In The Soldier’s Load and the Mobilty of a Nation, then-Colonel S.L.A. Marshall examines the soldiers’ fire load:
Outdoing Schamhorst, von Moltke in his time decided that 200 rounds of ammunition was a more fitting load for the sturdy Prussian. That became the standard requirement for modem armies. Both sides used it during the Russo-Japanese War, and most armies likewise used it in World War I. So far as may now be learned, no one of any importance saw fit to question whether that figure of 200 rounds had any justification, either in tactics or logistics. In the American Army in France of 1917–18, our commanders usually adhered to the practice of requiring troops to carry a full ammunition load during the approach march, even in moving into a “quiet” sector. And in bot weather the results were brutal. We can write off the general policy with the simple statement that troops usually had to carry ten times as many cartridges as there was any likelihood they would use.
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But we deviated from it, not primarily to lighten the soldier’s load but to make room for other types of ammunition.
For example, during the last two years of operations in the Pacific, the rifleman put across a beach generally carried eighty rounds for his MI or carbine. This special dispensation was simply granted him that he might the better carry eight hand grenades, or in some cases five. It was presumed that in the close-in fighting he was likely to meet, five to eight grenades would give him a wider margin of safety than double the amount of his rifle ammunition.
In the event, such calculations were found to have little practical relation to what took place along the line of fire. When you examined company operations in atoll fighting in detail, it was evident that the soldier who used grenades at all was almost as rare as the man who fired as many as eighty rounds from his rifle in any one day of action. Which is to say that the load of grenades the line was required to carry did not promote either increased safety or greater fire power. Eight grenades are a particularly cumbersome burden. They weigh 10.48 pounds. Had the grenade load of each man been cut by three-quarters (giving him two grenades) it is a reasonable assumption that the over-all and expedient tactical use of that weapon would not have been reduced, and the force so lightened would not have been made more vulnerable.
With all hands carrying eight grenades, the number of men making any use of that weapon at all was consistently less than six per cent of the total in any general action. Research showed further that the grenade was rarely put to any practical use in the initial stage of an amphibious attack. This was also true in Europe.
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This same argument would eliminate altogether any further issuing of the bayonet. That weapon ceased to have any major tactical value at about the time the inaccurate and short-range musket was displaced by the rifle. But we have stubbornly clung to it-partly because of tradition which makes it inevitable that all military habits die a slow death, but chieffy because of the superstition that the bayonet makes troops fierce and audacious, and therefore more likely to close with the enemy.
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In the Pacific fighting of World War II, more men were run through by swords than by bayonets.
In our European fighting there is only one bayonet charge of record. That was the attack by the 3d Battalion, 502d Parachute Infantry, at the Pommerague Farm during the advance on Carentan, France, in June 1944. In that attack three of the enemy were actually killed by American bayonets. It is a small irony, however, that these killings took place about six minutes after the main charge had subsided. And it is a somewhat larger irony that the one junior officer who actually closed with the bayonet and thrust his weapon home was subsequently relieved because he was not sufficiently bold in leading his troops.