Fascinating S.L.A. Marshall commentary

[John Kettler]

Found this while trying to chase down the report to Eisenhower on comparative German weapon performance.

Not all that long, but well worth the time to read it!

http://www.militaryhistoryonline.com/wwii/armies/chapter2.aspx

Regards,

John Kettler

[flamingknives]

Good find. Seems to be pretty much right on the money.

[John Kettler]

flamingknives,

I thought so, and it was only later that I realized that what I thought was an article was instead akin to a chapter. Looks like a must read.

Regards,

John Kettler

[flamingknives]

It seems that each chapter focusses on a different book.

Along the same lines, You might find this of interest.

I don't recall the source, other than I think John Salt put me onto it.

Jary's "18 Platoon" also counters the claim of the Germans superiority.

[Zalgiris 1410]

Excellent read thanks for that John, very in-depth debunking.

[Mad Russian]

I have read an awful lot of comments about SLA Marshal. I'm not sure how I view his interviews.

About the only thing controversial that I see is that % of men involved in combat. Before I go off the deep end, claiming him to be an educated idiot, I would want to see those same type of interviews done with other armies in the war.

What is very interesting to me, here, on these forums is the points of view we all take. Few, if any of us lived through WWII as combat infantry men or tankers. Having aaid that, we get our opinions from those that were, or claimed to have been, or wrote about those that were.

That starts to divide us out into groups that believe certain aspects of the war and those that don't.

The one and only example of that I will use is the tank/crewmen casualty figures and the kill ratio for German/Allied tanks.

Both sides are firmly entrenched with they believe. Both sides bring their expert witnesses to the defense of their viewpoint. All the production figures that are touted to "prove" that those figures couldn't possibly be right. All the rebutals about how tanks are often repaired and then put back into combat. All of it. The entire debate is based on other peoples opinions and written histories.

This debate is cleaner than most because the official records for production and own side causualties are at least solid. (Other debates don't even have that as a foundation.)

These debates often boil down to my research material is better than yours or my death trap tank mechanic had a better idea of what was going on than your ordinance report.

What is seems to be missing to me in most of these debates is common sense. Yes, you have the figures, and the figures don't lie, but liars can figure...

In the case of tank kills for instance. According the research material I have the Soviet Union produced 109,278 AFV's. If any German source comes close to declaring that even half of those was knocked out in combat 20 people will vehemently deny that here within moments.

But what is knocked out to one country may not be knocked out to another country. We are relying on the works of men, in many cases long since dead. And I know this will come as a shock to most people, but they didn't coordinate their efforts at recording the war, for our sake of discussion, all these years later.

Every nation had different classes of the state of repair for instance. Take a tank with at bad drive train. Did it break down on the road 50 miles from the front? In battle without ever having taken a hit? In battle after having taken a hit? After the battle without having taken a hit? After the battle after having taken a hit?

What were those guys thinking, that they didn't record every single round that the enemy and THEMSELVES fired, and what the results of that shot were.

We need to step back at times and look where some of these discussions go. I laugh at alot of them.

There are a few indisputable facts. Not many but a few.

* The Germans lost the war. They were not supermen.

* The Allies won the war. They were not the worst soldiers the world has ever seen.

* It took parts of 7 years for the war to be concluded. In that time some people became very good at what they did. Even then they could get killed. Look up Whitmann on the internet. You'll see.

Twenty people witnessing a car wreck will all write the police report about what would appear to be a different car wreck. Everybody's preception is different. Look at the American penchant for Tiger tanks. Or the German penchant for Spitfires. To the Americans, every German AFV, sometimes they weren't even tanks, were all TIGERS!! The Germans during the Battle of Britian were always shot down by Spitfires, never a lowly Hurricane!!

You have to view what has been written with a grain of salt. The victors write the official histories. They are going to make themselves look as good as they can.

The Germans write that, we were vastly outnumbered and only the production rates beat us. We were the best. We were supermen but for that.

The Allies write that, only our better tactical skill beat the Germans. Their equipment was much better than ours. The Germans were supermen but we beat them anyway!

