Only a small percentage of the soldiers did almost all of the fighting in World War II, Gen. DePuy found, early in his career:
If you just left them alone then some 10 percent of the soldiers were the ones who actually took the initiative, moved, fired their rifles, threw hand grenades, and so on. The other 90 percent would defend themselves if they had to, but would not do the other things unless an officer or a sergeant directly ordered them to do it, in which case they usually would do it. I learned that you couldn’t depend on them doing things simply because there was a plan to do it, or because of some generalized order to do it, and this included the junior officers. You had to say, “do this,” “do that,” “now fire there,” “now do this,” and “now move there.” You would always end up with a good sergeant or a good officer and three or four men doing all of the work. Unfortunately, the rest of them contributed to the casualties. And, to this very day, I’d rather have a 40-man company than a 220-man company, if I could pick the 40 men. I’d pick sergeants and officers and a few natural fighters if I could. So, what I’m saying is that I came away absolutely impressed with the fact that the average man, like nine out of ten, or eight out of ten, does not have an instinct for the battlefield, doesn’t relish it, and will not act independently except under direct orders. If they are in a crew they are better. If they are in a tank or with a machine gun, they are better because there is teamwork involved. If an officer orders them to do something eyeball-to-eyeball, most men, even the ones who don’t want to do it, have no initiative, and are scared to death, normally will do exactly what he tells them to do.
Once, during the Battle of the Bulge, we moved into an attack at night (early morning). We got behind the Germans and prepared to jump off from the edge of some woods across an open, snowy field to seize the little village of Berle, Luxembourg. I had “B” Company in the overwatch and “A” Company doing the attack. Just before we were ready to go, a machine gun opened up on us from the rear, back in the woods. You see, we had gone past the Germans. We had slipped through them at night. And, some of them had turned around, came back, and spotted us milling around in the woodline. So, they set up a machine gun and started firing at our backs. I didn’t want to stop the attack because I had the artillery just about ready to go. So, I grabbed the first two soldiers I could find, I didn’t know who they were, and I said, “You and you, I want you to go back and knock out the machine gun right now, because we are going to attack that town. Now, get going.” And, they did! They were scared to death, but they did it. They would never have done it if I hadn’t said, “We have to do it, you have got to do it — now go do it!” This means that effectiveness varies directly with leadership actively applied.
I’ve been reading the Collins violence book. This is such crazy analysis compared to normal thinking on the topic.
I think this explains a lot of the success of airborne operations in World War 2. Every single one of them started as a clusterfuck, with units disorganized, weapons lost, fighting against superior numbers, etc., but they were also all largely successful. When you realize that most men didn’t really fight — though I would be interested to see if those same percentages apply to the German or Russian armies — and that the airborne units were all full of picked men, this becomes much more understandable. No better demonstration of Napoleon’s maxim that the moral is to the physical as three is to one. Three-to-one might even be understating the issue.
Doesn’t this hold true for just about any human endeavor, not just combat?
I’d be willing to bet that the percentages were slightly higher for the Germans and slightly lower for the Russians, but pretty close, outside of picked, elite units. Yet another Pareto power law — 20% of the men did 80% of the fighting.
As I recall, the Soviets clung to airborne units as an excellent way to select for bravery, even when it became clear that they wouldn’t be using those troops as actual paratroopers.