INFANTRYMEN HAVE ALWAYS been the most important of soldiers, from Homer’s Achaeans and Trojans who battled beneath the walls of Troy to the legionaries who finally stopped Hannibal at Zama. Civilization is grounded on land. Outside of Aristophanic comedy, cities are not perched in the clouds, in a reality unchanged by technology or social upheaval. It was, is, and will always be far easier and cheaper to feed and arm men on the ground than at sea or in the heavens.
Overwhelming naval power can nearly starve an island or smaller land power of its resources, and on occasion force it into submission. The Allied navy almost did that with Japan by 1945 and could have finished the job by 1946 or 1947 if it had been necessary. At one time Germany believed that its U-boat fleet might do the same to Britain by late 1942. Instead, the British and American fleets by 1942 had stopped almost all maritime importation by the Third Reich and ensured oil shortages. Sustained strategic air power reduced cities to veritable ruins in Germany and Japan. Yet ultimately in a total war, if an enemy was to be thoroughly defeated and its politics changed to prevent the likelihood of renewed resistance, hostile armies had to be routed and land occupied by infantrymen. The fact that Japan and Germany had no ability to invade and occupy Britain and the United States, while the Allies most certainly did intend to put boots on the ground in all their enemies’ homelands, is yet another reason why the Axis lost the war.1
Even the great sea and air battles of ancient and modern times—Ecnomus, Actium, Trafalgar, Jutland, the fire- and atomic bombing of Japan, the detrition of Iraq in 1991, and the removal by air power of Slobodan Milosevic and his government from the Balkans in 2000—did not eliminate the need for infantry. Only the great hoplite battle of Plataea, not just the brilliant sea victory at Salamis, finally rid Greece of Xerxes’s invading Persians. The victorious Holy League fleet of 1571 never besieged Istanbul, and thus the Ottomans continued to threaten the West even after their crushing naval defeat at Lepanto. In modern times, Great Britain’s air and sea power helped win back the Falklands in 1982. Yet ultimately British troops still had to land on the island and physically force Argentine infantrymen to surrender and depart. Saddam Hussein was not removed until an army rolled into Baghdad in 2003, even though he had been subject to withering air assault during the previous twelve years. Air and naval power can win limited wars, but, barring the use of nuclear weapons, not total wars in which occupation of the defeated’s land is central to permanent victory and a lasting peace.
In World War II the need for infantry primacy was an unfortunate reality for the Allies, given the central and advantageous geographical position of Germany and the long-proven superiority of the German army. At its peak, Hitler’s land forces would reach five million active frontline soldiers, who would largely have to be destroyed or captured if the Third Reich were to vanish from Germany.2
Even the three great naval powers on the eve of World War II—Great Britain, the United States, and Japan—eventually had larger armies than navies. Those interservice disparities grew ever wider throughout the war, especially with the demise of major naval battles in the European theater by 1943. Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine personnel by 1944 were routinely fighting as foot soldiers. As horrific as air and sea battle became in World War II, well over 75 percent of the aggregate combatants killed and missing on all sides were foot soldiers. The Battle of Midway was a historic Allied naval victory. Yet the total American and Japanese fatalities (approximately 3,419) over four days were less than a third of the daily fatalities of German and Russian dead at the two-week Battle of Kursk.3
FOOT SOLDIERS SURVIVED the technological and organizational revolutions of the twentieth century in a variety of ways. Most important, by 1945 a soldier’s arms had proven far more deadly than at any time in history. The greatest revolution in arms of World War II was neither in armor nor more-lethal artillery, but in the pedestrian rifle that spewed bullets at rates unimaginable in prior wars. The United States alone produced over forty billion rounds of small-arms ammunition in World War II. And by late 1942, the chief weapon of most American soldiers was increasingly the gas-operated M1 Garand caliber .30 rifle with an eight-bullet clip. The semi-automatic rifle, the first reliable