Few times have I ever seen where the Germans give Soviet Generals credit for being better than they were. SOMETIMES, in the art of deception, but rarely for anything else. Few times have I seen the Soviets give credit to German generals for being better than they were.

Chuikov is an exception, but then he himself was an exceptional leader. That, of course, is my own viewpoint.

The discussions will continue to rage back and forth about who is right.

Was SLA Marshal right? Did only 25% of American infantrymen ever fire their rifles in combat on average? Could be. Was that the world's normal participation rate? Could be.

The evolution of tactics points that it might be. The MG was, for the Germans, and has become for most of the world now, the center of the tactical unit. Not the individual rifleman.

But that is only my opinion and within moments I expect to see opinions here that don't agree with mine.

But hey, this is where we come to discuss.

[ March 12, 2006, 11:54 AM: Message edited by: Panther Commander ]

[Michael Emrys]

Panther Commander makes some good points that we all should ponder. Time and again in my reading and thinking about history and the War, I reach a point where I have to say that we can only make educated guesses. We can't know the "answer" with certainty. And I find it strange that people will argue passionately and dogmatically over a point that cannot be proven. It seems often that the less proof available, the greater the passion. The human race is just another tribe of monkeys, methinks.

Michael

[flamingknives]

Michael:

Pans Narrans - the story-telling ape, perhaps.

Panther Commander:

Have you actually read the book "Men Against Fire"? ISTM that the exact proportion of firing riflemen (I don't think his claim included crew-served weapons.) is only a small part of his claims. The command and communication aspects are far more important.

[Mad Russian]

Originally posted by flamingknives:

Michael:

Pans Narrans - the story-telling ape, perhaps.

Panther Commander:

Have you actually read the book "Men Against Fire"? ISTM that the exact proportion of firing riflemen (I don't think his claim included crew-served weapons.) is only a small part of his claims. The command and communication aspects are far more important.

I have not read "Men Against Fire" but have seen others debate it. I have read some of his other works and find them to be well researched as a whole.

MAF is on my list of books to get though. Soon I hope to have a copy.

[John D Salt]

Originally posted by Panther Commander:

I have read an awful lot of comments about SLA Marshal. I'm not sure how I view his interviews.

What interviews?

All the best,

John.

[Mad Russian]

Originally posted by John D Salt:

</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by Panther Commander:

I have read an awful lot of comments about SLA Marshal. I'm not sure how I view his interviews.

What interviews?

All the best,

John. </font>

[JonS]

Those interviews never actually took place.

[Mad Russian]

Originally posted by JonS:

Those interviews never actually took place.

Really? What evidence do you have that supports that?

I have no idea one way or the other. I'm just a spectator in this discussion so far. I haven't read the book and have no opinion one way or the other at the moment.

[Frenchy]

Pick up Dick Winter's book "Beyond Band of Brothers" and read his take on SLA Marshal. An excerpt also is in the latest issue of WW II History magazine.

[John D Salt]

Originally posted by Panther Commander:

</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by JonS:

Those interviews never actually took place.

Really? What evidence do you have that supports that?

</font>

[JonS]

http://www.warchronicle.com/us/combat_historians_wwii/marshallfire.htm

http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0IBR/is_3_33/ai_109580229

http://hnn.us/articles/1356.html

http://pages.slc.edu/~fsmoler/amheritagemarshall1989pageone.htm

It is interesting that Nutter, in the MHO article apparently written in 2004, sucks up SLAMs assertions wholesale.

[Michael Emrys]

Originally posted by flamingknives:

Michael:

Pans Narrans - the story-telling ape, perhaps.

Agreed. Gossip is one of the things we do best.

Michael

[civdiv]

Both Hackworth and Dr. Roger Spiller, founder of the Combat Studies Institute at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, both state that Marshall made his numbers up. The interviews didn't take place, and the resulting data is complete fabrication. Add in the fact that Marshall didn't even reach France until July 1944, the interviews COULDN'T have taken place in the time frame he states in the book.

