Quote:
Originally Posted by Webstral
In the line, no less! Good God, where would we have been without our crushingly superior industrial capacity? How many [expletive deleted] green infantrymen did we sacrifice on the altar of our impatience? Even today, I wonder what would happen if we needed to replace thousands of infantry in short order.
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When will we ever learn from the Germans?
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The Germans who only sent out replacement soldiers at the end of the month? Who had to combine companies nearly every week to have even half-strength battalions in some regiments? Who regularly scraped up whatever soldiers were nearby, such as transients or hospital dischargees, and sent them willy-nilly into combat as "replacement" platoons, with little or no integration into the command structure or unit?
When the American army could make attacks, take casualties and have units at full strength again in two days? That's what the system was designed for, and as far as that goes, it worked. Where it fell down was in our small army in the ETO. There weren't enough divisions to allow any unit to pull back long enough to absorb replacement soldiers.
With as few formations as Ike had, even with the slower replacement system the Germans had, we would have been forced to throw the raw replacements into the line, in
ad hoc replacement companies and platoons, just like the Germans did. I doubt the results would have been any better.
I don't see the replacement system itself as the limiting factor, but perhaps the underestimation at the regiment/battalion level on how long infantry small units needed to absorb and assimilate new men. I've read in places that it got better as the divisions and regiments accumulated experience, and took their time to rotate units more often.