In a war, how often do adverse sides actually shoot at each other?
WW2 had many notable battles, but what about the times between them? For example, during the German advance and, later, retreat in the east, how much time was spent marching and fighting, respectively?
What about Vietnam? Movies tend to focus on the action, but how much of it was there?
In Vietnam, early on anyway, one of the big morale problems was boredom. Most actions that I was aware of were fast and furious. That was part of Uncle Ho’s strategy, and it was very effective.
Peace,
mangeorge
Even so, it’s worse than it was in the past. I can’t recall which book it was in, but the author related the service record of a British sergeant who served in the wars against France, from the Revolution through Napoleon. In 20 years during an almost continual state of war, his actual combat time added up to a few hours total during the key battles of the war in Spain.
Compare that to the US in WWII, where we didn’t break for winter, didn’t ship guys back from across Pacific or Atlantic for leave, and kept combat troops up at the front for the duration of whatever campaign was being waged for as long as it was being waged.
And, from what I’ve been told by Iraq War veterans, it’s even worse now, since technological advances in methods of killing people far away and sneakily prevents the coninuation of the image of the soldier back in camp placidly playing his harmonica
Actually, the exposure of soldiers to danger has generally increased over time.
Beginning in the very early days of truly organized warfare, in the sense we would define it today, wars were generally decided by a very small number of battles - often just by one battle, but sometimes by two or three. The battles themselves did not last more than a few hours. Sieges were a special circumstance, of course, but even those did not involve actual combat most of the time.
The transition of warfare from muscle-powered to chemically-powered combat increased the lethality of weapons and presented the soldier with a higher degree of danger; nonetheless, early gunpowder battles were still pretty quick affairs. However, the industrialization of war put larger and larger armies into the field and enabled them to maintain themselves in the field for longer periods of time.
What gunpwder, especially after the invention of rifling, does is it allows for attacks in more circumstances than would have been possible in, say, 2000 BC. Warfare in ancient and classical times was a group activity; one man with a spear is useless, but a thousand men with spears and shields, and then you’re in business. But a man with a rifle can kill your officer with a sniper shot. A man with a bomb can blow up your tank. A man with a missile can shoot down your helicopter.
Consider the experience of the Union and Confederate armies in the U.S. Civil War, which started out fought as the sort of set-peice battle series familiar to most general at the time but which eventually expanded into almost continuous warfare. Entrenchment and constant gunfire became commonplace late in the war. The volume of fire meant that general could not use the rank-and-square set peice tactics of the past; men had to take cover, and they had to start spreading out, to protect themselves from fire.
Eventually of course things got to the point of the First World War, where the armies were perpetually in combat. The Second World War saw the static lines broken up and become more fluid, but a soldier was still in danger far more often than he would have been in the days of battles like Agincourt; for much of the latter parts of the war German soldiers, to use an example, were under almost perpetual danger of being bombed by airplanes.