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From: plains!umn-cs!LOCAL!thornley@uunet.UU.NET (David H. Thornley)
Newsgroups: sci.military
Subject: Re: distribution of armed forces
Message-ID: <1991Jan19.034245.1680@cbnews.att.com>
Date: 19 Jan 91 03:42:45 GMT
References: <1991Jan15.021152.22475@cbnews.att.com> <1991Jan17.052222.27310@cbnews.att.com> <1991Jan18.003756.8733@cbnews.att.com>
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From: plains!umn-cs!LOCAL!thornley@uunet.UU.NET (David H. Thornley)
In article <1991Jan18.003756.8733@cbnews.att.com> patterso@ADS.COM (Tim J. Patterson) writes:
>In article <1991Jan17.052222.27310@cbnews.att.com> ab3o+@andrew.cmu.edu (Allan Bourdius) writes:
>>
>>[10% of Army was infantryment in WWII; they took 80% of casualties.]
>
>Is this really accurate, I understood there was a 2:1 ratio of
>support to fighting troops but also that the majority of those
>fighting were ground pounders.
>

Some of this depends on who you call infantry.  The guy with a rifle is
infantry, and the guys with the machine guns, but is the company clerk
infantry?  The 81mm mortar crews?  I've rarely seen an account of the
number of infantry that specified exactly what they meant (the one
definition I remember seeing is "everybody in an infantry battalion",
and the source admitted that was inaccurate).

Patton commented in WWII that an infantry division has 4000 riflemen,
out of over 16,000 men total, and so a division that took 20% casualties
(3200 men) would be almost useless.  We can use this estimate as follows:
The U.S. fielded something like 130 divisions during the war.  Not all were
infantry divisions, but there were other non-divisional units, so assume
about 5-600,000 riflemen in the Army.  I can't seem to find a handy
reference source about how many people were in the Army, but I did find
that about 15,000,000 men and women wound up in the Armed Forces, and I
can't see the army as less than a third of that (even discounting the
Air Corps, which was technically part of the Army), so our rough
estimates do indeed show that the Army was 10% or less riflemen during
the war.

DHT