model of its kind to be mass-produced, proved to be one of many World War II precursors to such lethal postwar assault weapons as the AK-47 and M16. Unlike its workmanlike World War I predecessor, the M1903 Springfield bolt-action rifle, the new American M1 had far less recoil. If it was not as accurate as the Springfield at long distances, it also did not require the shooter to move his hands from round to round. That convenience ensured more rapid and, with training, precise-enough sustained fire. A trained American soldier could fire and reinsert clips to achieve forty to sixty shots per minute, with good results within three hundred yards. Quite unlike the earlier, heavy, and specialized M1918 Browning Automatic Rifle (BAR), with a twenty-bullet detachable magazine and a five-hundred-rounds-per-minute rate of fire, the easy-to-use M1 was a light general-issue weapon. When General George S. Patton called for troops to use “marching fire” (“one round should be fired every two or three paces”), he assumed that such rapid shooting was possible only with weapons like the M1, “the greatest battle implement ever devised.”4
The excellence of the M1 surprised the world in 1942 and set a standard, prompting a small-arms race to mass-produce semi-automatic and fully automatic rifles with even greater rates of fire, greater penetration, and larger magazines. In 1944, the appearance of the frightening German Sturmgewehr (StG) 44 (“storm rifle”)—over four hundred thousand produced—marked the world’s first assault weapon. It combined the accurate range of a carbine (300–400 yards) with the theoretical rate of fire of a heavy machine gun (500–600 rounds per minute)—albeit in bursts of twenty-five to thirty shots from its detachable magazines. The Sturmgewehr was preceded by the German light machine gun, the Maschinengewehr (MG) 42 (400,000 produced between 1942 and 1945), which could fire at an average rate of 1,200 rounds per minute. It may well have been the most feared infantry weapon of the war and refined the grotesque art of killing in ways unimaginable in the past. The Allies were fortunate that the German army was not equipped with both weapons in mass numbers in 1941–1942.5
By the end of World War II, millions of infantrymen of almost every major power had access either to hand-held machine guns, semi-automatic rifles, or first-generation assault weapons, resulting in a storm of bullets that far outpaced the gunfire of the trench warfare of World War I. World War II infantry was also equipped with a number of auxiliary weapons undreamed of just twenty years prior. Grenades were both more powerful than World War I models and far more plentiful; when launched from rifles, their range increased tenfold to over 350 yards. All the major armies by 1944 had access to hand-held flamethrowers, to be used against entrenched positions.
Soldiers in World War II employed land mines in numbers and varieties never previously even imagined, from small anti-personnel to large anti-tank models. These portable explosive devices gave the infantrymen the ability to lay down fields of fire that could stop the progress of entire armored columns. The use of mines and anti-tank weapons in campaigns in North Africa and in Asia and the Pacific led American planners to conclude that tanks were hardly invincible and that the number of once-planned armored divisions might better be reduced. All of these infantry weapons were easy to operate and required little training.6
Most of these advances were in offensive weaponry, but not entirely. Among the sixty to ninety pounds of gear that autonomous soldiers now carried, they had greater access to nonperishable rations and medical supplies, as well as compact tools and navigation aids. While the weight of personal gear soared, so did the availability of motorized transport, at least on the Allied side. By 1944, the typical American infantry division was outfitted with nearly 1,400 motor vehicles, a fact that helped explain why the foot soldier was now expected to carry more weight than any infantryman in history, including Greek hoplites and their servants of the past. A constant criticism of the American military, both during and after the war, was the extraordinary weight carried by the GI—although his heavy pack, in terms of percentage of his body weight (around 50 percent), was in fact, in proportional terms, lighter than what Japanese soldiers carried (their packs could approach 100 percent of body weight). The American soldier’s heavy gear was not so much just a reflection of American abundance as the fact that all World War II foot soldiers had access to food, clothing, weapons, and supplies undreamed of in the past, but without the personal “batmen” of antiquity who sometimes accompanied heavy classical infantry.7
