How Did the American Soldier Stack Up Against the Enemy in WWII?

Great Debates
1

Perhaps 15 years ago, I was watching a documentary on the battle of Stalingrad. During this gruesome broadcast, former German and Soviet soldiers provided running commentary on the savagery of that campaign and also confessed their grudging respect for the ferocity of their adversary on the battlefield. Both Germans and Soviets said their counterparts were brutal fighters.

At which point, the interviewer asked one of the former German soldiers, “And what of the American soldiers? How fearful were you of them?” The German looked at the camera, chuckled, then snarled, “Nobody had any respect for the American soldier.”

A surprising comment. Though I know a fair amount about the Pacific theater, I’m not sure I know enough about the European campaigns to rebut this admittedly broad statement. (That said, the Battle of the Bulge, Anzio, the D-Day invasion, etc. seem ample evidence.)

In general, how did America’s soldiers in WWII stack up against the enemy–especially in Europe? Were “we” the equal of the Germans and Soviets?

2

Um–didn’t we win? And didn’t the Germans lose?

[sub]now tell me that’s too simplistic[/sub]

:smiley:

3

Uh, last time I checked, Tsunami, we won, so I think that makes us the better of the two. :wink:

Seriously, though, it depends upon what part of the war you’re talking about. In the beginning, the US soldier wasn’t quite the match for the Nazi’s one would hope to be. The Nazi’s had better equipment and better training than most of their US counterparts. However, the Germans, unlike the US, didn’t halt much of their civilian goods production during the war, so we were able to rapidly match the amount of stuff they could put into the field and as the war progressed we got better with the kinds of equipment we had and with the training of our soldiers. (We routinely rotated our best people off the battlefield so that they could train the raw recuits, something that the Germans didn’t do to the extent that we did, IIRC.)

(And on “preview” I see that DDG has beat me with the witty retort. Damn your feathers, girl!)

4

[list][list][list][list]Sour Grapes
…:confused:…

5

It may not have been sour grapes, kniz. Hitler didn’t think that the US would become a player on the world stage until the 1980’s, and in Slaughterhouse Five, Vonnegut relates being in a POW camp with British soldiers. The Brits had made a very nice place according to him, and we Americans immediately made a mess of it. So, I’m sure that we didn’t always exhibit the “cultural sophistication” that the British and the French did.

6

Well, we did beat both the Germans and Japanese, the two most successful military empires in history at the same time. While the Russians did the real heavy lifting in Europe, we had more resources in Europe than in the Pacific. And none of our Allies had a presence in the Pacific to match ours.

What I suspect that the German officer was talking about was that the Russians and Germans fought with a lot more hardships than the Americans in the way of supplies and desparate situations. If the Russians were getting pasted by German artillery, they would run under the artillery and take it out. The Americans, under the same situation, would call an air strike. At least that is the the trash talk I have heard. Obviously all the combatants had some incredibly brave soldiers. I think there is substantial evidence, however, that the German/Russian front was considerably more brutal.

7

Hmmm, do you mean how well did the American soldier suck up hardships like being on the front line until victory or death? Not very well … because we were fairly sucessful in avoiding really bad situations. We saw no reason to engage in death struggles like Leningrad, Stalingrad and Berlin. It didn’t fit our stragedy.

However, when it was thrust on us, the American soldier was usually equal to the task. Some units folded, others achieved greatness. Some types of units, like airborne and combat engineers, were very respected by their German counterparts.

But, as stated before, the proof is in the pudding. The Nazis did lose the war(even if it was due largely to the struggle with the Soviets), and Americans did win most of the major battles with them.

8

I’m assuming the OP’s question has to do with how US soldiers might have fared against the German army of, say, 1940, rather than the decimated forces they faced following the Normandy landings. That’s an interesting question, but I’m not sure there’s a neat answer. In 1940, the US was clearly not ready to mount a sustained military campaign in Europe.

I can only provide anecdotal info. My father fought in the European theatre from November '44 till V-E day. He was involved in numerous actions in which members of his unit were wounded or killed, including the famous crossing of the Rhine at Remagen. He never, however, gave any indication that he felt that there were gross errors in the tactics employed on the US side to carry out actions, at least at his level. In discussing the actions he took part in he made it clear that when the Germans did attempt to hold a position, it could be very difficult to dislodge them. He, like many others, felt the Germans had better weapons on a one-to-one basis, and had a healthy respect for elite SS-type units, but in the end it didn’t matter because limited numbers and a lack of air superiority negated their advantage.

9

Nope, nobody respected us Americans. And why should they? We didn’t know what we were fighting for, and never did. Remember that joke from The Killer Angels?

“They said they were fighting for their rats.”

So take the Japanese, for example. They were a little deterred when they ran across some real Marines, like at Wake Island, but for the most part when they had the run of the show they discovered that Americans, unlike the Japanese, gave up when things were truly hopeless.

Then, we came back.

