If I ask google, I get an average age of 25 for lieutenants. Seems a bit young to me, so I thought I'd ask. Also, I can't make heads or tails of all the extra terms like (join+8) and TC. More specifically, I mean the guy who's the boss of the other guys jumping out of a landing craft at Omaha Beach. Is that even a lieutenant. by the way? I always kinda thought it was a sergeant who leads the soldiers. Even more specifically: The who tells everyone where to go when the hatch of the landing craft opens (as far as that was still possible in that mayhem). What's his rank, and likely age? It'll probably only be referenced in passing, story wise, so in depth details are welcome, but mostly just for my personal curation of knowledge.
25 sounds about right. The US army was nearly nonexistent (~100K?) until the war broke out and quickly filled out with millions of young dudes.
If 80s songs are to be believed "In World War II the average age of the combat soldier was 26" I can't believe that officers would be much younger than the average soldier. As to the difference between lieutenants and sergeants, I suggest this video. It's based on the UK army, but I think it will copy over to the US.
It seems like it's hard to get good data on this via Google. But maybe that's a good thing. Anyways, and this is anecdotal, but there are accounts of volunteers lying about their age but I don't know if that was prevalent enough to skew the actual data.
Here's a picture of some soldiers on board an LCA in North Africa. Many of them don't look much more than kids.
I've heard that in WWII, for the US Army anyway, that anyone over about 23 years of age was referred to as "Pops".
OK, so it looks like the the draft age in the US was 18-45 in WWII. The draft age in the Vietnam era was 18-26. I wonder how many of the older guys ended up in combat in WWII, though. There must have been tons of clerk typists and quartermasters and such stationed everywhere from Europe to the Pacific to stateside. Took a lot to make that war machine run. My cousin was drafted during the Vietnam war and spent the entire time stationed in Hawaii.
Side note: Now I'm thinking of Mott The Hoople. Well, damn. I work in graphics and we were none too pleased when our good boss was replaced with a young dude. I can't imagine the uprising if he'd told us to storm the beaches of Normandy. "Dude! Have you seen those machine gun nests? They're firing Comic Sans! Fuck it, we're going to lunch." Anyway. Point is that it's weird having a "kid" lead your troops. Though, when I was 18 the 25 year old seemed like an old dude, I guess. Still, feels like it's a little young to have sufficient combat experience. I grew up in the 80s. All of them are true. All of them... Godspeed, Europe. I hope you made it to Venus. Yeah, at least I have the option to lie. Feed the reader what they've learned from movies instead. I try not to, on these kinds of things, though. I've got more than enough crazy stuff going on, and I like to believe it helps the story to anchor the bullshit to facts. Motörhead - 1916 (1991) We all volunteered and we wrote down our names / And we added two years to our ages Wrong war, and wrong release year, but it's a recurring theme, yes. I did indeed figure out a large bulk of soldiers on Omaha Beach were fresh faced kids who'd never seen action before. That's why I'm so confused about the age of their leaders. Seems to me that if you want to give those boys the best fighting chance, you send a battle hardened commander with them. It just doesn't work in my head. I'm at a lot of these memorials for work reasons, and each year there are less antique looking veterans there. Yet at 25, it would put the character at 72 (or 78, depending on what year the reader thinks it is). Hm. I'm sure there were some older guys out there. I need the guy in my story to be an unnatural old age. I figured something as iconic as the D-Day landings would naturally get me there. Maybe I'll take a closer look at WW1.
Out of 10+ million who served, I'm sure there were plenty of older dudes too. That won't be an issue storywise.
2nd Lt is a entry level post for officers... it would be completely normal to have a kid with no combat experience other than what he gets at officer training be leading a platoon... he'd have a platoon sergeant who'd be much more experienced, to help him, and it would be likely that the squad leaders would have some idea too In short you don't generally have 'battle hardened' officers in low level command positions - those who survive long enough to be battle hardened could expect rapid promotion through attrition to company or battalion command positions. The only exceptions would be either where a sergeant was promoted from the ranks, or found themselves in command after the lieutenant was killed, or whee a more experienced officer like the company XO found himself leading a platoon because there wasn't anybody else compentent Also in something like omaha beach most of the officer level orders would be given before the landing craft even embarked...when the fighting actually started most of the actual orders given between disembarkation and fighting your way off the beach would be fire team or squad level, with the direction needed being given by non coms
Officers were mostly college educated, if not graduates. In the US most graduate college when they are 21. So, a 25-year-old lieutenant would be quite common. There is also the fact that it was not unusual for non-coms to get battlefield commissions. So, you join up the day after you graduate high school, you've been in the Army for three years and make sergeant. Due to the high casualties, a year later you're given a field promotion to lieutenant. And there you are, a 22-year-old lieutenant, just like the college grads, except you have three years of combat experience. Also keep in mind that there was a huge difference between the "instant" officers created by the draft and those who volunteered as opposed to the "professional" Army of West Points grads. The West Pointers got the rapid promotions; the volunteers/draftees stayed in the line units. As a lot of the front-line troops would say, "It don't mean a thing if you ain't got that ring," meaning their West Point class ring.
