Soviet snipers NEVER hunted alone dude:)
The any sniper group consists at least from couple of snipers. As wrote Vasilij Zaitsev in his memours- he always went on mission with assistent.
Okay, but probably those were sniper-scout couples, one looking for targets and the other firing at it , no a sniper accompanied by a superior officer. In the end in as many other instances the kill is mostly given by the word of the sniper and/or the obserbation of his scout, wich is not bad but isnt definitive either.
I first encountered Marshall’s work, or at least references to it and the claims about weak ratios of fire, some time in the 1970s and accepted it as accurate because of the sources which presented it and because his surprising conclusions were widely accepted in military circles. I remember his conclusions well, because they offended every sense of self-preservation I knew in myself and others. It seemed impossible that even in the worst circumstances only a small fraction of men facing death would fire at the enemy. Anyway, I happily quoted that well known ‘research’ for years to prove that it’s very hard to make a civilian into a killer.
Much later I found criticisms of his work which suggested that he was a charlatan and a blowhard journalist who did not do any reliable statistical or other research but carved a reputation out of his own journalistic bullshit. I can’t recall the sources that contradicted him but I first came across references to them perhaps a decade or fifteen years ago. Thanks to the marvels of Google, this might have been one of the works which questioned his work and provoked whatever it was I read back then.
In 1947, a slim book entitled Men Against Fire: The Problem of Battle Command in Future War made the reputation of S.L.A. Marshall.
During the war, Marshall was employed as a popular historian with a newspaperman’s talent for getting a story through interviews. Indeed, the best parts of Men Against Fire are soldier’s folk wisdom about staying alive.
But that aspect of his book did not make Marshall’s reputation as a social scientist of the battlefield. The book’s central argument did. Marshall stated:
In an average experienced infantry company in an average day’s action, the number engaging with any and all weapons was approximately 15 per cent of the total strength. In the most aggressive companies, under the most intense local pressure, the figure rarely rose above 25 percent of the total strength from the opening to the close of the action.
Marshall’s claims certainly raised eyebrows in disbelief. Significantly, his “ratio of fire” does not appear in the official history series, The United States in World War II. Nonetheless, Marshall found many followers among the gullible. It wasn’t until 1988 that a scholarly article set the record straight.
The article, “S.L.A. Marshall and the Ratio of Fire,” appeared in the British journal, The Royal United Services Institute for Defence Studies. The author was professor Roger J. Spiller, and his task was an unpleasant one because he believed that Marshall was basically right about the primacy of ground combat. Nonetheless, Spiller pulled no punches. He writes:
Marshall had no use for the polite equivocations of scholarly discourse. His way of proving doubtful propositions was to state them more forcefully. Righteousness was always more important for Marshall than evidence…
The foundation of his conviction was not scholarship but his own military experience, experience that he inflated or revised as the situation warranted. Marshall often hinted broadly that he had commanded infantry in combat, but his service dossier shows no such service. He frequently held that he had been the youngest officer in the American Expeditionary Forces during the Great War, but this plays with the truth as well. Marshall enlisted in 1917 and served with the 315th Engineer Regiment—then part of the 90th Infantry Division—and won a commission after the Armistice, when rapid demobilization required very junior officers to command “casual” and depot companies as the veteran officers went home. Marshall rarely drew such distinctions, however, leaving his audiences to infer that he had commanded in the trenches. Later in life, he remarked that he had seen five wars as a soldier and 18 as a correspondent, but his definitions of war and soldiering were rather elastic. That he had seen a great deal of soldiers going about their deadly work was no empty boast, however. This mantle of experience, acquired in several guises, protected him throughout his long and prolific career as a military writer, and his aggressive style intimidated those who would doubt his arguments. Perhaps inevitably, his readers would mistake his certitude for authority.
What of Marshall’s claims for his research in the field during World War II? Spiller writes:
In Men Against Fire Marshall claims to have interviewed “approximately” 400 infantry rifle companies in the Pacific and in Europe, but that number tended to change over the years. In 1952, the number had somehow grown to 603 companies; five years later his sample had declined to “something over 500” companies. Those infantry companies—whatever their actual number—were his laboratories, the infantrymen his test subjects, and at the focal point of his research was the ratio of fire. “Why the subject of fire ratios under combat conditions has not been long and searchingly explored, I don’t know,” Marshall wrote. “I suspect that it is because in earlier wars there had never existed the opportunity for systematic collection of data.” [Emphasis added.]