And when we discovered that the Japanese didn’t give up easily, or they betrayed that fragile trust that is required of one who is willing to surrender, we killed them all. We stopped inviting them to give up when they shot the guys with the megaphones. Then, we killed them when they tried to surrender. And then, with typical American ingenuity, we sat down and figured out how to kill every last fucking one of them, to the point where out of 22,000 guys at Iwo Jima, 21,000 young, idealistic men died.

It took 75,000 of our guys to do it, and it was expensive as hell, monetarily, materially, and psychologically. We still consider that battle to be one of, if not the, very worst of the battles we ever fought. But when it was all over, that stupid volcanic pork-chop of an island was turned into a supporting base, and we used it to help our guys kill untold numbers of people in our own unique manner of trepidation.

That’s what Iwo Jima was for, by the way. It was to insure that our wounded bombers had a snowball’s chance in hell of having a place to land somewhere in between Saipan and Tokyo. Because we sort of cared. In the meantime, half a million, maybe more innocent mothers and fathers of the people who didn’t care were immolated.

That’s war. Yeah, we sucked and might very well still suck on the battlefield, but we’re going to come at you every single way we can think of to fuck you, your family, and your neighbor’s dog up if you dare to enrage us. And once you do, all bets are off, because we’ve always figured out how to show that tough love. Win or lose, you’re going to die in droves if you come up against us.

Oh, yeah. Iwo was probably America’s most Pyrhhic victory, besides the Hurtgen Forest, which we’ve tried hard to forget.

Almost 7,000 Americans died there, or roughly one-third the number of Japanese who died defending it.

The fact of the matter is, you have to die in very large numbers to properly disrespect the United States. And you’re welcome to try to join the club, any time.

10

I think this is just one of those cherished beliefs that a lot of Europeans clung to at time. Many Germans held this opinion before the war, including Hitler. He thought we were all controlled by Jews, and he took the fact that we coexisted (however poorly) with blacks to be a sign of weakness. Yet if you asked Hitler or any of his cronies about American military history other than WWI, they probably couldn’t tell you jack shit.

Also, Our soldiers didn’t go through meat grinders such as Stalingrad (in Europe, the Pacific was another story) because frankly they didn’t have to.

11

“We” should be “whites.” Of course I was trying to see the world through Hitler’s eyes. :eek:

12

Erhm, nope, you didn’t win. The allies did.

Here’s one estimate of the cost of victory.

13

I grew up listing to my dad and his buddies tell war stories about the island hoping campaigns in the South Pacific. Yes they repected how tough the japanese were, but considered them to be just as tough and ruthless by any standard. Marienes would cut off japanese ears and and them tied to their belts to show off how many they had killed. Every vet had picture of “dead japs” that had been burned, mutilated,disembowed, and posed in degrading positions; there was quite a market for them and people still collect these photos (I hsve several). It became a game to roast’em out of a cave, they would take turns throwing grenades, operating the flame thrower and shooting the poor bastards as they ran out. The reason the japs didn’t surrender is because the were routinly shoot by americans who were up for days pumped up on speed issued by there commanders. My dad before he died told me that one of the best times of his life was when he was in the South Pacific, that he loved killing those little jap bastards!

So I’m not sure how the opposition felt about them, the japanese are too polite anymore and don’t talk as much about the war as some germans I’ve met, but the soldiers themselves considered themselves to be the best, most ruthless enemy the world had ever seen and the reason you did’t hear about american war crimes is because we won and wrote the history books.

14

Fine, that’s too simplistic. But then so is the OP.

C’mon, folks, we’re talking about an international coalition that slowly wore down and defeated the Germans–a coalition the Soviets arguably led by way of sacrifing several million men in perhaps the most brutal large-scale ground combat ever witnessed. There’s also the muddying issues of differentials in logistics, materiel, national resources, air support, population differentials, America’s relatively late arrival in the European theater, etc. etc., so, yes, I think concluding that “because the Germans lost that means they were inferior fighters” is indeed simplistic.

Sofa King and jaybee, I specified the European campaigns in my OP. The Pacific theater’s record is evident. BTW, Sofa, relax, bro. I’m not attacking the heroism or spirit of America’s fighting men, but let’s refocus on Europe.

I believe what the German quoted in the OP was alluding to was the psychology and physical toughness of the American soldier: his ferocity, courage, brutality, and willingness to keep slugging it out under the most adverse conditions. In some ways, this strikes me as grunt macho, something one today would expect to hear from the, um, vanquished Taliban. On the other hand, was he on to something?

15

Most likely no. His comments are simply reflective of his personal beliefs, filtered through his own memories and prejudices. A German who knew that he had been (arguably) in the world’s most brutal fight and who only had experience of U.S. soldiers as the soft-hearted guys handing out candy bars to starving German kids after the war is going to know that they were really undeserving of respect.

However, the guys who went through the battle of the hedgerows following D-Day facing an entrenched German Army, usually more poorly equipped in armor than his entrenched opponent, and having never trained for that type of battle (because the intelligence guys thought that the Normandy hedgerows were just lines of bushes), still managed to force those German forces back, one yard at a time.

