Firing to miss?

[PLM]

I've heard statistics that say a large percentage (50, 75%) of GIs in WWII on all sides, fired to miss on purpose because they didnt want to hit the enemy?

that seems a little high? what do you guys think?

[Elmar Bijlsma]

I think that's a bit misleading info. Most shots fired weren't intended to hit, there's a difference with intended to miss. People had this nasty habit in battle to keep their gun up and their heads down.

It's in a soldiers interest to survive the battle, killing while doing so was purely optional and thus more effort was made to do the former and often trusted to luck with the latter. It's been a while since I read about but there was a US Army study about it after WW2 (sory I googled but can't remember it's name) but it's something I believe Tacitus commented on aswell. Roughly 15% of soldiers are detemined to kill the enemy, most just go through the motions.

[John D Salt]

Originally posted by PLM:

I've heard statistics that say a large percentage (50, 75%) of GIs in WWII on all sides, fired to miss on purpose because they didnt want to hit the enemy?

that seems a little high? what do you guys think?

I think that sounds like a garbled version of S. L. A. Marshall's claim in "Men Against Fire" that about 25% of American soldiers in WW2 did not use their weapons at all.

It has since been shown fairly conclusively that Marshall did not have the data he claimed to have collected that would support such a conclusion.

See:

S. L. A. Marshall, “Men against fire: The problem of battle command in future war”, Infantry Journal Press, NY, 1947.

Roger J. Spiller, "S.L.A. Marshall and the Ratio of Fire", in: The RUSI Journal, Winter 1988, pages 63-71.

All the best,

John.

[Michael Dorosh]

Originally posted by John D Salt:

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

I've heard statistics that say a large percentage (50, 75%) of GIs in WWII on all sides, fired to miss on purpose because they didnt want to hit the enemy?

that seems a little high? what do you guys think?

I think that sounds like a garbled version of S. L. A. Marshall's claim in "Men Against Fire" that about 25% of American soldiers in WW2 did not use their weapons at all.

It has since been shown fairly conclusively that Marshall did not have the data he claimed to have collected that would support such a conclusion.

See:

S. L. A. Marshall, “Men against fire: The problem of battle command in future war”, Infantry Journal Press, NY, 1947.

Roger J. Spiller, "S.L.A. Marshall and the Ratio of Fire", in: The RUSI Journal, Winter 1988, pages 63-71.

All the best,

John. </font>

[yacinator]

Are u sure 75% of GIs didn't shoot to kill the enemy? That could explain all my lost battles in CM lol . And by not shooting to kill do you mean a guy is running across the field and u don't kill him on purpose or that they shot in the general location of the enemy, not really to kill but to keep their heads down so that sumone else can get in close?

[Macphail]

This is a pretty foggy area, and i only comment with my gut reaction, but i think most soldiers actually try to hit their intended targets, but conversely, there are also alot of examples of how soldiers were ordered to provide covering fire.

your average machine gunner sprays alot of bullets, but im sure he knows a relatively small percentage of those slugs will enter flesh, or knock out vehicles.

this is alot different than firing above a target because you are afraid to kill, or do not intend harm.

[John D Salt]

Originally posted by Michael Dorosh:

[snips]You've got it backwards - Marshall claimed that only 25% of Americans DID use their weapons.

Quite right -- my fingers typed "25" when my brain wanted "75".

Originally posted by Michael Dorosh:

I think the caveat was "used them effectively" though, wasn't it?

No, it was 75% not firing at all. Marshall says on page 57 of the Peter Smnith edition of "Men Against fire":

"Moreover, the man did not have to maintain fire to be counted among the active firers. If he had so much as fired a rifle once or twice, though not aiming it at anything in particular, or lobbed a grenade roughly in the direction of the enemy, he was scored on the positive side".

All the best,

John.

[LongLeftFlank]

That reminds me of an anecdote from the autobiography of General Grigorenko (the Pioneer who blew up Minsk cathedral for Stalin and later became a dissident). In Hungary he ran across a sniper who had a distinct preference for shooting the enemy in the legs rather than killing them outright.