Steel helmets—especially the German Stahlhelm (M1935 and its later iterations) and the American M-1 models—covered more head and neck area than did World War I versions. They were sometimes made from stronger nickel- and manganese-steel alloys and tended to reduce head and neck wounds. But all attempts to craft body armor, both sufficiently tough to prevent penetration of bullets and shrapnel and yet light enough to wear, had failed. As in World War I, but unlike in post–Vietnam War conflicts, infantry casualties spiked in World War II as the arts of offensive weaponry flourished and defensive protection stalled. Only in the late twentieth century did the advent of new ceramics and hybrid metal fibers offer the infantrymen body armor that could protect against high-velocity modern bullets and some shrapnel. In contrast, World War II was part of an unfortunate cycle in which offensive rifles, machines guns, grenades, artillery, and bombs were becoming ever more lethal and numerous without a commensurate development in personal armor. Traditionally, technological breakthroughs in the defense of infantrymen accelerate in more affluent societies of static populations, in which foot soldiers are scarcer and battle more conventional on the open plains. Greek and Roman foot soldiers were probably the best-protected infantry until the rise of the modern age, and enjoyed a rare period in history in which their armor actually turned away a variety of offensive weapons.8
The new lethality of infantrymen—together with the increasing number of aircraft carriers and U-boats, and the rapid growth of strategic and tactical air power—all worked to diminish the relative percentages of ground soldiers in most World War II armies. Increased logistical support and greater mechanization also made it more expensive to field an army division than in the prior world war; far more support troops and mechanics were needed to attend not just to soldiers but to the array of their machines as well. The United States, for example, although it had mobilized a far larger active military than during World War I (12.2 million versus about 4 million), and deployed it in far more theaters of operation, nevertheless for a variety of understandable reasons (most prominently the huge size of air and naval forces and the need for skilled workers in the vast archipelago of American industry) fielded fewer active US combat infantry soldiers on its central front in Europe by May 1945 than it had by November 1918.9
Unlike the static trench warfare in World War I, there were far more varied modes of infantry battle in World War II, mostly because of the diverse geography of Europe, the Mediterranean region, and the Pacific. First arose the large and small continental ground wars that characterized Germany’s multiple border invasions. Hitler soon followed the destruction of Poland with a second wave of brief border wars to the west and south that saw roughly the same sort of combined blitzkrieg attacks and familiar logistical support. Again in surprise fashion, the Wehrmacht would steamroll in succession over nearby Eastern and Western Europe in a way unimagined even by the Imperial German Army twenty-five years earlier.
However, after the April–June 1941 invasion and occupation of Greece and Crete, the landscape of continental battle changed and expanded in frightening fashion. On June 22, 1941, the Third Reich sought to extend its range of European operations by invading the Soviet Union. The German military with its allied armies mobilized nearly four million strong for the campaign, but when it went into the vast expanse of Russia in June 1941 it faced novel obstacles, well aside from prior considerable air and vehicle losses in Poland, France, and the Balkans, and over Britain and Crete that were never rectified. The army was now responsible for occupying almost all of Europe, a burden that siphoned off tremendous German manpower. The lull after the victories over France, Belgium, and the Netherlands in June 1940, and the availability of the flotsam and jetsam of millions of rifles, artillery, shells, motor vehicles, and planes scavenged from defeated European militaries, along with the reluctance to go on to a total war footing, had all made it seem unnecessary to expand the Germany army and its supplies enough to meet the unprecedented challenges of entering the Soviet Union.
