Okay, now I am ticked off. The Americans were the Italians of the Allies in WWII. Sure.
First, the American soldiers were inexperienced early in the war and they were not as disciplined or as effective out of the box as the Germans or the English. That much is true.
However, the American soldier carried the brunt of the effort against the Germans on the Western Front. It was the Americans under Patton and Bradley who pushed the fight in Sicily. It was the Americans who carried the fight forward in Italy, despite some poor leadership early on and despite having to carry the fight against the Germans in tough mountainous terrain where the Germans picked and set their defensive positions. It was the Americans that faced the toughest fighting on D-day at Omaha. It was the Americans that broke out of the Normandy beachhead in operation Cobra. It was the Americans that encircled the German Army in France and while waiting, as ordered, for the British under Montgomery to close the gap, much of the German Army escaped. It was the British under Montgomery that failed again and again despite being given the gas and supplies to take ground quickly enough to succeed in break throughs - first in France and then in Belgium. It was the Americans who due to poor intelligence and disposition took the brunt of the attack during the Battle of the Bulge, yet they held Bastogne and then under Patton turned and attacked faster than any modern army had ever done, crushing the attack. It was the Americans that carried by far the brunt of the war in the Pacific, where the Japanese soldiers by a large margin preferred to die rather than surrender. If you want to rate soldiers on fanaticism to duty and a willingness to die then the Japanese win hands down. Yet we defeated them. The Americans in the Pacific were the brothers of those in the European Theater, they were not a breed apart.
What the American soldiers had in spades that the Germans, the Japanese, the Russians, and to a lesser extent the British did not was a willingness to innovate, that peculiar independence of spirit that comes with freedom and liberty. American soldiers were willing to die, but they didn't want to and they weren't going to blindly follow orders in the name of discipline and get killed when they could get the job done and survive.
By contrast the Italian soldiers did not win any major victories of any significance in WWII. If the Americans were the Italians then the Germans or the Russians would still be in control of Europe today. So please don't tell me how pathetic and ineffective our soldiers were in WWII.
Lastly in regard to the psychologist who claims that only 15 percent or so of soldiers actually fired their weapons or were effective in combat and that todays soldiers because of better psychological training are better killers. I doubt it. First the evidence he has is questionable and his conclusions are even more suspect. Even if it is true that only 15 percent did the killing, it would not be that surprising, look at even non-life and death endeavors like sport. In basketball you always find that most of the scoring is done by one to three people, does that make the rest of the team irrelevant - no there are defensive players, there are those players who don't score much but who still make the big shot when it counts, there are those who put the team first and set up the shooters to take the shot, there are the rebounders and the shot blockers, everyone on a winning team fills an important role. So even if the so-called superior killer training is in effect in the modern military, I'm willing to bet you will still find that only 15 percent are effective killers, by this gurus definition. A deeper examination would find that effective combat units require soldiers to fill many roles. Why, because human beings have been involved in combat since the first organized societies and no miracle training is going to make everyman an elite combat soldier. Maybe genetics or cloning and training will, but no current training technology will. Oh, I am sure that the whatever army is training the troops tells them that they are mean lean killing machines, but that also has been the story told to all soldiers since the first army boot camp. You can train all you want and tell yourself you are a stone killer all you want, but until you are face to face with it you will never truly know.
If you want to claim that our modern soldiers are better trained and more effective than their WWII brothers that is fine, that may be true. God bless them both. But don't crap on the WWII vets by denigrating their accomplishments and attempting to paint them as generally ineffective and a joke when compared to their contemporaries.
.....and they still lost. To defeat 100 german combatants it required on average 125 enemy combatants. When German units were over-run or destroyed they were not permitted to withdrawn from battle. They and other survivors were formed into ad hoc combat units and lead back into the fight. I wonder what the mental profile of the average german soldier of WW2 is? It had to be awesome!