[Kohler]

there was a program in the uk about this called "the truth about killing" the claim made here was something along those lines , this program claimed that the only people who shot to kill were madmen or hero's like the soldier on sword beach (i think, sorry if im wrong) who cleared and captured 2 german machine gun bunkers. personly i think a statement like this is way to generalised who's to know what every single soldier in ww2 was thinking when they fired their shots , wouldnt it depend on a series of factors? like their state of mind , the situtation they were in (assualting, defending, surrounded etc), if friends were threatened?. we can not answer the question.

[Industrializer]

remember that large quantities of soldiers werent intended to fire at the enemy. Officers (especially NCO ), everybody working in the supply chain, security and garrision units, drivers etc.

I think I've read somewhere that only 35% of all men in a division were front line soldiers.

[xerxes]

Wow, that sounds like a particularly stupid program. Notably so.

[Michael Emrys]

Which program?

:confused:

Michael

[Kohler]

the truth about killing, it was shown on channel 4 earlier this year in the uk.

[John D Salt]

Originally posted by Industrializer:

remember that large quantities of soldiers werent intended to fire at the enemy. Officers (especially NCO ), everybody working in the supply chain, security and garrision units, drivers etc.

I think I've read somewhere that only 35% of all men in a division were front line soldiers.

Marshall's claim cannot be explained away like that. He is talking specifically about those soldiers directly engaged in the direct-fire battle right at the sharp end, whose job is to engage the enemy with their personal weapons.

"Men Against Fire" used to be quite hard to get hold of, but it has recently been re-printed, and Amazon currently have new copies going for $12.57. Given that the book has been around for over half a century and has been highly influential over that time, I think it would be a good idea for people to read it before passing remarks about it.

All the best,

John.

[A.E.B]

John D Salt

I have read Men Against Fire: The Problem of Battle Command in Future War. In fact I read it when I was studying science, and my immediate thought was this guy has made no effort to base his conclusions on anything resembling scientific fact. In fact this book is a terrible case study in "arguing from authority".

Then I did some research and discovered that SLA Marshall was pretty well discredited.

Marshall's claims certainly raised eyebrows in disbelief. Significantly, his "ratio of fire" does not appear in the official history series, The United States in World War II. Nonetheless, Marshall found many followers among the gullible. It wasn't until 1988 that a scholarly article set the record straight.

The article, "S.L.A. Marshall and the Ratio of Fire," appeared in the British journal, The Royal United Services Institute for Defence Studies. The author was professor Roger J. Spiller, and his task was an unpleasant one because he believed that Marshall was basically right about the primacy of ground combat. Nonetheless, Spiller pulled no punches. He writes:

Marshall had no use for the polite equivocations of scholarly discourse. His way of proving doubtful propositions was to state them more forcefully. Righteousness was always more important for Marshall than evidence....

The foundation of his conviction was not scholarship but his own military experience, experience that he inflated or revised as the situation warranted. Marshall often hinted broadly that he had commanded infantry in combat, but his service dossier shows no such service. He frequently held that he had been the youngest officer in the American Expeditionary Forces during the Great War, but this plays with the truth as well. Marshall enlisted in 1917 and served with the 315th Engineer Regiment—then part of the 90th Infantry Division—and won a commission after the Armistice, when rapid demobilization required very junior officers to command "casual" and depot companies as the veteran officers went home. Marshall rarely drew such distinctions, however, leaving his audiences to infer that he had commanded in the trenches. Later in life, he remarked that he had seen five wars as a soldier and 18 as a correspondent, but his definitions of war and soldiering were rather elastic. That he had seen a great deal of soldiers going about their deadly work was no empty boast, however. This mantle of experience, acquired in several guises, protected him throughout his long and prolific career as a military writer, and his aggressive style intimidated those who would doubt his arguments. Perhaps inevitably, his readers would mistake his certitude for authority.

What of Marshall's claims for his research in the field during World War II? Spiller writes:

In Men Against Fire Marshall claims to have interviewed "approximately" 400 infantry rifle companies in the Pacific and in Europe, but that number tended to change over the years. In 1952, the number had somehow grown to 603 companies; five years later his sample had declined to "something over 500" companies. Those infantry companies—whatever their actual number—were his laboratories, the infantrymen his test subjects, and at the focal point of his research was the ratio of fire. "Why the subject of fire ratios under combat conditions has not been long and searchingly explored, I don't know," Marshall wrote. "I suspect that it is because in earlier wars there had never existed the opportunity for systematic collection of data."