Certainly, Hitler had added more divisions, and the OKW had made inroads in refining its combined air, armor, and infantry operational doctrine. The quality and number of its aircraft, tanks, and artillery likewise had improved somewhat. Nonetheless, in terms of its size versus the expanse to be covered and the magnitude of enemy forces to be defeated, the Germans who invaded the USSR were perhaps proportionally at a greater disadvantage in Russia than they had ever been in Western Europe, especially given the loss of ground-support aircraft and veteran pilots in the wars of 1939–1940. The German army’s multiphase Eastern and Western European wars between 1939 and 1945 accounted not only for most infantry casualties of World War II, but for more aggregate combat causalities than in all other theaters combined, as well as nearly matching the war’s total of civilian and military fatalities.10
Although both the British and Americans had sent large expeditionary armies to France and Belgium in World War I, there also arose a quite greater variety of World War II infantry battles that involved large expeditionary forces on all sides that were foreign rather than native to the continent, including the Anglo-Americans, Italians, and Germans in North Africa, the Allied invasions of Sicily, Italy, and Western Europe, and the British and Japanese expeditionary forces in Burma and China. Armies sent far abroad differed chiefly in the nature of their origins and methods of supply, and demanded far closer intraservice cooperation. Expeditionary forces started at the enemy coastline. Because they could not always rely on the land transportation of supplies directly from their home soil, logistics became even more important than fighting power. The homeland, at least in the case of one of the belligerents, was always distant, and thus not usually immediately in danger should invading armies be thrown back. New York, for example, was not directly threatened by the outcome of the Battle of the Bulge in a way that Paris was by the first German invasion through the Ardennes, or Moscow had been in December 1941, or Berlin in 1945. Oddly, at such a late date on the eve of the Battle of the Bulge, Hitler reminded General Wolfgang Thomale how much more vulnerable was Germany than America: “If America says: ‘We’re off. Period. We’ve got no more men for Europe,’ nothing happens; New York would still be New York, Chicago would still be Chicago, Detroit would still be Detroit, San Francisco would still be San Francisco. It doesn’t change a thing. But if we were to say today ‘we’ve had enough’, we should cease to exist. Germany would cease to exist.”11
Expeditionary warfare required constant attention to morale and spirit. Troops knew they were not defending their homes but had instead crossed the seas to attack those of others. The French felt differently about the German invasion of May 1940 than did their allied British expeditionary forces. The most civilized theater of war—if we dare use that adjective for the horrors of North Africa—was fought from Egypt to Morocco, where none of the European combatants (e.g., Italians, Germans, British, and French) or the Americans were fighting on their home ground. Traditionally, every expeditionary army—Xerxes in Greece, Alexander the Great in Bactria, the consul Crassus’s Roman legions at Carrhae, the Byzantines in Italy, the Crusaders outside Jerusalem—eventually experienced difficulties once the campaign transcended a few set battles. It is generally forgotten that American, British, Canadian, and Commonwealth infantries in World War II rarely fought on their home ground (aside from Hawaii and the Aleutians), a fact that might explain their greater investments in air and naval power, and one that should nullify some of the criticism that their relative ferocity was sometimes not comparable to that of German, Soviet, or Japanese ground forces.12
Given that Britain and Japan were island powers, given that a distant America enjoyed a two-ocean buffer from its enemies, and given that Italy’s opportunities for aggrandizement would largely be found across the Mediterranean, amphibious operations loomed large in World War II. Logistics was the key for the Italian, German, British, and American efforts in North Africa, and also for the Allied invasion of Italy, southern France, and Normandy. Such fighting was predicated on transporting armies safely across the seas, a fact that governed even the size and nature of shipped artillery and tanks. There was little chance that American planners and logisticians would have considered sending any weapon comparable to the awkward German rail guns or ponderous King Tiger tanks across the seas and unloading it at ports or the Allies’ artificial harbors, called Mulberries, at Normandy. The need to transport weapons long distances by sea was both an additional expense and also a catalyst for innovation and experimentation. Such shipping limitations on weapon size and design are also rarely computed when assessing the quality of national arms in World War II. It was perhaps easier to deploy Tiger tanks to Kursk by rail than to Tunisia by Italian or German freighters.