[flamingknives]

Interestingly, the lack of statistical data doesn't actually influence the greater part of the book. Even those parts that reference the interviews aren't rendered invalid because the numbers are wrong. They might be if the numbers were orders of magnitude wrong, but this doesn't seem to be the case.

[JasonC]

MAF is nonsense. SLAM had his own preconceived diagnosis of things and pushed it, evidence be darned. The reason he recorded a number a bit more than twice as high in Korea is he actually asked instead of making it up. In MAF itself you get weaseling - "persist" in firing and the like.

The reality was, if you fired all the time just to be firing and imagined you were suppressing the enemy, you'd be out of ammo in 20 minutes and the other guy would come kill you. Germans actually occasionally provoked that reaction e.g. in night fighting against lax units. You can read AARs of some of the Anzio fighting, for instance, where they would infiltrate small teams with MPs, fire to provoke reactions, keep it up for a few hours, and then attack with the real force after the other side got strangely quiet.

In Korea, the men learned only the bullets in the rifles would last the whole night - everything else would eventually run dry. They also learned if they still had them and only used them when they hit somebody, they would suffice to make it to morning, readily.

In major combat, the purpose of a rifleman is to protect his immediate environment, and to occasionally and opportunistically hit an enemy soldier he happens to be able to see. Since the average riflemen never hit anybody - a fact that drove people like SLAM batty - that is plenty to do.

Artillery does the killing. With modest help from tanks, direct fire guns, heavy machineguns on vehicles and foot teams, and mortars. With only modest residual help from BARs at range, SMGs and grenades close. A rifle isn't much to bring to a war between industrial great powers. It is enough to protect the immediate environment of one pair of mark I eyeballs in a forward and therefore exposed position, and that is its job.

Men like SLAM wanted every rifleman to shoot constantly and hit 2-3 enemy per outing, which would thereby run the enemy out of infantry in oh, about six hours. He simply never faced the logical contradiction involved. The average man cannot take out more than one enemy or the war is already over. For some reason, this mathematical truism is indigestible to the world of romantic prowess. It is as though airmen resisted the proposition that things go faster when they are pointed down.

He had to explain it somehow, and came up with his idea that it was all the fault of commanders forgetting to nudge their men to, hey, get on with it, they are right over there, shoot already. The army prewar had its whole cult of the offensive. The lesson taken from WW I was that firepower kills (which is true enough), so SLAM was at least spared the embarrassment of defending liberal use of the bayonet, like the blue-pants martinettes of the French army of 1914.

The men were always ten times as sensible as such officer fads. MAF is more a document of the disconnect between officers thinking they can manage war and the men actually facing it than anything else. If you ask the actual vets, they will say hell yes of course I fired. But we know they didn't all hit something. When the were close enough they did and could tell they remember alright - every night.

Sometimes you didn't fire because the point was to get information and you didn't want to endanger the mark I eyeballs you had laboriously brought to the spot. Sometimes you just prudently decided they'd kill you if you showed them where you were, and why die today? Lots of times you couldn't see them, and why throw away the ammo? Lots of times the artillery worked them over and you mopped up, but they had left.

None of it the phenom SLAM wanted, because none of it something he could cure by just having 23 year old butter "encourage" more "aggressiveness". The officers were so not in control, the events so didn't fit their romantic training, they wanted some nice simple, managable way to matter. Being lost on the shop floor of an industrial accident the size of France doesn't have the same ring to it.

But all the grunts tell a different story. There was only one form of prowess worth anything, being able to cope with and put up with unending pain and misery. Getting up and firing didn't make it go away. Like as not, it made the man up and firing go away, which took care of that.

Read William Manchester on gung ho leadership sometime. The SLAM aggression instigator just gets himself sawn in half by Nambu fire, when waiting 20 minutes would have let somebody else flank the damned thing, without loss.

[A.E.B]

S L A Marshall is a textbook case of arguing from authority.

Basically there is no evidence that the interviews SLAM claimed to have conducted ever took place. But on the basis of these bogus interviews SLAM became "THE" authority on the matter and then used that authority as a method of deflecting criticism until his death in 1977.

