patterso@ADS.COM (Tim J. Patterson) (01/18/91)
From: patterso@ADS.COM (Tim J. Patterson) In article <1991Jan17.052222.27310@cbnews.att.com> ab3o+@andrew.cmu.edu (Allan Bourdius) writes: > > >From: Allan Bourdius <ab3o+@andrew.cmu.edu> >>Without a doubt, the most casualties occur in ground attacks, or in >>assaults on ground forces. > >Point of information: In WWII, 80% of casualties suffered in battle by >the US Army were absorbed by the infantry. This number is even more >shocking when you consider that only 10% of the Army were infantrymen. ^^^ Is this really accurate, I understood there was a 2:1 ratio of support to fighting troops but also that the majority of those fighting were ground pounders. Tim
thornley@uunet.UU.NET (David H. Thornley) (01/19/91)
From: plains!umn-cs!LOCAL!thornley@uunet.UU.NET (David H. Thornley) In article <1991Jan18.003756.8733@cbnews.att.com> patterso@ADS.COM (Tim J. Patterson) writes: >In article <1991Jan17.052222.27310@cbnews.att.com> ab3o+@andrew.cmu.edu (Allan Bourdius) writes: >> >>[10% of Army was infantryment in WWII; they took 80% of casualties.] > >Is this really accurate, I understood there was a 2:1 ratio of >support to fighting troops but also that the majority of those >fighting were ground pounders. > Some of this depends on who you call infantry. The guy with a rifle is infantry, and the guys with the machine guns, but is the company clerk infantry? The 81mm mortar crews? I've rarely seen an account of the number of infantry that specified exactly what they meant (the one definition I remember seeing is "everybody in an infantry battalion", and the source admitted that was inaccurate). Patton commented in WWII that an infantry division has 4000 riflemen, out of over 16,000 men total, and so a division that took 20% casualties (3200 men) would be almost useless. We can use this estimate as follows: The U.S. fielded something like 130 divisions during the war. Not all were infantry divisions, but there were other non-divisional units, so assume about 5-600,000 riflemen in the Army. I can't seem to find a handy reference source about how many people were in the Army, but I did find that about 15,000,000 men and women wound up in the Armed Forces, and I can't see the army as less than a third of that (even discounting the Air Corps, which was technically part of the Army), so our rough estimates do indeed show that the Army was 10% or less riflemen during the war. DHT