Am I the only one irritated by our soldiers of the day being called amateurs? By the way, if the opinion of the individual who was interviewed holds any merit what does that say for the professional German army since they were defeated? Then again, in the end it is one mans opinion and rarely can one speak for all. That, and I would hardly call counter attacking with overwhelming fire superiority as amateur. I call that shit a solid tactic.
The story should be titled, "What a German soldier of WWII thought of British, US, Canadian, and Soviet soldiers, and never mind because he is bitter."
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Ahh yes and who have we fought that would be considered modern and civilized.
PROFESSIONAL
: relating to a job that requires special education, training, or skill
: done or given by a person who works in a particular profession
: paid to participate in a sport or activity
The Civil War was a foreshadowing of WW1. Where else do you see the impact of sending troops into fortifications where the defenders are armed with single shot rifles. The European military observers either missed this or ignored it.
Jump forward 50 years and put belt fed machines into the mix.
I'm thinking he didn't fight any airborne troops.
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Just a dog chauffeur that used to hold the dumb end of the leash.
If you look at the Army that started the war in 1942 in North Africa, they very much were amateurs from a training standpoint. The US Army as you know it of WW2 was slapped together in less than a year in 1941. In 1940 there were a little over 200,000 active duty US Soldiers. By the end of the next year, that number was around 1.5 million... All of those new troops received a very condensed training period focusing on the individual and small unit level. What is really incredible is the lack of large scale training at this point. By 1941, there had only been one real large scale maneuver exercise above the brigade level to prepare for war. They really were amateurs and when you look at the course of the war, that becomes clear. Early battles like Kasserine Pass were total shit shows, but as institutional knowledge of warfare gained through the school of hard knocks grew, the Army began to perform exponentially better. Anyone who tells you the US Army was a professional force is dead wrong. We weren't the Russians, but we weren't that far off.
Absolutely. Another point is that a percentage of newly trained men became instructors for new recruits, particularly in flight schools. Were there career soldiers? Certainly, and they were professional to the extent of their training and experience, but the Army as a whole in WWII was made up of citizen soldiers. WWI was as bad or worse.
"Gunfighting is a thinking man's game. So we might want to bring thinking back into it."-MDFA
Beware of my temper, and the dog that I've found...
Mike: My father, who was a landing craft commander in the Pacific, and who is now in his mid-90's--would tell you to this day that from the US side it was almost entirely an amateur effort, that those amateurs had to learn as they went along, that a lot of Americans died because of that, but by the end of the war the survivors had learned what they needed to know. (He would also tell you that the Marines in 1945--the guys who took Iwo and participated at Okinawa, were the finest troops he ever saw and he suspects were some of the finest in world history--their leaders were the guys who had learned the tough lessons in 1942-43).
And the fact that they started out as amateurs was no surprise. The Army in 1939 had only something like 150,000 men, and expanded in a few years to something like 8 million.
Those amateurs did well, but until they taught themselves they really were amateurs, just like most of our soldiers had originally been in WW I.
Let us hope that the current defense cuts don't leave us in that situation once again. It was an expensive lesson to learn.