is the MAJORITY of individual troops (not just units) that fought in Normandy had never been in combat.  I never said EVERY person in the units had not seen combat.





It goes with my original post that the US Army in 1944 was made up of mostly green troops, but with excellent training and very good equipment.  

That's why the Wehrmacht had so many great successes in the beginning. Stalin wouldn't let his units retreat and they'd just get completely enveloped and then destroyed by German armor. Which is funny because Hitler did the same thing, and then large German units would get surrounded and cut off. You might say that Ivan himself wasn't particularly well trained or too bright, but they figured out how to beat the Germans at their own game.





It's absolutely true in the movie "Enemy at the Gates", when the German General complained that his troops weren't "designed" for that kind of fighting (in Stalingrad).





 

We might have slightly borrowed, but America's brand of fighting is still our brand of fighting.
Look at both the armored assault into Kuwait and look at both armored assaults into Iraq and tell me how that is a copy of German WWII Armored Assault. They look similar on camera watching tanks rolling along but they are NOT the same.





The US Army in WW2 would suppress the enemy and then hit them on the Flanks, or "Bounding". Fire and Maneuver. We still use essentially the same shit. The Germans did not teach us that.
 

The Soviets never figured it out.  They just threw men and machines at the Germans until there weren't enough Germans left to hold the line.

Hmm? Soviets were doing pretty damn well in Armored warfare in the latter years of the war.



 

I'm going with this.



 

I'll bet mine is higher than yours. Or did you even serve??

this



 

Yes they figured it out.

The Russians captured many many German troops by using large encirclement maneuvers that are similar to what happened in the Ukraine.