Opportunity aplenty existed in Europe: more than 1200 rifle companies did their work between June 1944 and V-E day, 10 months later. But Marshall required by his own standard two and sometimes three days with a company to examine one day’s combat. By the most generous calculation, Marshall would have finished “approximately” 400 interviews sometime in October or November 1946, or at about the time he was writing Men Against Fire.
This calculation assumes, however, that of all the questions Marshall might ask the soldiers of a rifle company during his interviews, he would unfailingly want to know who had fired his weapon and who had not. Such a question, posed interview after interview, would have signalled that Marshall was on a particular line of inquiry, and that regardless of the other information Marshall might discover, he was devoted to investigating this facet of combat performance. John Westover, usually in attendance during Marshall’s sessions with the troops, does not recall Marshall’s ever asking this question. Nor does Westover recall Marshall ever talking about ratios of weapons usage in their many private conversations. Marshall’s own personal correspondence leaves no hint that he was ever collecting statistics. His surviving field notebooks show no signs of statistical compilations that would have been necessary to deduce a ratio as precise as Marshall reported later in Men Against Fire. The “systematic collection of data” that made Marshall’s ratio of fire so authoritative appears to have been an invention.
Puncturing the Marshall legend was Dr. Spiller’s duty rather than his pleasure. He ended his piece this way:
History has a savage way about it. A reputation may be made or unmade when history seizes upon part of a life and reduces it to caricature. S.L.A. Marshall was one of the most important commentators on the soldier’s world in this century. The axiom upon which so much of his reputation has been built overshadows his real contribution. Marshall’s insistence that modern warfare is best understood through the medium of those who actually do the fighting stands as a challenge to the disembodied, mechanistic approaches that all too often are the mainstay of military theorists and historians alike. http://warchronicle.com/us/combat_historians_wwii/marshallfire.htm
Even if Marshall’s figures were accurate, they demonstrate only that about one in four to one in six riflemen fire in a company action. That has been interpreted to mean that that is the proportion of men willing to fire. It ignores the fact that in a company action of about 120 men (or whatever a WWII American company was) it might well be that only about a quarter or a sixth of them have a target presented to them. That doesn’t mean the rest won’t shoot, just that they didn’t.
With the benefit of hindsight, Marshall’s ‘research’ needs to be viewed very sceptically.
And I can say that I’m buggered if I’d go to war with five other blokes and expect them not to fire when their nuts were in the vice. It just doesn’t make sense.
I’m also sceptical about Marshall’s ability to obtain the information he claimed to base his conclusions on. Multiply the number of the companies he supposedly interviewed by about 100 to 120 men (or whatever the correct US number is) and work out whether he could have done it.
Anyway, for consistency he would have needed to ask every soldier the same questions and tabulate the results. Where is there any evidence that he did this?
My recollection is that the fire ratio increased steadily from WWII to Vietnam as a result of Marshall’s work, so that by Vietnam it was around 90%.
The dehumanising aspects of training that produced that supposed increase go some way to explaining the problems veterans from that war have, being trained up to kill but not trained down to live in society again, if that is possible.
Unclear, but there is also supporting evidence that the basic premise is sound. I’ve read an account of British troops in Sicily (written in wartime, by a serving officer for internal use and predating Marshall) which comes to similar conclusions. It’s a little more illuminating however in the way it categorises those who don’t fire - it says they’re usually hiding well back and make themselves scarce as soon as there is the risk of being shot at. The conclusion is that the overwhelming majority of the fighting is done by a small number of “gutful” men being directly led by an officer, causing this group to suffer overwhelmingly high casualties. This of course enables both Marshall’s work and your sense of self-preservation to be in accord - those who didn’t fire their weapons may have failed to do so not because they couldn’t bring themselves to kill another human, but because they had made themselves scarce and didn’t have a target.
Another (small) group with a good excuse will be SNCOs/Offrs - too busy commanding to actually fire in most cases.
I’d accept all that, but the problem with Marshall is that his work suggests that you and I and two to four other blokes are in a shell crater with the enemy bearing down on us with small arms fire and you’re the only one firing back. I’m buggered if I’d be cowering below the crater lip with a full mag waiting for the enemy to arrive and start pouring small arms fire down on me so I can die with an unfired weapon.