Another sort of expeditionary warfare centered on island and littoral fighting, where amphibious forces stormed ashore after assuming both naval and air superiority. Given the relatively small landscape of the targeted territory, invaders usually had to advance no more than a hundred miles, and usually far less, from the coastline. The aim of these ground operations was to eliminate strategically hostile strongholds, while providing naval bases and air bases to carve away the air and sea space of the enemy. Throughout World War II there were only a handful of failed island operations where the attackers were forced to re-embark or surrender. All such relatively quick defeats were British or Dominion endeavors in Europe: in Norway (April–June 1940), Dieppe (August 1942), and the Dodecanese landings (September–November 1943). They were largely a result of strategic confusion, poor operational planning, and an inability to achieve prior air and naval superiority.
Otherwise in almost every case—the Japanese invasion of the Philippines and much of New Guinea, Singapore, or the Aleutians, or the American island hopping from Tarawa to Okinawa—initial success was assured by controlling the skies and seas. Japanese expeditionary forces were successful only until late 1942, or as long as Japan enjoyed a brief window of superiority in the air and at sea. Japan failed in almost all its amphibious efforts shortly after that window closed, or lost almost all the ground that it once occupied.
The opposite trend characterized America’s steady ascendance. After losing Guam, Wake Island, and the Philippines in late 1941 and early 1942 to Japanese seaborne attackers, the US Marines and Army went on the offensive in late 1942 at Guadalcanal and thereafter established a successful, though costly, record of amphibious operations. They were never repelled in a single effort, largely because of their careful attention to ensuring pre-invasion material superiority, auxiliary aerial bombing, and naval gunfire.
At times when a landing stalled or an inland thrust was stymied, as at Omaha Beach, the first dark hours at Tarawa (November 1943), or at the Shuri Line on Okinawa in May 1945, the Americans nonetheless pressed ahead, convinced in part that it was critical to their mystique never once to abandon men on the beach after landing. In that sense, their confident resoluteness was reminiscent of the imperial Athenians who reminded the doomed besieged islanders of Melos that they would not abandon their blockade, because they “never once yet withdrew from a siege for fear of any.”13
There were only a small number of airborne assaults during World War II, largely because prewar fantasies of mass drops of parachutists proved unrealistic. It was difficult to anticipate winds, or to be sure that paratroopers would land where intended rather than drift off course or even into enemy positions. It was almost impossible to protect a parachutist from both hostile ground and air fire while dangling in the air. Once they landed, such light troops could hardly muster sufficient heavy weaponry, artillery, and armor to resist inevitable enemy counterattacks, or hope to be supplied if they were behind enemy lines or far ahead of friendly positions. Nonetheless, for a while the attractions of airborne forces seemed enticing, especially the idea of surprise, the ability to overcome natural obstacles such as rivers and fortresses, and the promise of trapping the enemy between airborne troops and advancing infantry—without the enemy quite knowing where its enemy might appear next.14
After some use of airborne troops in Poland and against Norway, the Germans first mounted a serious use of their Fallschirmjäger, or “parachute hunters,” when three airborne regiments were dropped against the Western Europeans during the battle for France. In successive daring operations—against the Moerdijk Bridge in the path to Amsterdam and some airfields near Rotterdam and The Hague during the May 10–14 German advance, the capture of the supposedly impregnable Belgian fortress of Eben-Emael (May 10), and at bridges in the Ardennes—German paratroopers created the illusion that this new paradigm would help speed up the collapse of the weak Western democracies.
