What they carried
An infantryman carried on his back and in equipment bags and pockets everything he needed to survive in the field during a patrol or while en route to an ordered destination. In winter this included wearing underwear, long johns, woolen pants and shirt, one or two heavy sweaters, woolen socks, an overcoat, a rain poncho, a woolen cap, a helmet and a liner, gloves, boots, and galoshes. His clothing alone weighed more than twenty pounds. He also carried an equipment bag, ammunition bandolier, backpack, entrenching tool, grenades, rations, canteen, spare socks, a blanket, a half shelter (to sleep under), and whatever personal items he wished. Altogether his burden was over eighty pounds.
He also carried a weapon. The M1 rifle, which was the standard rifle for American infantry in 1944, weighed over ten pounds loaded, and the twelve eight-round clips in his cartridge belt added another six and a half pounds to his load. The BAR man carried a weapon which weighed over 20 pounds loaded, and he carried another 20 pounds in ammunition. The infantry rifleman during winter bore a load of over eighty pounds, the BAR man nearly one hundred. With these loads, they trudged through mud or snow during the winter of 1944-45, the coldest and snowiest in Europe in over fifty years. Sore feet and sore backs were part of life.
The infantryman often reached a designated point and had to dig in for the night. His entrenching tool could be used as a pick and a spade, but the often frozen ground encountered in late 1944 resisted his efforts stubbornly. Digging in was an exercise which added to sore backs blistered hands as the entrenching tool chipped away frozen ground. There were instances when some men used grenades to try to blast the frozen soil, a practice which was quickly stopped by the sergeants. Foxholes were dug by individuals, with each man responsible for his own hole, or in the case of weapons teams, dug together for joint occupancy.
During the winter sleeping bags were issued. Tapered at both ends, the bags were difficult to get into and even worse to get out of, and the men took to calling them mummy bags. In the case of a night attack, the men could not exit the bags quickly, and most infantrymen quit sleeping in them, preferring to stay on top of the bag and cover themselves with their overcoat or blanket. When in close proximity to the enemy smoking at night was forbidden, as were cooking fires or open flames. This meant that rations in the field were often frozen, as was the water in the canteens carried by the men, adding another eight pounds to their load, but entirely useless.
Members of the squad carried other equipment besides their personal load, as assigned by their sergeant. Axes were useful, but not all men in the squad needed to carry one. A radio operator carried the normal load for a rifleman, as well as a radio which weighed nearly forty pounds. Sometimes walkie-talkie sets were substituted, they weighed far less but offered a more limited range. All infantrymen were issued gas masks, but by the time they reached the front-most had discarded them as being unnecessary since there had been no indication that the Germans were planning on using poisonous gas, as they had in the First World War.