Army Assignments
Only a relatively small proportion of American soldiers made the invasions and fought on the front lines. Of the 11 million men in the U. S. Army in 1945, only 2 million were in combat divisions, of whom fewer than 700,000 were in the infantry-the “grunts” who did the fighting and most of the dying: They suffered 70 percent of the casualties. Every man in combat required 10 men in support. Young single men constituted a majority of these ground combat troops.
Most soldiers were assigned to the service and technical forces: the Chemical Warfare Service, the Corps of Engineers, the Medical Department, the Ordnance Department, the Quartermaster Corps, the Signal Corps, and the Transportation Corps. They supported the combat troops by training them; planning the battles the combat troops fought; transporting them; supplying them with food, shelter, clothing, weapons, and ammunition; buying and servicing their equipment; caring for the sick and wounded; operating the postal and financial services and the chaplaincy; running newspapers (The Stars and Stripes and base newspapers) and magazines (Yank and various unit publications); keeping records on them; getting them paid; running stores for them; and providing them with entertainment and rest-and-recreation facilities-all the multifarious tasks required to operate a modern military. Although they faced enemy guns only in unusual crisis situations, the millions who went overseas in support capacities were still at substantial risk-of accidents, submarines, the V-1 and V-2 bombs that the Germans rained on England, or the kamikaze planes in the Pacific.
Army Strategy
After Pearl Harbor, with the U. S. declaration of war on Japan and the German and Italian declarations of war on the United States that immediately followed that attack, the United States was a full-fledged member of the Allied powers. By that time the Allied leaders-Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin-had already agreed on targeting Germany and Italy before Japan, and on concentrating planes and armaments in the European theater of operations (ETO) first. At the same time the United States had to rebuild and supply its navy to fight Japan in the Pacific.
Although the Allied nations shared the common goal of defeating the Axis nations, jealousies and differences on strategy arose among them. Their leaders had to take into account political as well as military realities. President Roosevelt was far more hopeful about the Soviet premier Joseph Stalin’s good faith than was the British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Hitler had sent his armies to invade the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, and the fighting that developed on that front was prolonged, bloody, and bitter, costing millions of lives. Consequently Stalin pressed his allies to invade France as soon as possible, to gain some relief for the embattled Soviet army. Worried about a possible defeat, Churchill dragged his heels, insisting on invading first North Africa, Sicily, and Italy. Roosevelt’s personal friendship with Churchill was stronger than with Stalin, just as the ties between Great Britain and the United States were stronger than those between the Americans and the Soviets. Nonetheless Roosevelt favored an earlier invasion of France. He mediated between Stalin and Churchill, conciliating first one, then the other. On the next lower level, the American general Dwight Eisenhower as supreme commander in the ETO had to reconcile differences between British and American generals.
Roosevelt also had to handle interservice rivalries among the U. S. Army, the U. S. Navy, and the Marine Corps, which persisted throughout the war. Commanders competed for men, equipment, and supplies-all too scanty in the early days of the war. Cocky young marines taunted infantrymen with accusations of cowardice, failing to recognize that they were older, wiser, and more experienced. Ultimately, however, the services had no choice but to depend on one another, and some men recognized the valor of other services. For instance, Cpl. William Preston wrote his father after the invasion of Normandy:” I cannot say enough for the Navy for the way they brought us in, for the firepower they brought to bear on the beach. Whenever any of us fired a burst of tracer at a target, the destroyers, standing in so close they were almost ashore, fired a shot immediately after us, each time hitting what we were firing at on the nose.”
Confronted with a two-ocean war, the United States assigned major responsibility for fighting in the ETO to its army. Nonetheless, even though the army operated a larger number of ships and watercraft (troop ships, cargo ships, hospital ships, repair boats, tankers, coastal freighters, tugboats, launches, amphibious assault craft, barges, and pontoon sections) than the navy, the army relied on the navy to battle the German submarines that infested the Atlantic, to transport troops across the Atlantic to battlefields in North Africa and Europe, and to back up every invasion with bombardments. The army also depended on the civilian merchant marine to transport supplies, under conditions of great hazard. Similarly, the country entrusted to the navy and the Marine Corps the brunt of the war in the Pacific, but army infantrymen fought side by side with marines in the agonizing battles to retake Pacific islands, and army troops under the command of Gen. Douglas MacArthur warred in the China-Burma-India theater.
The navy also had to evolve a method of combating the Axis submarines that wreaked so much havoc on shipping in the Atlantic. At British and American naval insistence, in January 1943 the Casablanca conference of Allied leaders gave priority to antisubmarine warfare. Early in the war the British and Canadians developed antisubmarine tactics and escort vessels more effective than those of the United States. By 1944, however, the U. S. Navy had worked out the hunter-killer groups built around escort carriers that eventually defeated the submarine menace and enabled the enormous lift of men, supplies, and equipment necessary for the invasion of Normandy that spring.
The Enemy
During World War II up until the discovery of the concentration camps in which the Nazis interned, tortured, starved, and murdered Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, and those they considered their political enemies, Americans directed their enmity toward the Nazi party and its leaders-particularly Adolf Hitler- not the German people as a whole. For one thing, millions of Americans had German ancestors and relatives. Many admired German culture, particularly German music, and German military skills. 15 American soldiers made a distinction between the German SS-elite, fanatical Nazi troops, whom they hated as ruthless-and other German soldiers. Generally speaking, they trusted Germans to play by the rules. In fact, of course, no nation played by the rules all the time. Every army had its sadists. Exhausted soldiers who had just seen their friends killed or suffering took their own revenge. Armies moving fast did not want to bother with prisoners or spare the men to guard them. The longer the war went on, the more violations there were. Germans did their worst at Malmédy in France in December 1944, when SS officers and men killed 107 American prisoners of war in cold blood; 43 others escaped by feigning death. 16 Nevertheless, most of the time in most places American and German troops maintained some sort of mutual understanding of the rules of war.
