Straight Leg

As I read Victor Davis Hanson’s The Second World Wars I am struck by many things. One thing that stands out is the primacy of infantry. Yes infantry, The Queen of Battle. It’s a recurring theme of Hanson’s, also addressed in his awesome book Carnage and Culture; the theme points out that throughout military history it is infantry that has always proved decisive.

Military technologies always seem to threaten the primacy and the usefulness of the lowly foot soldier, or straight leg infantryman. As technology advances, the role of the infantryman changes, but there never seems to be a way to replace the foot soldier entirely. In order to finish things on the battlefield, it always comes down to infantry to extinguish enemy resistance.

One of the first “technologies” that threatened infantry’s lead role in battle was the horse. Cavalry was faster and more romantic than trudging soldiers on foot, slogging forward at a snail’s pace. Horse soldiers certainly have played important roles in wars; they were incredibly useful for reconnaissance and flanking movements.

Mighty armies of the past have used cavalry often. Roman Legions employed cavalry, and Napoleon’s Grand Army did too. In the American Civil War, cavalry was romanticized by Confederates who elevated Jeb Stuart, top cavalryman in the Army of Northern Virginia, to a status just below that of the God-like Robert E. Lee, commander of the Army of Northern Virginia. Cavalry even made its way into World War II and Operation Barbarossa. The Soviet Red Army employed many horse-based cavalry divisions and even the German Waffen SS included a cavalry division that was eventually recalled to the Reich and converted to an armored division.

No matter how dashing and romantic, horse legions were never decisive. As Hanson describes, heavy infantry always defeated horse cavalry. In fact, as shown often in the U.S. Civil War and in the Indian Wars on the plains, cavalry was most effective when fighting dismounted, or in other words fighting as infantry.

The tank was another technology that threatened to render infantry obsolete. The metal monsters with the hides of iron seemed impervious to attacks from foot soldiers and their small arms. The eastern front in World War II was the heyday of the tank, showcasing its awesome destructiveness and revealing its inherent weaknesses.

Despite increasingly thick armor, tanks always had an Achilles Heel, and enterprising armies found a way to exploit it. On the Eastern Front infantry found many ways to defeat tanks. A weapon as primitive as a gasoline-filled glass bottle could set fire to and destroy a technologically complex and costly Tiger tank. The most absurd example of this was the failure of the gigantic Ferdinand at Kursk. For lack of a machine gun many of the giant armored vehicles were disabled by Soviet infantry using magnetic mines and Molotov cocktails of gasoline.

Anti-tank guns improved steadily throughout the campaign and became significantly more deadly than the 37mm gun the Germans started with in 1941. Even that weapon could knock out a T34 if the round was placed correctly, and the advent of the Panzerfaust and the shaped charge made life even more dangerous for tankers. That danger was exemplified in the motion picture Fury, which in one scene depicted the destruction of an M4 Sherman tank by a fanatical German Hitler Youth fanatic and a Panzerfaust.

Although many attribute German success in early World War II campaigns to armor, it was the lethality and professionalism of the German infantry which caused the greatest damage.

As Hanson points out in The Second World Wars, Heinz Guderian’s second panzer group of Army Group Center had only 920 tanks on June 22, 1941 when Barbarossa began. The rest of the group consisted of panzer grenadiers, assigned to infantry regiments. It was these grenadiers who decimated surrounded and desperate Soviet units with lethal machine gun fire and close combat. The small-unit cohesion, excellent training and leadership of German infantry units proved deadly to its Red Army opponents. But the mass of Soviet manpower, and the gritty resolve of the Soviet infantry, eventually wore down the Germans and after six months of horrific combat the Ostheer and its superb infantry fell short of Moscow when Barbarossa reached its culminating point in December of 1941.

In the high-tech U.S. military, infantry has maintained its primacy, bearing the brunt of combat in Vietnam, Afghanistan and the Iraq wars. Infantry soldiers in Vietnam endured awful conditions and battled and bested highly motivated Viet Cong and PAVN soldiers on hostile ground. Certainly U.S. technology and firepower greatly helped the grunts, but tactical victory most often came down to the skill, courage and tenacity of line infantry soldiers and their officers.

Infantry units formed the tip of the spear during the Iraq invasion of 2003 with the 3rd Infantry Division barging first into Baghdad, earning a Presidential Unit Citation, and elements of the 10th Mountain Division were the first regular army units to deploy when the United States retaliated against the Taliban and Al Qaida. The 10th Mountain grunts, going into combat for the first time since World War II, quickly earned their combat baptism of fire after landing in Afghanistan and routing the Taliban fighters.

U.S. Army infantry soldiers still undergo intensive 16-week, one-station unit training at Ft. Benning in Columbus, Georgia and all U.S. Marines receive infantry training. Their battle uniforms are more sophisticated than the olive-drab fatigues of yesteryear and their helmets are no longer steel pots, but as they say at the Infantry Museum at Ft. Benning, the last 100 yards of the battlefield still belongs to the infantry.

Despite an increasing reliance on technology, it is certain that modern U.S. infantrymen will be called upon again to carry the fight to the enemy when the civilian leaders call for boots on the ground.