Re: [eia] US Memorial Day remembrance

[MICHAEL P GORMAN <mpgorman@xxxxxxxx>]

Your comment got me curious.  My impression was that the Civil War was the last major US military operation where most officers would be expected to lead soldiers into combat in the sense of charging right along with them.  Thus officer casualties were often proportionally as high as enlisted casualty rates.

I haven't found all the figures sorted by rank yet but I started looking up WWII losses for US forces.  I've found the Navy so far, excluding Marine Corps, and they're interesting since the total losses for the war are pretty much proportional.  About one in ten of the deaths in the navy were officers and they made up about 10% of the navy.  But when you start breaking it into categories it shows up that officers were higher in percentage in non-combat deaths than in combat and that almost 40% of all officer fatalities were in air combat where officers made up 50% of the casualties.  Not surprising since pilots were typically officers, but it does show the unusual structure of the air combat arms in the military.  They are the only arm of the military where officers typically go out and fight while the enlisted stay back at base in support roles.

It was also interesting that the navy estimates that 87% of all of its forces that deployed overseas during the war were directly exposed to combat at least once in their tour of duty.  Makes something of a mockery of the entire concept of a non-combat role in a war zone.

The most concise naval link I've found so far is:
http://www.history.navy.mil/library/online/ww2_statistics.htm


I'm expecting the army to paint a very different picture as I've heard anecdotally that the army seriously underestimated the percentage of its losses that would be from frontline units and corespondingly overestimated the losses it would suffer from support roles.  This was attributed to the fact that with the exception of the Battle of the Bulge there were few engagements that the army was heavily engaged in where it was not primarily on the offensive.

_______________________________________________
eia mailing list
eia@xxxxxxxxx
http://lists.ellipsis.cx/mailman/listinfo/eia