Therefore you cannot accept that any of the claims made in Men Against Fire have any real value, as without a factual underpinning to support its conclusions, MAF simply becomes one man's opinion, regardless of who that man may be. Bogus is bogus.

[LongLeftFlank]

SLAM was in essence an amateur management theorist of (roughly) the same generation as Peter Drucker and Abraham Maslow, applying pre-1940 Taylorist scientific management principles, plus some behavioral psychology to the battlefield. I give him due honor and credit for being a pioneer in this field, without however overstating the value of his actual work.

Like most other productivity models I've seen, his model identified the correct drivers for his area of interest -- infantry firepower -- but did not accurately portray the relationship among them:

a. overestimates impact of the drivers of interest on overall performance (victory) while ignoring or minimizing complex confounding variables (e.g. artillery)

b. overestimates benefits of increasing productivity (enemy body count)

c. does not develop actionable recommendations for doing so (elan, aggressiveness)

Scientific management was great for getting beans and bullets to the GI's; it was -- and remains -- lousy at modeling, much less improving the performance of complex tasks (infantry tactics).

Oh, and most business productivity models I've seen falsify their data too. They pretty much have to.

Originally posted by JasonC:

MAF is more a document of the disconnect between officers thinking they can manage war and the men actually facing it than anything else.... The officers were so not in control, the events so didn't fit their romantic training, they wanted some nice simple, managable way to matter. Being lost on the shop floor of an industrial accident the size of France doesn't have the same ring to it.

If you read SLAM's later works, e.g. A Soldier's Load and his evaluation of weapons in Korea, his central message seems to be less "how to micromanage the GI" than "how can we on the home front give him the tools that are most useful to him and not load him down with useless junk?" And this is a worthy question, today as well as yesterday (think body armour).

[John Kettler]

LongLeftFlank,

I read a borrowed copy of A SOLDIER'S LOAD many years ago, and it's burned into my brain to this day. Can't help noticing how little attention has been paid to the hard won lessons in that book. See, for example, the terrible predicament of the yomping paras in the Falklands trying to advance by successive rushes while under fire (got to see the formerly classified MoD debriefing film). THE GAUNTLET is one of the treasures of my library. I've read it at least three times.

Regards,

John Kettler

[A.E.B]

LongLeftFlank

I agree that SLAM was the first to bring a Time Motion approach to the study of combat and its effect on the individuals who take part in them.

I totally disagree that SLAM was a positive contributor in this field.

Sadly, a lot of SLAMs supposed life was a sham. It is now accepted that he never saw combat in the First World War. If anything he was a journalist in uniform.

And his conclusions in MAF weren't just wrong; they were backed up with bogus data.

If fact the few real interviews that SLAM really performed in the Pacific totally contradict MAF - in that men fired too often and too uncontrollably - rather than not firing at all. Fire discipline, not reluctance to fire, was the problem.

But, on the basis of a deliberate lie, SLAM created both a career in the military and a career as an author. Men who had actually seen combat knew that SLAMs ideas were crap, but SLAMs status as "the authority" allowed him to stop and even destroy others who had a far better grasp of reality than SLAM did.

The problem was that you had a deliberate lie being accepted as the truth, to the point that people who should have know better like John Keegan would accept SLAMs 25% rule without question.

How much time and effort was spent debating and trying to fix a problem that didn't exist?

SLAM was a wannabe warrior who never faced the enemy; ignoring his bogus actions in WWI, who produced a deliberately false work (that even contradicted the little real data he had) to claim that 75% of WWII American soldiers declined to fire at the enemy, who then used this fame to promote himself to the detriment of the US military, and who damaged a unknown number of other soldiers and academics who dared to question the great man, until no one was willing to risk taking him on, and whose deceit was final uncovered years after his death.

IMO the negatives far outweigh any positives when SLAM is concerned.

[flamingknives]

What about the rest of MAF? The Command, Control and Communication bit? I found that to be the most interesting part of the book.