G.I.s in the Heurtgen Forest, where weather made air support a joke, still managed to force the Germans to retreat from entrenched positions at a very high cost in casualties.

I doubt that the Germans who tried to eliminate the U.S. troops following the first week of the Battle of the Bulge when, without any air cover and with most of their armor and artillery gone, the U.S. infantry refused to let the Germans take any more land, were all that patronizing.

At Anzio, the U.S. forces had no right to survive, given the nature of the terrain in which they needed to attack straight up and even their rear echelon was under direct artillery fire from the Germans, yet they held out for over five months until the siege could be raised.

Broad generalizations about any large group not respecting another large group suffer the usual caveats against generalizations.

16

Well, gee, TS, if it’s just measurements on the “brutality capability” scale you want, how does My Lai stack up against “your choice” of other massacres? :wink:

[sub]i know, i know, different war[/sub]

But anyway…I don’t see why one “culture” of homo sapiens should be any more brutal, ferocious, or physically or psychologically tougher than any other. [shrug] I detect a trace of “Are Americans soldiers all just pussies because they’ve had it easy all their lives?” in the OP. My response would be, “Well, do you think that Americans in general are all just pussies because they’ve had it easy all their lives?” I would say that as the culture goes, so go the culture’s armed forces.

And no, I don’t think Americans are all pussies, and I don’t think American armed forces are all pussies. And I don’t think they were, back in World War II.

I think if push came to shove, you’d be surprised how fast all those teenagers who only joined the Army so they could get computer training turned into balls-to-the-wall fighters.

Even the gals.

Especially the gals. :smiley:

17

Well, I’m sorry if I came off a little bit bristly there. I was trying to capture the American attitude at the time. Perhaps I could offer a little bit of background.

The American Civil War is really the place to start. Something like 2% of all Americans were killed or wounded in that war, and yet we somehow made a lasting peace with ourselves. The grisly cost forced a major change in American outlook when it came to combat. In a way, Americans had already learned some of the costly lessons that others had to learn in the First World War.

By the time of the WWI, Americans were no longer so willing to rush headlong into battle. Black Jack Pershing made absolutely certain that Americans were not fed into the meatgrinder of the Western Front until they were well trained and properly equipped. When they finally did commit to battle against a thoroughly worn out German enemy, it was very difficult to judge exactly how the two forces compared, for the mere presence of the Americans proved to be the straw that broke the German back.

In World War II, however, the first German experience with Americans was at Kasserine Pass. That was a disaster. Americans were poorly led, totally disorganized, and badly beaten about. However, they quickly improved.

I wish I could find the exact quote, but I can’t. Erwin Rommel remarked on the Americans, saying that they were the very worst soldiers he had ever seen–but they were also the fastest learners.

And that, in a nutshell, was the key to American success. Americans very well might not have been the equals of the Germans and Russians when it came to fighting poorly supplied in horrible conditions. So one of the American solutions was to try to ensure that they didn’t have to do that.

Rather than rely simply on the fighting prowess of their soldiers, they brought every conceivable advantage to the battlefield–adequate food, fuel and ammunition, air supremacy, massed artillery, tactical and strategic deception and yes, chocolate bars and cigarettes. Not only that, but the “soft” Americans also held forth an attractive option to the Germans and their non-German conscripts: they could often safely surrender, something most would never consider on the Eastern Front.

America didn’t do everything right by a long shot, but they did far, far better than the Germans, which is what was important.

18

This is a difficult question to answer because the quality of American units varied greatly. The best American units (Marines, Airborne, Rangers) were equal to the best anyone else had. They had a number of advantages over regular American units: superior training, superior personnel, rest and refitting between missions/battles

Non “elite” forces varied greatly in quality, depending on experience and leadership.

One huge liability was the “Repple Depple” system of replacements, where units were kept at full strength by feeding green replacements forward into units in combat, which had no chance to bring the new troops up to speed. (The Germans generally rebuilt units between battles).

The average American infantry division were probably never as good at pure infantry tactics as a good German division. But the Americans almost always had more armor, more artillery, and more airpower than their opponents so it is understandable if they substituted firepower for blood.

19

DDG, your language and argument really surprise me.

Nowhere did I suggest American GI’s were ineffectual or weak. My Queen of Googol, let’s not resort to strawmen.

20

I think at least three things undermine any meaningful comparison:

  • US troops in Europe were at war with nations fighting for their own lands – motivation is instinctively greater.

  • US troops were fighting as a result of an attack in the Pacific – the US people hadn’t been meaningfully attacked by Germany or Italy i.e. less of a revenge factor (especially compared with the USSR).

  • US troops came to Europe rather like a boxer entering the ring after the first few rounds – a lot of the best troops from other nations were no longer around by D-Day.

Idealistic, naive, potentially man-for-man better fighters, better fed, better supported, not war weary…all probably true to some extent.

Does that make them better or worse ? No, it makes them to different to compare, IMHO.