Originally Posted by IronDuke99
Trouble is, in a big war, against an enemy with more or less the same technology as you, and the same high standard of training, with the heavy casualties that come with that, 'experience' and 'moral' don't both generally go up.
Experience goes up, to a certain point, then plateaus for a bit then should actually go down in terms of taking risks.
Moral, (and that is intimately related to experience) can often start fairly high, stay high, especially with success, especially relatively cheap in terms of friendly casualties success, but then, over time starts to fall and continues to do so as the individual soldier works out how much depends on more or less pure luck and chance and how every single risk he takes, raises his chances of copping it.
Case in point British 8th Army formations, some of whom had been away from UK for years, fighting in North Africa and then Italy, from in a few cases 1940 and in every single case from at least early in 1942, that where brought back to UK for D-Day in 1944. By then a great many officers and men in those units thought (and I certainly will not fault them for it) that they had done their bit already and expecting them to attack German defensive positions yet again, was asking a bit too bloody much. Those men, brave as they certainly were had expended their courage on battlefield after battlefield. Of course, being British, they did not mutiny, and they certainly did not even think of running away, but they made their advances slowly and very cautiously, using all the support they could get, taking as few chances as one can on a modern battlefield, and hoping to get home to wives, children and girls after it ended. They were asked to much of. By 1945 the US Army veterans in Europe were much the same, which is why 'Band of Brothers' rang true and 'Fury' (in the end) just did not (A whole Tank crew, when the war is obviously almost over, decides to become dead heroes in order to defend a non running tank? Sure that is going to happen in some idiots brain perhaps. I leave aside a whole enemy infantry battalion taking a ridiculously long time to knock out a single non running tank, when they already showed how 'easy' it was for a kid with a panzerfurst to kill one)...
So experience should not just make you better and better, it does not always, or even mostly, after a certain point, do that.
|