Just got that one too.
Some numbers, from the Wall Street Journal (I’ve pasted the entire text that is available to non-subscribers):
Not to Be a Stickler on Bayonets, But …
By Julian E. Barnes
From the department of picayune fact-checking: The U.S. Army has 419,155 bayonets in its inventory. The Marine Corps has about 195,334 bayonets (and has plans to acquire 175,061 more).
PresidentBarack Obamasaid Monday night that the U.S. had fewer horses and bayonets than in 1916, by way of rebuttingMitt Romney’s charge that the Navy has fewer ships than any time since 1917.
Mr. Obama appears to be on the money with horses. In 1916, the U.S. Army still had mounted cavalry forces, creating a demand for horses on the battlefield. Today the Army only has 176 horses in its “on-hand inventory.” (Though, to be sure, the Special Forces in Afghanistan from time to time borrow local steeds.)
:smack: President Obama actually said “ships that go underwater.” That’s one way to arrive at a smaller Navy.
my father kept a bayonet in his boot, so he *always *knew where it was, when on his combat tours in WW2 pacific theater and in Korea. I know he used it too! It’s the one thing I asked him to put in his will for me.
Fascinating article. I noticed it mentioned bayonets are distributed to more soldiers than pistols. Why? Pistols are clearly inferior to rifles, but wouldn’t they be far more effective than bayonets as last ditch weapons?
Cost, maintenance and no need for ammo.
Bayonets are still used, but not nearly as much overall. I was a transportation officer in the Army, served in OIF, 5 years active duty. I have never once mounted a bayonet to a rifle, nor been issued one. Not once. Not during ROTC, not during OBC, not during sergeants time training, not during pre-deployment training. Never.
However, it wouldn’t surprise me to hear many infantry units still getting them.
Triangle Bayonets and Wounds is a good thread from here, on that bayonet type and more generally how bayonets hurt people badly.
As to camp tool/weapon/conflicts for a fixed metal weapon: I am almost sure it is in All Quiet on the Western Front–it’s been years since I read it–that the author describes in some horrible detail how the soldiers learned to use their spades, not their bayonets, in quick by-pass kills while advancing. Something about a learned decision not to use the bayonet because it too easily became snared in the victim’s bones, and the attacker would then be helpless as he tried to remove his weapon.
Am I getting this right?
Yep.
[QUOTE=All Quiet On The Western Front (Chapter 6)]
During the day we loaf about and make war on the rats. Ammunition and hand-grenades become more plentiful. We overhaul the bayonets–that is to say, the ones that have a saw on the blunt edge. If the fellows over there catch a man with one of those he’s killed at sight. In the next sector some of our men were found whose noses were cut off and their eyes poked out with their own saw-bayonets. Their mouths and noses were stuffed with sawdust so that they suffocated. Some of the recruits have bayonets of this sort; we take them away and give them the ordinary kind.
But the bayonet has practically lost its importance. It is usually the fashion now to charge with bombs and spades only. The sharpened spade is a more handy and many-sided weapon; not only can it be used for jabbing a man under the chin, but it is much better for striking with because of its greater weight; and if one hits between the neck and shoulder it easily cleaves as far down as the chest. The bayonet frequently jams on the thrust and then a man has to kick hard on the other fellow’s belly to pull it out again; and in the interval he may easily get one himself. And what’s more the blade often gets broken off.
[/QUOTE]
The book is fiction, but Erich Maria Remarque served in WWI and did in fact serve on the western front. A lot of what is in the book is presumed to be based on Remarque’s actual experiences.
Not to sound trite, but a soldier’s last-ditch weapon is the soldier next to him.
Saw bayonets. That’s a new one.
I was proud of myself for coming up with that reference. But more important, is recognizing that one single paragraph stayed so strongly in my memory for so many years, down to the two different points it made. And I never gave a damn then, and not until that GQ triangle bayonet thread, about bayonets or hand-to-hand killing in war.
I take that back. I read fairly recently an interview with the actor Joe Pesci. In the shocking opening of Goodfellas his character repeatedly knifes his victim who is bound in a car trunk. Between takes during filming, his stalwart actor-in-Mafia brother Robert DeNiro suggested that rather than thrusting jab-jab-jab, perhaps Pesci should slow it down and show a little strain on pulling the knife out, because it probably would have got caught up in the rib cage. That’s why DeNiro’s DeNiro, I suppose.