Let's be clear. Artillery and aircraft bombs are the killer of infantry more than rounds. 80% during ww1 iirc
Sounds about right. This was pre-Skinnerian training methods as well.
If you didn't watch the video, let me just explain one story that seems to have happened several times: British troops are on patrol in France, fighting the Germans in WW2. A small squad of Brits are sitting on a hill, and they see a small group of Germans start walking up the road. When the Germans get within throwing/shouting distance, the British soldiers stood up and started shouting insults and throwing clumps of mud and rocks at the Germans, who responded in turn. One side would eventually flee, and the other side goes about their watch, picking up their unused rifles and saying "We showed them, eh?!"
Their rifles lay on the ground beside them as these exchanges occurred. I know of at least two incidents where this was recorded, so it probably happened way more than we know about. In one of the recorded incidents, the British soldiers were questioned by their officers: "Why didn't you kill the Germans? You had your weapons, you are all good shots, the weather was clear, you had the opportunity to kill them all. What happened?"
The answer they got from the British troops was roundly something like "Well... it never occurred to us to use our guns. Our orders were to hold the road, and we threw rocks at the Germans and they ran off." It seems like people just don't like killing other people, or engaging in fights- it's much safer for both parties to solve conflict by making a bunch of noise and scaring the other side off. Why risk being shot at, or caught with a lucky punch, or stabbed, or w/e, when you can just throw a rocks at the bad guy and call him a faggot until he leaves?
Bizarre but I read a study on gettysburg.
They had collected thousands of dropped muskets and found many had multiple rounds pounded into them. The soldiers went through the actions of life and adding as trained but wouldn't pull the trigger.
This and the similar experience of Vietnam was what lead us army to start using Hunan shaped targets for training
They had collected thousands of dropped muskets and found many had multiple rounds pounded into them. The soldiers went through the actions of life and adding as trained but wouldn't pull the trigger.
IIRC, this led to a study where they tested the marksmanship of whole fire platoons. They'd have them fire at big, formation-width white sheets, and found absurd accuracy, very close to 100% of the shots from the 500 men struck the sheets. Then they'd try to simulate combat conditions, obscuring the targets with smoke and marching the men hard to get them stressed out. Their accuracy did decrease a bit, but not very significantly.
But in combat, volleys that should be killing dozens of men, in the open, only strike like 2 in the legs, maybe some unlucky fucker gets one in the belly. It was theorized that men were aiming high at the moment of firing, staring into the face of a man and killing him is difficult for most humans. Even ruthless murderers/executions like Che Guevara (press f to spit) could never shoot his victim in the face, always forced them to look away. Executioners throughout history have issues with this, hence often putting a sack over the condemned's head before hanging or beheading.
Interestingly, it's theorized that most of the greatest killers of earlier wars might have been psychopaths who simply had no qualms with killing another person because they have no feelings about it. Then you'd have people fighting with zealous fury who would probably kill effectively. But besides that, usually we just shout at each other and try to avoid a lethal fight by nature.
(post is archived)