GIs Did Shoot Back in WWII
A pernicious myth, created from unreliable data, has persisted for decades that the vast majority of riflemen in WWII refused to fire their weapons in combat. This was because of moral qualms about killing, or so the story goes.
by Fred Smoler
In November 2008, PBS aired a documentary called Soldiers of Conscience with a decidedly pacifist bent. Both the film producer and a military officer interviewed declared confidently that only 25% of U.S. soldiers in WWII fired their rifles at the enemy. That amazing conclusion was based on the work of Brig. Gen. S.L.A. Marshall, an Army combat historian during WWII and Korea.
In 1947, he claimed to have proved something optimists had long hoped was true: humans—even combat infantrymen—are by no means eager to kill one another. In fact, they are almost fantastically unwilling to do so, even when their own lives are at risk.
That was the year Marshall published Men Against Fire, revealing the fruits of his after-action interviews (a technique he pioneered) with “approximately” 400 American rifle companies. This number would fluctuate over the course of Marshall’s career, but never dipped below the first estimate. In later remarks, the number of companies rose to 603, but later declined to 500.
The sum of these interviews revealed something that sounded pretty startling. During WWII, a strikingly small percentage of American soldiers had ever fired their weapons at the enemy. Never more than one in four, and generally around 15%, Marshall claimed.
Crucially, this behavior was not only a failure but a refusal to fire, rooted in a deep and very powerful inhibition.
By the time of the Korean War, during which Marshall conducted more after-action interviews, the ratio of fire went up to 55%, according to Marshall. Ameri¬can infantrymen trained by methods inspired by Marshall had greatly improved, or so it appeared.
Some observers adhere to these statistics in part because they are fascinating. Also, a lot depends on it—there are implications for how infantrymen ought to be trained. But most of all because they want to believe Marshall had at last discovered something neither speculative nor anecdotal about combat behavior. After all, 400-600 rifle companies interviewed within a few days of combat is a vast amount of data. It would seem Marshall had proved something about the psychology of combat.
Phantom Interviews
But he hadn’t. There is no incontrovertible evidence that Marshall ever asked any infantrymen whether they had fired their weapons at the enemy in any interview conducted with any rifle company. That covers those who fought in Europe, and the very small number of prompt after-action interviews we know that he did conduct in the Pacific. None of which necessarily demonstrate his alleged discovery of the ratio of fire.
This means there is no hard evidence for Marshall’s ratio of fire. Marshall seems to have invented his systematic debriefings of those 400-600 rifle companies.
In 1989, Roger J. Spiller, at that time founder and deputy head of the Combat Studies Institute at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., published “S.L.A. Marshall and the Ratio of Fire” in the British RUSI Journal (Royal United Services Institute). I wrote “The Secret of the Soldiers Who Didn’t Shoot” in American Heritage Magazine that March. Both articles refuted Marshall’s theory. The American Heritage article made the front page of the Sunday New York Times on Feb. 19.
Research revealed that on Makin Island in the Pacific, Marshall’s after-action interviews showed that green troops did not fail to fire, they fired too much.
“Much aimless shooting by ‘trigger-happy’ men occurred. … In the early morning its volume increased … A wave of shooting hysteria swept the area … and men started firing at bushes and trees until the place was ‘simply ablaze with fire’ …
“Shouted orders to the men to cease firing proved ineffectual … flat terrain and limited area made control of fire abnormally difficult.”
This clearly suggested that some of the evidence we now know Marshall possessed pointed in the opposite direction from the position he took in Men Against Fire.
Yet the news that Marshall had invented his statistics has not stopped historians and journalists from quoting him, and them. Since 1989, however, some military historians noted that Marshall’s ratio of fire is at best doubtful. They include Michael D. Doubler, John C. McManus, Russell W. Glenn and James B. McPherson (writing on the American Civil War).
Comparing Korea
Kelly C. Jordan published “Right for the Wrong Reasons: S.L.A. Marshall and the Ratio of Fire in Korea” in the Journal of Military History in January 2002. Jordan thinks that more soldiers fired in Korea than had fired during WWII because of organizational changes of squads and platoons. Meaning, GIs in Korea possessed more automatic weapons, and more crew-served weapons. Soldiers are widely believed to be likelier to fire if they are so armed.
But Jordan has no good reason to believe that Marshall’s figures for the ratio of fire during WWII are accurate. As he points out, there are no figures other than Marshall’s. This means that we cannot know whether the ratio of fire improved, because we do not know what it was before. And we do not even know what the ratio was in Korea.
Jordan cites a few veterans who think Marshall was right about WWII. But no one I know has ever met anyone who commanded a WWII infantry squad, platoon or company and passionately backed Marshall (see sidebar on p. 32).
Other than Marshall’s “data,” there is only the testimony of six officers who’d fought in both WWII and Korea. Two of whom thought all soldiers in Korea fired, two said some were not firing but gave no percentage estimates, one who thought that 45% fired and the other 35%.
In 2003, John Whiteclay Chambers II wrote “S.L.A. Marshall’s Men Against Fire: New Evidence Regarding Fire Ratios” in Parameters (Autumn 2003). He concluded that Marshall’s work in Korea was unreliable and thus the validity of his WWII methods highly questionable.
According to Frank J. Brennan, Jr.’s, testimony—Brennan accompanied Mar¬shall when he interviewed soldiers in Korea—Marshall did not “push” questions about the ratio of fire. He rarely, if ever, asked whether soldiers had fired.
This corroborates some more oral evidence. A couple of decades ago John Westover, who had been present during most of Marshall’s interviews with soldiers in Europe, told Spiller that he did not remember Marshall ever asking about the ratio of fire.
