The infantry’s role in the war
During the Second World War in all theaters, it was the infantry which bore the brunt of combat, be it ground units of the US Army or the Marines. The casualty rate for the American infantry was high. Seven out of ten suffered some form of injury or death. It was the infantry which carried the fight to the infantry of the enemy, battled the elements while out in the open, and carried on the grunt work of the advancing army. The loading and unloading of supplies at the front was performed by infantry units, as was the moving it forward to the men engaged at the front lines. Even when out of combat their comforts were few.
Infantrymen learned to survive without any creature comforts for the simple reason that anything that they kept they had to carry. Survival led them to shed those items which were not essential to their remaining alive. They lived in the mud and snow, not in the deep trenches of the First World War but in foxholes they dug themselves, or in shell craters created by the artillery of both sides. Living in the ground led them to be filthy, and staying alive drove them to tolerate it, of themselves and their squadmates. Some reported not having the ability to shower for as long as several weeks.
They endured the monotonous rations, lack of hygiene, bombardment by the enemy, accidental bombardment by their own artillery, constant tension, and the constant loss of friends because they were there to protect themselves and their fellow squad members, finish the job and go home. They accomplished the task with little knowledge of the tactical situation which drove them to take and abandon positions, engage and disengage the enemy, sleep in the open in driving rain, sleet, snow, or the hot humid summer of 1944. Once they were on the continent in 1944, other than the initial days of the Battle of the Bulge, there were few withdrawals in the face of the enemy.
At times in Italy and later in France, infantrymen learned to sleep as they marched, stumbling forward as if they were sleepwalking, which in a way they were. On the march, they saw first-hand the horrors of the war they were fighting, dead and maimed bodies of Allies and the enemy, many of them scarcely recognizable as human. They saw burned-out tanks and other vehicles, bombed-out villages and towns, civilian refugees with all of their remaining belonging in carts or on their backs. They learned to spend the night in foxholes back to back with another squad member, giving them a 360-degree range of vision, and creating the term, “I’ve got your back”.
They endured faulty equipment, inadequate clothing, the errors of logistics and judgment which found them being delivered winter boots in summer and the opposite in cold weather. Their war was a personal one, with the enemy when engaged in plain sight, and the casualties inflicted by themselves and their unit revealed before their eyes. For the most part, when they went home after the war they regathered themselves and used their GI Bill rights to get educations, buy houses, and create the baby boom and the suburbs. Few of them talked about the horrors they endured until much later in their lives, focusing, as they had during the war, on what was ahead of them instead of what was behind.
Where do we find this stuff? Here are our sources:
“Company A, 276th Infantry in World War II”, by Frank H. Lowry, 1991
“Life in the Infantry”, by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, The War, PBS online, 2007
“The Infantry Organization for Combat”, by Hugh Foster, April 26, 2000, online