My Vietnam link in my last post goes a long way to explaining those aspects.
Did he actually specify that the 1 in 4 figure was per randomly selected group of people in a foxhole being shot at, or for a company as a whole? That would account for a hell of a big discrepancy.
This is the article I remember. There is so much wrong with his work my tendancy is to say it’s all bollocks.
Queries.
As said before to interview 600 companies. An Infantry Company’s strength on paper is 190 odd men, say 175 for wastage. 600 x 175 = 105,000 men. Yeah, likely story.
If only 1/4 men do anything these will soon be dead, what happens then. An army looses 25% casaulties then cannot fight. This flies in the face of small unit actions across WWII.
I think he mistook bayonet strength for fighting power. In US units only 25% fought and saw their enemy the rest were in support units.
In the British Army standard practice removed a squad in each platoon to make a reserve, same with platoons and companys. Most army’s operate with two up and one in reserve. This gives a reasonable chance that 33% won’t fire.
Ammunition expenditure was prodigous if only 25% fired.
I believe in combat that a small proportion lead, most follow and a few hide. As other posters have said who would stay with 3 others who don’t ever help out. Commanders would soon know the active 25% and put them in one unit then you have units in which everyone fights again.
Marshall said about half of the men fired in Korea but it’s clear from the article that his methodology while with Lt Brennan didn’t support any conclusion about ratios of fire in that conflict, while other aspects of the article indicate that Marshall was a bullshit artist of the first order.
I can’t find a library copy of Men Against Fire and my knowledge of Marshall is from other references to that work, so I don’t know what methodology he used there. However, from what I can see of objective criticisms of Marshall’s work, the following is more convincing than his ratio of fire claims.
S.L.A. Marshall’s invention of the “ratio of fire” was the greatest hoax in military history. Unfortunately, it is all too representative of Marshall’s work rather than being an isolated lapse. As an historical writer, S.L.A. Marshall might have been plopped from the Lytton Strachey mold. Marshall, too, was impatient with the limits of truth, and the methods of open inquiry.
In one of the most disturbing, and nutty, passages in Marshall’s Men Against Fire, he explains why he kept his wartime findings to himself. Surely, something as serious as riflemen not firing should have been reported or at least discussed with colleagues. This is how Marshall explains it:
The data which came of [my] prolonged personal research was my own and I made no attempt to cross-check or co-related it with the findings of my friends and colleagues in the Historical Division, ETO. There was a reason for this quite apart from the lack of time and high pressure of duty. Each man judges performance according to some standard deriving from his own experience. But the impressions of others, and how they evaluate man against fire, are also either validated by a breadth of experience or colored by a lack of perspective. Where the armchair historian may pick and choose whatever fits in to the making of a good story, the combat historian may be sure only of his own datum plane.
“Prolonged personal research” while heading an historical mission for the United States Army? How can Marshall call his colleagues in the field, who were as close to the frontlines as he, “armchair historians”? (And why would he dedicate the book to them, if they were such dullards?) Wasn’t it Marshall’s “duty” to record and share findings? And, while we’re at it, what on earth is a “datum plane” that can only be understood be its creator?
From top to bottom, Marshall is fibbing.
The “Marshall problem” is that he was both a perceptive commentator and a fibbing windbag. A supreme over-reacher, he was a habitually dishonest man in a field where honesty is everything.
Some writers still claim that Marshall’s work has an overall validity. Some have said that he helped focus the Army’s attention on fighting men rather than bombs. But fraud can never have an altogether beneficial result. Fraud saves the perpetrator from an honest effort which might have been useful, and wastes the victim’s time and energy on nonsense. It is alarming, for instance, to find Marshall’s “ratio of fire” quoted as fact in the War Psychiatry Textbook of Military Medicine (Office of the Surgeon General, 1995). One would wish for a bit more intellectual rigor on the part of our boys in white coats.
For present historians and readers who want a clear head, the “Marshall problem”, has only one solution. His work must be regarded as historical fiction.
