It was from the 1965 movie The Battle of the Bulge. The German commander finds a fresh chocolate cake next to the body of an American soldier, notes the cake is fresh, and says: “They have the fuel and planes to fly Cake over the Atlantic Ocean. Do you know what this means?”
He meant that if the Nazis didn’t win the war right then, they were doomed, and they were probably doomed anyway.
I go for this method.
(That was Elmer Fudd, no? I could not find any pictures of him doing this).
Maybe Yosemite Sam?
During the battle for Mount Tumbledown during the Falklands War, the night attack involved a bayonet charge and some hand-to-hand fighting.
I think this is in line with the OP but I don’t see where it has really been answered:
Is there a logistical system in place to rearm soldiers during a battle? Are there soldiers who’s primary mission it is to bring additional ammo to other soldiers on the front line? If you are in battle are you left to your own devices if you encounter the unfortunate situation of running out of ammo?
(probably not enough here for a separate GQ so I’ll just give a quick hijack here)
The Civil War marked the end of the bayonet as a major player in combat. In previous wars (U.S. Revolutionary War, Napoleonic Wars, etc) the bayonet accounted for roughly a third of all battlefield casualties. Civil War muskets were still produced with long triangular bayonets designed primarily for combat, but they didn’t see much use (although you could have asked Col. Joshua Chamberlain exactly what happens when you run out of bullets and your enemy hasn’t - he had to resort to a good old fashioned bayonet charge during the Battle of Gettysburg). Changes in tactics and weaponry really made the bayonet obsolete though, dropping it to less than one percent of all battlefield casualties.
After the Civil War, the army slowly transitioned away from the old triangular bayonets to more knife-like bayonets (the transition was gradual because they still had a huge number of triangular bayonets still in stock), reflecting the bayonet’s changing role from a weapon that could be used as a tool to a tool that could be used as a weapon. You still hear about occasional bayonet use even in modern times, but it’s pretty rare. It hasn’t completely vanished from the battlefield, but its use is not at all common these days.
(end of hijack)
A friend of mine drove ammo trucks in Vietnam. His main job during the war was to take the ammo from the rear up to the front lines where the fighting was. From there it would get unpacked and split up to the various units.
He said he volunteered for it. To this day he doesn’t understand why he volunteered. He just said they asked for volunteers and for some strange reason he noticed his hand went up in the air.
Only in siege situations. Stalingrad, Arnhem, Bastogne, a few others.
Edited a typo
Yes, no, sometimes. Yes, resupply is anticipated and prepared for. No, there isn’t a primary MOS of “Ammo Bearer.” They just grab the nearest guys in the reserve force and send them forward with ammo. Or more likely, the attached helicopters bring in ammo and take out the wounded. If you run out and resupply hasn’t gotten to you yet, you scrounge ammo from the dead.
Of course these days battles are much more fluid and dynamic than before. So all sorts of things can happen.
Also, if you run out of ammo and can find no source to allow you to reload do you retreat without being given an order?
I’ve asked my father that (he was a reservist) and he said ‘yes’, though it was preferable to stay in your post and ask for ammo from the enemy. Look at fighter planes. They withdraw as soon as they run out of ammo (or gas, whichever comes first.)
In an ideal world, you call back to your c.p. or squad/platoon/company leader and indicate that you are “winchester” (low or out of ammunition) and they send up someone to replace or back you while you resupply or to bring up new supplies of ammunition, grenades, batteries, et cetera. And any coherent engagement plan will have provisions for withdrawling if the opposing side has greater-than-expected numbers or expendatures and casualties are greater than expected, so a solider doesn’t have to “retreat without being given an order”; it’s all part of a plan, to be executed only as well as the fire teams have been trained.
But no, if you’ve been ordered to hold a position, it is your job to hold that position, regardless of whether it is actually possible or not. In the real world, running out of ammo is about the third dumbest thing you can do in the field, and you are pretty much sierra october lima if you run out of ammunition in the middle of a firefight. Which is why a trained soldier doesn’t just blaze away at anything moving, despite what you see in movies; suppressive fire is provided by the SAW gunner or a dedicated machinegun firing team (gunner and ammo carriers) whose job it is to blaze away like Jesse Ventura facing off with a camp of Sandinista rebels, while everybody else covers their fields of fire and follows the plan for advancing and covering until the opposition is disabled, flanked, or otherwise incapable of effective response.
Stranger
If you can do so without a hijack, can you explain to this civilian what are the first and second dumbest things you can do in the filed (in wartime)?
#2 “Volunteer to be first for anything”, and #1 “Run around the front wearing your helmet with shiny lieutenant/captain bars on the front assuring that every sniper and designated rifleman know that you are in command and therefore should be their primary target.” A good platoon seargent will make it his first duty with a freshly minted O-2 to scrape the bars off the helmet, show him how to get to the latrine without getting his head blown off, and inform him, “You’re in command, so do what I tell you and you might live long enough to make captain.”
I’m being only slightly hyperbolic. A smart officer–which is a battlefield quantity nearly in short supply as luck and common sense–will put himself in the hands of his senior NCOs, and if he listens and lives, might actually be molded into the kind of leader that military academies aspire but too often fail to produce. Every good officer I’ve ever known will talk about the NCOs who educated him past his youthful ignorance.
Stranger
Indeed, ‘Lieutenant’ essentially translates as ‘Temporary Placeholder’.
Depends what you mean by “in battle”. The “logistics system” is actually a fairly huge and complex supply chain network of transportation, depots, staging areas, and whatnot to get everything needed from wherever it originally comes from and distributed across the battlefield to individual units. You typically don’t have smaller units like platoons and companies (40-150 men) operating so autonomously that they are unable to obtain fire, communications and logistic support from their parent battalion, brigade or division.
I would assume when supplies get low, they radio in for more (via helicopter or truck), get relieved by another unit or return to a larger base.
Cause once is not enough.
“Getting shot” has to rank rather high, innit ?
[QUOTE=chacoguy]
Indeed, ‘Lieutenant’ essentially translates as ‘Temporary Placeholder’.
[/QUOTE]
The most dangerous combination of things you can encounter in a combat situation is a green 2nd Lt. with a map, a compass and an idea of what to do.
Getting shot on a battlefield can happen to anybody at any time for any reason, including no reason at all. Getting shot for being a complete idiot, however, does take a certain talent for ineptitude which occurs with high frequency in junior officers. Senior officers, on the other hand, have lived long enough to keep their heads down or, more commonly, stay back away from the front lines entirely and conduct the war by carrier pigeon, radiotelephone, or in the modern era by PowerPoint charts delivered by e-mail.
Stranger
