Reply #34: Replacements on a grand scale. [View All]

[sofa king]

Who hasn't seen a World War II flick in which a greenhorn replacement is dropped into a battle-hardened unit and shunned by everyone?

There were good reasons, however cruel, for avoiding replacements in the American Army in World War II. First of all, the chances that a replacement was going to get killed within the first 72 hours was much higher than that of soldiers with a little bit of experience. Soldiers don't want to get too attached to someone who's just going to get killed.

But more importantly, replacements had a bad habit of getting others killed, in a hundred different ways--revealing a position, tripping mines, freezing up or running away, not covering his sector of fire, et cetera.

Now ramp that incompetence up to the brigade scale and imagine what's going to happen when the greenhorns are responsible for an entire area and don't know how to patrol and sweep it, how to conceal their movement, how to correct the mistakes they've made, and how to hold it together when things get confused.

Even the Soviet Army, hardly the most subtle war machine ever to scar the earth, quickly learned that the best way to kill well trained and highly disciplined German troops was to hit the less well trained units of the Italians, Rommanians, and Bulgarians which were next to the Germans, then maul the German units as they moved in to stabilize the situation, or surround them if they didn't.

It's a lesson as old as warfare itself, and it will be applied against us.