Books such as Bastogne: The First Eight Days and Night Drop: The American Airborne Invasion of Normandy are highly enjoyable and illuminating. Marshall’s work will live, though his claims for it cannot, because it is irreplaceable. No one but Marshall recorded airborne actions in the ETO or details of ground combat in the Pacific. But the inescapable fact is that Marshall was not a serious historian. He was a brilliant combat journalist who fatally put a premium on telling a good story. http://warchronicle.com/us/combat_historians_wwii/marshallproblem.htm
It appears to be for companies as a whole, based on interviews with small groups. He didn’t interview officers or casualties in Korea so, if he did the same in WWII, he wasn’t interviewing everybody in the company engaged in the action.
Omitting casualties is understandable if they’d been sent further back, but it’s bound to distort his ‘research’ as GSW and grenade casualties are most likely to have been in situations where firing by everyone was critical.
We’d need to know a lot more about the actions the companies were involved in to assess the reliability of his figures.
For example, in jungle only the scout and perhaps one or two others at the head of a company column might be in a position to return fire in a contact front, while in a jungle ambush everyone might be in position to fire, although a company sized ambush is a bloody big ambush in heavy jungle. The odds are that a ‘company ambush’ would involve a couple of sections or a platoon, which even if just about everyone fired still gives about a 25% ratio on a company basis.
Similar issues applied in the confines of the bocage in Normandy, and in heavy forest.
Common sense says the fire ratio should be derived at section level as it’s often the case that only one or two sections of a company would be directly engaged in an action.
Apart from the foregoing considerations, deriving ratios on a company level has an inherent distortion built into it because, as ptimms points out, there’s also the issue of a reserve platoon. The company headquarters platoon is usually a reserve platoon so unless the action reaches company headquarters or they’re sent forward, they aren’t going to fire. If another platoon is held in reserve they won’t fire either. Plus there is company headquarters staff who won’t be firing if the action doesn’t reach them, or they don’t reach it.
We’d also need to know whether the company is attacking or defending. A company defence in static positions with pre-determined arcs of responsibility could see only one section firing if that’s where the probe or attack comes from, especially in heavy country. In night defence, the fire ratio and rate of fire would often be much less than daytime to avoid revealing positions by muzzle flash. In attack, the fire rate and fire ratio could be expected to increase because of the need for suppressing fire and fire and movement tactics.
All in all, I don’t think it’s possible to make the sort of sweeping generalisations that Marshall made to assert that only about a quarter of infantrymen fire in combat.
It’s like saying that only quarter of bomber air gunners would fire under fighter attack. I reckon that to a man they’d be pumping lead through their weapons like there was no tomorrow, which there wouldn’t be if the fighter got through. It’s different on the ground because you can hide, but I think the survival instinct under attack would see the vast majority of men firing if they had a target. In attack, I can see the ratio dropping as more timid soldiers advance carefully.
What Marshall’s figures also ignore, and ptimms adverts to with his comment about a few leading and most following, is that the nature of an infantry section and platoon is that the men won’t carry passengers if they’re repeatedly in action. Every man has to pull his own weight. Although it’s allowable that some men aren’t going to be as adventurous as others, it is inconceiveable that only three of the dozen or so men in a WWII section did all the firing from, say, Normandy to Berlin.
Source? Also, remember that many of these kill counts would be over 4 years of warfare. For 200 kills, that’s only one a week per sniper - hardly likely to decide a battle. Furthermore, the Germans lost around 4,000,000 dead on the Eastern front, of which these represent around 0.5% of the total - not an entirely implausible figure.
Now if the info there is accurate like the one saying “SS Erwin Konig 500 kills” we are pretty much wasted if finding the right info about russians snipers is our goal.
Some of the pics are interesting but others are not good as portrait of russian snipers.
Like this one, note the muzzle of the rifles potruding the window, the logical firing position would be from inside the , well behind the windows frame to avoid show your emplacemnet by the muzzzle flash.
Perhaps, but that assumes that there was a rest inside; the angle of fire was available from that point; and that the disturbance of dust from an internal shot in a shattered building did not reveal the position for longer than what little, if anything, might be seen from a full daylight muzzle flash.
For all we know, they are actually behind the likely point of fire, by firing through a building or something else in front of them which obscures them from the enemy in the same way that firing from inside the building would.
If your interpretation is correct, it might be explained by the snipers wanting to be in a position where they commanded the widest field of fire and were in the best position to see movements towards them.
Or maybe it is a staged picture.