The early airborne successes of the Fallschirmjäger soon prompted a much more ambitious and dangerous effort, Operation Merkur, to spearhead the invasion of Crete on May 20, 1941. Almost everything went wrong with the German drops, given that they were now no longer operating over land, but over seas against an experienced British navy. Well over 350 aircraft were destroyed. Such losses were not easily made up and would later partly explain the chronic shortage of German supply aircraft in the subsequent critical first two years of Operation Barbarossa. In addition, the Germans suffered almost seven thousand casualties, and for the first time in a major battle may have lost more dead in victory than the enemy did in defeat.15
Three thousand ninety-four paratroopers were killed, perhaps one reason why the subsequent German occupation of Crete proved especially savage. The debacle reminded Hitler that airborne troops, when not quickly supplied and followed by Panzers and infantry, were nearly defenseless, especially if neither air nor naval superiority had been achieved before they were dropped. The cost of Crete may have persuaded him not only to avoid landing paratroopers on the more strategically valuable Malta, but also to relegate all future airborne forces to minor operations in North Africa and Italy and during the Battle of the Bulge. Germans both created modern major airborne strategy and then gave up on it before the Allies had even sought to emulate them.16
Two years after the bitter German experience in Crete, the Allies’ first attempt to send a division of airborne troops against Sicily on July 10, 1943, likewise was seen as successful, but also similarly almost ended in calamity. High winds wrecked and scattered gliders. Parachutists were dispersed far off their assigned targets. In the case of the 504th Regimental Combat Team, Allied troops on the beaches and at sea mistook them for Germans and shot up their gliders and transports, inflicting over two hundred friendly casualties. Airborne apologists, as was their wont, argued that such confusion and misdirection achieved the unintended effect of panicking German and Italian defenders as well.
Some success with the highly trained 82nd Airborne Division at Salerno, Italy, in September 1943 had encouraged the Allies to risk deploying nearly fifty thousand paratroopers for the D-Day landings of June 6, 1944: the 82nd and 101st American Airborne divisions, and the British 6th Airborne. The plan was to secure bridges in advance of the Allied troops’ breakout from the beaches, as well as to knock out German artillery emplacements, disrupt communications, create confusion, and hamper German reinforcements headed to the landing areas. Due to bad weather, German anti-aircraft guns, and poor intelligence, nothing much happened as planned and yet the drops succeeded in securing the critical Orne River and Caen Canal bridges. As early as the airborne drops in Sicily, seasoned German soldiers when taken prisoner had asked American paratroopers whether they had previously fought the Japanese, in amazement at their courage and audacity.17
The most disastrous use of airborne troops was the infamous Operation Market-Garden against the Rhine River bridges in Holland in September 1944, a misconceived effort to leapfrog the Rhine, punch a narrow hole through German defenses, and pour into the Ruhr, thus ending the war before 1945. Due to popular literary and cinematic reconstruction of the operation, the campaign is now unfortunately known as “A Bridge Too Far”—as if the failure to take the final bridge at Arnhem meant that the operation was otherwise 90 percent successful. It was not.
The planning was flawed. General Bernard Montgomery had ignored his own intelligence that the British drop on Arnhem would land amid sizable German forces that included undermanned but spirited SS Panzer divisions, the 9th and 10th. Both were deployed under the fervent and capable Nazi field marshal, Walter Model, while undergoing refit and recovery.
