Stephen Ambrose in one of his books (“Citizen Soldiers” I think, I’ve read several of his books recently) is pretty complimentary towards the Sherman tank. He says it was more reliable, easy to repair and had a faster rate of fire than its German counterparts.
To echo what stillownedbysetters wrote, I happen to talk to my sole surviving uncle last week and he said he could never get my father to talk about liberating a concentration camp, or anything else. He was surprised when I said Dad once mentioned during the Battle of the Bulge, they had to use grenades to dig holes to bury their dead
Two of my customers at the Library had been at the Battle for the Bulge. One was taken POW there, and when rescued by more Americans, one of his group was loaned a Tommy gun and killed a particularly abusive guard.
The other customer’s unit was lost, and upon finding another American unit, saw that they were sitting on dead bodies to keep from freezing to death. A sergeant told him, “Pull up a Kraut and sit down.”
Strictly speaking though, even if the vast majority of the casualties occurred in the infantry that doesn’t mean that the infantry was the most dangerous place to be. It it may be that a smaller branch (or subset of the infantry) had a larger per capita casualty rate.
How safe was being an artilleryman? It seems that you were behind the front lines, and your positions had shelters of some kind (trenches, sandbag walls). Was this safer than the infantry?
Thanks, I didn’t know that. That was broadcast in 1940 though, when Bomber Command wasn’t particularly effective and the desire to ‘hit back’ was strong, five years later Bomber Command was a devastating war machine and by then there was some discomfort about attacking cities. Churchill could have been playing politics by distancing himself from them at that point.
I’m not an expert in WW2 and my first post was based on a newspaper article I read quite some time ago, so I’m happy to be educated.
ISTR reading in James Dunnigan’s “How to Make War”, that artillery and armor soldiers had about an even chance of making it through alive and unwounded based on historical statistics, but for infantrymen, it was a matter of how long you were in combat; past a certain point (200 days?) you were likely to be wounded, killed or if nothing else mentally incapable of fighting.
So yeah, artillery’s less dangerous than being an infantryman, just like being inside a 60 ton tank is considerably safer.
In the artilleryman’s case, it’s because they’re usually far enough behind the forward edge of the battle area that they’re not vulnerable to direct fire like machine guns, rifles, etc… but they are vulnerable to air strikes and counter-battery fire.
My dad fortunately didn’t see combat, but judging from his diary, the worst job he had was as ship’s mechanic while in the Bay of Naples; he and his crew had a hell of a time keeping the engines and doings going on his ship with all of the volcanic ash.
If you were a USA or UK soldier, at least you were rotated out. If you were a german infantryman (Russian Front), you fought till you were killed. that must have been bad.
It’s true that they did rotate units out of the line periodically- both within a division, and entire divisions, but I’ve never heard that GI Joe, rifleman, only had to serve a set number of days and then he got rotated stateside or into a non-combat billet. You were pretty much in until the war was over or you were killed, I thought. This wasn’t unique to the Western Allies; German units were rotated in and out of the line for rest and refitting as well; this was probably rare during the last 8 months of the war or so, but they did do it.
Even Audie Murphy fought from early 1943 through the end of the war, including Sicily, Italy, Invasion of S. France, Vosges Mtns, Alsace, Rhineland and Central Germany. Pretty much wherever the 36th Infantry Division fought, he was there, and you’d think they’d have rotated a war hero out earlier than they did.
The only service limits I’m aware of were for bomber crews- 25 missions originally, then 35 as the missions became easier. And they didn’t get out of the USAAF after that; they just rotated into trainer positions stateside. My grandfather was in the USAAF for a good year and a half after completing his 25 missions in Dec. 1943. He spent most of it being retrained for B-29s, and subsequently as a gunnery instructor for B-29 crews.
I don’t know if it qualifies but the Navy Frogmen had an incredibly dangerous and stressful job. They were sent in ahead of attacks and landings using crude rebreathers. I can’t find a cite but I’ve heard that a lot of these guys ended up with drug and alcohol problems after the war, William Hopper who played Paul Drake on Perry Mason among them.
Sounds like you spent your short time on Earth cold, cramped, and with minimal chance of affecting your personal outcome. IMHO, the odds of hitting a nightfighter from a tail gun, before catching a 20mm cannon shell, has to be bad.
Not to mention the pure random chance of death by flak.
I don’t know about infantry, but I do recall reading that for the Allies (including the Soviets I believe) after fighter pilots got a certain number of kills and/or became famous they were taken off combat duties and moved into a training post, which makes sense on several levels.
For the Germans however there was no such out, a fighter pilot flew until either he was injured beyond recovery, killed, or the war ended. That’s why German pilots had such impressively high kill-counts as compared to Allied pilots.
Upon reading this I immediately thought of this guy whose story I read years ago. Tail gunner on a Lanc shot down over Germany. The tail gunner’s space was so constricted that he could not wear a parachute (he had a chute, just couldn’t wear it). To don the parachute he had to crawl out of his cubbyhole, scramble down a short corridor and through a hatch and grab it off hooks on the wall. In this case, with the plane burning and out of control he reached the corridor just in time to watch the advancing flames consume the 'chute.
Alkemade made a conscious decision that death by impact was preferable to burning alive, and jumped out at about 18000 ft. He claimed not to remember the fall, saying he fainted a few seconds after leaving the plane. As it happened, he had jumped into heavy forest cover where the canopy of pine boughs broke his fall and deep soft snow cushioned the final impact. Amazingly, he survived with only relatively minor injuries. Picked up by a German patrol, his story was not believed until investigation by the Germans located the remains of his plane with the burned parachute still mounted. At that point he became something of a celebrity POW and was treated very well in captivity, being repatriated to England about a year later.
One of the most amazing stories I’ve ever heard.
SS
It’s an amazing story … but the Soviets apparently sometimes dropped people out of airplanes without parachutes on purpose (into deep snow). That has got to be one of the crappiest wartime assignments!
Source: Leroy Thompson’s “Unfulfilled Promise: The Soviet Airborne Forces 1928-1945” (Merriam Press, Bennington, VT, 2002) which says, on pages 34-35:
“Later in 1939 on 30 November, Soviet paratroopers had the distinction of making the first combat jump in history when they dropped at Petsamo and other points behind the Finnish lines during the Soviet invasion of Finland. Due to poor navigation on the part of pilots and quick action on the part of Finnish snipers who picked off many as they landed, few of these paratroopers actually made it into combat. Those who did fought with courage, and many had even jumped without parachutes into deep snow drifts.”