It all goes back to earlier discussions about what we can learn from the narrow perspective given by a photo. We need to know more.
How can it not be a staged picture. The two of you playing a cat and mouse game with major Koenig, one slip means death, hang on who is that stood up next to them ? The man from Pravda !! I would suggest that none of these pictures show combat as virtually no actual real combat photo’s exist.
How can it not be a staged picture. The two of you playing a cat and mouse game with major Koenig,
Just a comment, Major Koenig does not/did not exist.
Perhaps, but that assumes that there was a rest inside; the angle of fire was available from that point; and that the disturbance of dust from an internal shot in a shattered building did not reveal the position for longer than what little, if anything, might be seen from a full daylight muzzle flash.
Well, maybe, all is possible but the usual norm is to shoot from inside. Or perhaps those were sharpshooters ,average soldiers who can provide more accurate fire because their scoped rifles but not trained snipers, at list no like the well trained, professional, cammo maniac sniper.
I know about Koenig, I’ve re-read it this morning and sorry I sounded more sarcastic than I meant. I agree, I think all claims of all types are open to wide discrepancies. By the way has anyone read Allenbergers book ? Maybe it was the translation but I thought it was poor. More like a Sven Hassel novel than an account of sniper battles.
I don’t know about staged, or invented, but I share your doubt about the reliability of some claims, especially when war time propaganda needs will always encourage excessive claims of success.
Rather like the ridiculous body counts claimed by the SVN / American forces at times in Vietnam, or the no doubt genuinely believed but rather optimistic claims of kills by WWII pilots on all sides.
If you look at the reflections on the bedposts, back wall, etc. there appears to be a very strong light source immediately behind the photographer. Given that the photo was taken indoors, either there was no roof/wall and it was a sunny day (making it a highly implausible fighting position) or that the photographer used a flash. I would strongly suggest that the photo was therefore taken using a flash, and hence was staged in a safe rear area. There is no way that a flash would be used inside a real fighting position.
If you are correct, the shadows of the bars on the windows in the foreground should have been washed out by the flash.
I think it more likely that the main light source comes from the left of the picture, with other light through a roof, windows, breaches in walls or whatever contributing to other highlights.
As an award winning black and white amateur photographer in a national competition in the mid-1970’s when colour film was still expensive (I just thought I’d be a smartarse and throw that in to demonstrate my impressive qualifications to comment - I won a trip and week’s accommodation to some Barrier Reef Island which was great, except it couldn’t be taken during university holidays which wasn’t much use to a university student), I’d also mention that what is seen is not necessarily what was presented to the camera. Darkroom manipulation could make light that which is dark on the negative, and vice versa, and long before PhotoShop had ever been heard of.
Be all that as it may, flash in daylight that could produce the bright spot on the back wall would have obliterated the window bar shadows. The light is equally consistent with light from the left as captured by the camera’s angle.
It looks like a fairly straight print to me, perhaps with darker areas being lightened in the darkroom.
Not that that means the men were actually in action.
Once again, this demonstrates my long held view that if we devote enough attention to anything we begin to doubt everything about it.
That’s the first time anyone has accused me of that.
If you want to play with it, a flash could have been used away from the camera and above the subjects, but the light still looks wrong for that.
If you look at the men’s uniforms, light seems to be coming from behind and below the level of the windows on the left.
A flash from the photographer’s position would not have their uniforms facing the camera as dark as they are.
Also, a flash would tend to fade away from the bloke in the foreground, who has no evidence of flash on his uniform, rather than peaking on the wall in the background. Unless it was aimed high to achieve the photo effect.
It wouldn’t be hard to set up that photo with a few flashes inside and to the left of the shooters, with a few remote flashes and a bit of cable (I’m assuming that this was technically possible at the time - I’ve never used that era’s equipment).
There are few such photographs taken in the wild which cannot be replicated to a fair extent with artificial lighting.
For all we know, the photo is a studio still for a Soviet propaganda film.
Your scepticism might be more on the money than my photographic analysis.
- I won a trip and week’s accommodation to some Barrier Reef Island which was great, except it couldn’t be taken during university holidays which wasn’t much use to a university student), I’d also mention that what is seen is not necessarily what was presented to the camera. Darkroom manipulation could make light that which is dark on the negative, and vice versa, and long before PhotoShop had ever been heard of.