Opportunity aplenty existed in Europe: more than 1200 rifle companies did their work between June 1944 and V-E day, 10 months later. But Marshall required by his own standard two and sometimes three days with a company to examine one day's combat. By the most generous calculation, Marshall would have finished "approximately" 400 interviews sometime in October or November 1946, or at about the time he was writing Men Against Fire.

This calculation assumes, however, that of all the questions Marshall might ask the soldiers of a rifle company during his interviews, he would unfailingly want to know who had fired his weapon and who had not. Such a question, posed interview after interview, would have signalled that Marshall was on a particular line of inquiry, and that regardless of the other information Marshall might discover, he was devoted to investigating this facet of combat performance. John Westover, usually in attendance during Marshall's sessions with the troops, does not recall Marshall's ever asking this question. Nor does Westover recall Marshall ever talking about ratios of weapons usage in their many private conversations. Marshall's own personal correspondence leaves no hint that he was ever collecting statistics. His surviving field notebooks show no signs of statistical compilations that would have been necessary to deduce a ratio as precise as Marshall reported later in Men Against Fire. The "systematic collection of data" that made Marshall's ratio of fire so authoritative appears to have been an invention.

Puncturing the Marshall legend was Dr. Spiller's duty rather than his pleasure. He ended his piece this way:

History has a savage way about it. A reputation may be made or unmade when history seizes upon part of a life and reduces it to caricature. S.L.A. Marshall was one of the most important commentators on the soldier's world in this century. The axiom upon which so much of his reputation has been built overshadows his real contribution. Marshall's insistence that modern warfare is best understood through the medium of those who actually do the fighting stands as a challenge to the disembodied, mechanistic approaches that all too often are the mainstay of military theorists and historians alike.

SLA Marshall may have been influential, but that doesn't make his claims true.

Regards

A.E.B

[Paco QNS]

See the thread:

Most effective WWII MG

and specially the article:

""Natural Killers —Turning the Tide of Battle""

by Major David S. Pierson, US Army

Not related, but by SLA Marshall I´ve found this document:

Commentary on Infantry and Weapons, Korea, 1950-51

------------------

Edited to add:

Yeah!, I got the original source, look at

CAC Military Review in Past editions.

In the May-June 1999 number is the Pierson article

and in a letter published in Nov-Dec 1999 there is a rebuttal by Joseph Forbes

[ September 26, 2004, 12:55 AM: Message edited by: Paco QNS ]

[Dennis Grant]

In a related vein, you might want to read the book "On Killing" by an American army Colonel/Doctor of Psychology. Very interesting - if somewhat morbid - reading.

In a nutshell, the is a natural human aversion to killing other humans that is VERY difficult to overcome. Oddly enough, placing men in mortal danger is often not enough to overcome this.

DG

[John D Salt]

Originally posted by A.E.B:

[snips]

Then I did some research and discovered that SLA Marshall was pretty well discredited.

That Marshall never had any sound statistical basis for his claim about the "ratio of fire" being 25% is pretty well established. To elide this with discrediting all Marshall ever wrote is lamentably sloppy thinking.

Originally posted by A.E.B:

The article, "S.L.A. Marshall and the Ratio of Fire," appeared in the British journal, The Royal United Services Institute for Defence Studies. [snips]

If you are going to claim to have "done a little research" on the strength of what appears to be your first Google hit, you might have saved yourself a little trouble by looking at the second source I cited (accurately, giving the correct journal title, not the garbled version above) in the third post in this thread.

Having referred to this source, you might bother to obtain a copy and read it. If Marshall is so very thoroughly discredited, I should be interested to hear how you explain away the fact that the last sentence in Spiller's article reads (according to the copy of the RUSI Journal for Winter 1988 I have open on the desk in front of me) "Forty years later, as the quest for universal laws of combat continues unabated, Marshall is still right."

My point stands, and indeed is reinforced: Read the bloody sources before passing remarks about them.

All the best,

John.

[Simon Fox]

Originally posted by John D Salt:

My point stands, and indeed is reinforced: Read the bloody sources before passing remarks about them.

Tut tut. The abstract is more than sufficient you know.

Marshall had no use for the polite equivocations of scholarly discourse. His way of proving doubtful propositions was to state them more forcefully. Righteousness was always more important for Marshall than evidence....

Sounds as if he would be right at home in this forum.