The key British drop zone at the last bridge before Germany at Arnhem was sited far too distant from the river. Bad weather in England delayed reinforcements. The two American divisions that would take the initial bridges were veteran, but the paratroopers of the British 1st Airborne—assigned the hardest task of holding the “bridge too far” at Arnhem—were valiant yet had not yet attempted an airdrop on such a scale. The idea that a narrow exposed road could facilitate fast transit of the advancing Allied armor column was absurd. Montgomery had little reputation for risky mobile advancement in the manner of a Rommel or Patton. And one of his subordinates, General Frederick Browning, was both blinkered and incompetent, lacking precisely the rare gifts that the passed-over Major General Matthew Ridgway possessed to salvage an otherwise bad idea. General Brian Horrocks was an admirable armor commander with a stellar war record, but he lacked the near maniacal aggressiveness required to push through a long armored column to connect and secure the bridges. Oddly, despite the disastrous implementation of an inherently flawed plan, Market-Garden still might have succeeded had the overland component—the advance of Horrocks’s British XXXth Corps armored column—taken more risks and forgone rest stops.18
A final lavish Allied airborne operation involving three American and British airborne divisions was Montgomery’s monumental crossing of the Rhine (Operation Varsity) in March 1945, the war’s largest single-day drop at a single location. But by then the outcome of the war was foreordained and the end just seven weeks away. Other Allied commanders such as Generals Courtney Hodges and Patton crossed the Rhine at about the same time without the help of airborne troops. And the entire drop seemed almost more ceremonial than necessary to grab Rhine bridges and riverside towns. The irony is that the complex Operation Varsity was the most professional of all the Allied drops, as its landings were far closer to friendly lines, while Montgomery’s ground forces had started their advance before, not during or after, the parachute landings. Ironically, Market-Garden had been ineptly conceived, but at least it had the potential to change the course of the war in the West. In contrast, six months later, the more professionally conducted Operation Varsity did not much matter to the Allied crossing of the Rhine or the Anglo-American advance into Germany.19
Other than the initial German landings in France and Belgium and the American operations on the morning of D-Day and to retake Corregidor in 1945, it became hard to justify the increased cost of deploying paratroopers, despite the fact that their rigorous training and élan usually made them superb fighters in more traditional roles as infantry. The Soviets both created the war’s largest airborne units and used them the least in major operations: two major airborne drops at Vyazma (January 18–February 28, 1942), and the Dnieper/Kiev operation (September 1943), which largely proved to be failures. Like the Japanese and Italians who also formed smaller airborne contingents, high casualties persuaded the Soviets that parachutists were better employed as rifle divisions on the ground.
A final theater of ground operations was the siege, the age-old effort to storm cities and garrisons. Massive new siege guns and air bombardment neither altered the methods of siegecraft nor reduced the importance of the classical requisites of favorable supply, circumvallation, numbers, and weather conditions. As in the past, lengthy sieges became psychologically obsessive, often expending blood and treasure in either attacking or defending fortified positions that were not worth the commensurate costs. When civilian met soldier in confined landscapes, the death toll spiked, and it was no surprise that the greatest carnage of World War II—at Leningrad and Stalingrad—was the result of efforts to storm municipal fortresses.
FOOT SOLDIERS ULTIMATELY decided every theater in World War II except the final defeat of the Japanese homeland forces. The war, which had once promised to reinvent how and where conflicts were fought, instead validated the ancient supremacy of land forces, but with one important caveat. Infantrymen were no longer just defined by their guns, artillery support, and vehicles, but equally by the ships that delivered, supplied, and communicated with them, and the aircraft that protected and enhanced them. The Allied soldier had far greater naval and air support than did his Axis counterpart, so much so that these twentieth-century considerations redefined age-old criteria about infantry excellence itself.
Superficially, the national armies of World War II appeared similar. To the naked eye, infantry uniforms, organization, and equipment of both the Axis and the Allied ground forces reflected a common Western genesis, even in the case of a Westernized Japan. But on closer examination, the respective armies were starkly different, a reflection of distinct cultures and unique political histories. The next chapter notes how throughout the war national stereotypes usually stayed constant: the Soviet juggernaut that relied on overwhelming numbers and firepower; the organization, logistics, and superb air and naval support of the American army; the professionalism of the British officer corps and Britain’s unique ability to galvanize former colonial and Commonwealth troops for a single purpose; the ferocity of the Japanese soldier that was not matched by adequate support or weaponry; and the terrifying lethality of the Wehrmacht that sent its soldiers into battle with the expectation that their combat superiority could trump their enemies’ superior numbers and supply. Whereas these generalizations were often borne out, frequently armies were forced to fight in a mode inconsistent with their stereotypes because the singular objectives of their supreme commanders required ground forces to adapt to unique geographical, industrial, and strategic realities. For the most part, an immutable army did not drive the nation to war, the nation drove the army, and the army soon adapted accordingly, sometimes in accustomed character, sometimes not.