(Russell W. Glenn, author of Reading Athena’s Dance Card: Men Against Fire, conducted a survey of 1st Cavalry Division veterans of Vietnam that 84% armed with individual weapons and 90% manning mainly M-60 machine guns fired back in combat.)
Delving Into Fear
So why did so many historians and others believe Marshall, and why do so many continue to do so? It may be that they simply like his explanation, or have one of their own, for what they believe he discovered.
In Men Against Fire, Marshall had written that “men may face danger but they will not fight … In the workshop or the office, or elsewhere in society, a minority of men and women carry the load … the majority in any group seek lives of minimum risk and expenditure of effort plagued by doubts of themselves and by fears for their personal security.”
Only a few “forceful individuals” are willing to “carry the fight.” The bulk lack “initiative” and “the desire to use a weapon,” they “simply go along for the ride.”
Marshall thought a modern American was greatly at risk of not firing. “The fear of aggression has been expressed to him so strongly,” he wrote, “and absorbed by him so deeply … that it is part of the normal man’s emotional makeup. It stays his trigger finger even though he is hardly aware that it is a restraint upon him.”
It is not always a question of fear (“it must be said in favor of some who did not use their weapons that they did not shirk the final risk of battle”), but fear often is involved. “When the infantryman’s mind is gripped by fear, his body is gripped by inertia, which is fear’s Siamese twin,” he said.
Because Marshall believed that civilization, for good or ill, radically changes our nature, those who want to believe that civilization has done precisely that want him to have been right.
Marshall also believed in warrior heroes, whose indomitable courage makes them vastly more formidable than ordinary soldiers. It was the infantrymen of a quintessentially democratic army, WWII GIs, whose feats once eroded the plausibility of that Homeric story.
Above all, however, Marshall’s ratio of fire seems to appeal to those who think that combat is everywhere the same. And that the response when exposed to it reveals an elemental, simple and single truth about human nature.
It is almost certainly true that WWII American infantrymen did not all fire at the same and very high rate. Marshall may well have believed this. But if so, this was almost certainly because WWII riflemen had many good reasons not to fire.
Such as to conserve ammunition, avoid exposing their positions, avoid inflicting friendly-fire casualties, avoid drawing fire when their own fire would have had no useful effect, or because they were under indirect and not direct fire.
Marshall’s terse answer—25% shoot back—implies a pretty terse question. What is it like to be shot at, and what am I likely to do in response? It remains an endlessly interesting question. But the available evidence suggests that the only plausible answer must be that it depends.
As for Roger Spiller: “Nothing that has come out since 1989 has changed my position,” he says. “In fact, if anything, my position has hardened.”
As John C. McManus, author of U.S. Military History for Dummies, concluded: “Most World War II combat historians view Marshall’s ratio of fire as a myth.”
Fred Smoler teaches history and literature of war at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, N.Y. His writing has appeared in American Heritage magazine, Dissent, First of the Month, The New York Times and The Observer (U.K.).
Sidebar: ‘Absurd, Ridiculous, Nonsensical’
Harold P. “Bud” Leinbaugh came home from Europe in 1945. He had seen a lot of fighting. After completing ROTC, he had been commissioned in April 1944. Assigned to the 84th Infantry Division, he commanded K Co., 333rd Regt., during most of its time in combat between November 1944 and May 8, 1945.
After the war, he joined the FBI, retiring in 1972, then serving at the White House as a deputy special assistant to the President. Shortly after I interviewed him, he died in 1990.
GIs Maligned
In 1985, with wartime comrade John D. Campbell, Leinbaugh wrote The Men of Company K, a highly praised history of the rifle outfit he led during three campaigns. Leinbaugh was one of the very few men in his company to have made it through the war from start to finish. Campbell, more typically, came in as a replacement officer and went out with a Silver Star and a back full of shrapnel.
They both spent years conducting research on their book and on the war that had killed off so many of their friends. When Leinbaugh first came across S.L.A. Marshall’s ratio-of-fire statistics, he dismissed them out of hand.
“If you’re over 60,” he said, “have earned the Combat Infantryman Badge, and were lucky enough to survive a month without picking up a Purple Heart, you know Marshall’s charges are absurd, ridiculous and totally nonsensical.
“How many six-man patrols would have to be dispatched before Marshall’s odds give you one or two men who are willing to fire their guns? Statistically, it wouldn’t be at all difficult for a rifle company to end up with a platoon entirely devoid of firers.”
Leinbaugh talked to a number of former infantrymen, privates to four-star generals. None of them recalled any experience of failure to fire. One old K Company sergeant asked, “Did the SOB think we clubbed the Germans to death?”
K Company had entered combat with a strength of 200 men and had turned over once by war’s end—meaning that it had suffered 200 casualties. Leinbaugh believed these men, along with the other GIs he knew about, had tried hard to kill Germans: “Somebody had to persuade them to go back to Germany.”
But Leinbaugh had noticed that people who hadn’t been in rifle companies had a number of eccentric notions about how wars are fought. So at first he didn’t trouble himself about Marshall’s misconceptions.
But after Leinbaugh read several accounts maligning U.S. infantrymen, he was moved to action. None of the writers cited any other source for the ratio-of-fire numbers; Marshall was all there was.
Personal Insult
Leinbaugh admits to taking the charges personally. “Our company went into battle for the first time at Geilenkirchen in the Siegfried Line. We captured more than 150 Germans in that brief initial battle. We must have killed or wounded another 50.
“We fought more than three miles up the Siegfried Line, slogged forward in deep mud, spent sleepless nights in freezing water-filled foxholes, and lost more than half our company to nonstop German mortar barrages and machine-gun fire. Twelve men in K Company were killed during that one brief engagement.
“We did our job, and then Marshall comes along and, in effect, criticizes not only our efforts at Geilenkirchen but the performance of every American rifle company that did battle in World War II.”
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