To be honest in an high attrition environment like D day even the draftee officers could expect company XO or Co positions if they survived...a hell of a lot of them didn't because the play book has always said target the enemies leaders first (which is another reason why you don't put your battle experienced captains etc in the front wave) they would be much less like to take the next step from captain up to staff major if they didnt have west point or similar incidentally saving private ryan has one of the most realistic depictions of omaha beach... if you havent seen it its well worth a watch for research... at the very least the utube clips
On Omaha beach, the unit assigned to capture the western half was the 29th Division. None of the three infantry regiments (117th, 116th and 175th) had seen combat - they had been training since they were formed, so they wouldn't have had very many combat veterans to call upon in any case.
In WW2, 25 was probably actually rather old for a Lieutenant. I'm a Vietnam veteran and I had at least two company commanders who were younger than 25. They were also pretty useless. The best company-grade officer I encountered was a "mustanger" -- a former enlisted NCO who went through OCS (Officer Candidate School) to become a commissioned officer.
Yeah, I've been doing some more reading on Omaha Beach. There wasn't much communicating of anything as soon as the ramp went down. I was already convinced the soldiers in those metal tubs were something more than regular humans, but goddamn. How do you even do it? I'm pretty sure I would be considering just putting the 1911 against my head and getting it over with good and proper before we even reached land. I was born in '78. The most war I've experienced was when some other kids at school said something shitty about Van Halen. I can't even begin to comprehend how you get buddhist monk levels of control over yourself to get off the LCA. Yes, I know those guys in the boats were terrified, but none of them called in sick. Believe you me, I've seen it several times over. And I did think about having a good close look at it again, but I can't just watch a part of a movie. It's got to be a real piece of fecal matter before I stop watching, and Saving Private Ryan is not that. If I may ask a slightly personal question: How did you feel about that? Aside from them being useless, which is a fair assessment of any manager. I've seen my share of out-of-school twits The Who-ing it up: Meet the new boss, same as the old boss Come to think of it, how did they feel about that, your COs? I'm sure most people can sense when they're not getting the respect their position demands.
I think I, like pretty much every one of the guys in my company, just did my best to ignore the lieutenants and took my orders from our sergeants. One of the lieutenants wasn't a bad guy -- I became friendly with him -- but prior to going to OCS he was a postal clerk. Hardly what I'd consider preparation for a career as an Army officer. One of the real dorks had been a bank teller. He had a real ego problem -- HE was an officer, and he expected everyone to treat him accordingly. And then there was my company XO (Executive Officer) in Vietnam. I've been home almost 54 years, and I still remember his name. He's one person I'd love to meet in a dark alley some night. How he didn't get fragged is a mystery to me.
Keep in mind that when the U.S. entered WW2 the size of our army was relatively small. In 1940 the U.S. Army was just 269,023 men -- that's officers and enlisted. In 1941 it was up to 1,462,315. In 1944 -- preparatory to D-Day, it was 7,994,750. In three years the Army alone increased its personnel by six and a half MILLION men. There just weren't all that many "battle hardened" officers or NCOs to go around. My father served in WW2. He received a direct commission as a second lieutenant in 1942, at the age of 34. He wasn't involved in D-Day or any of the European theater action -- he was shipped to India, from where he went overland (over the Himalayas) into China. He made Captain by the time the war ended and he came home.
You'd think there'd be a bigger difference between the military and the media, but that sounds eerily familiar. I meet people like that on a weekly basis, to be honest. Thanks for your answers!
People are people and in a draftee war like ww2 or vietnam you get a bunch of people who aren't maybe right for military service or any command structure...you put them in stressful situations with limited supervision, and pressure to meet impossible targets from above, and that's the result...people who are naturally dicks anyway tend to be much bigger dicks with rank on their sleeve. If you watch Band of Brothers - zobel, David Schwimmer's character in episode 1 - is a classic of type... and the way hes dealt with ...being taken out of command of Easy Company but promoted rather than disciplined, is also pretty typical. Fragging wasn't really much of a thing in ww2 but if it had been Zobel would totally have been getting a high explosive surprise at 0 dark thirty
I was thinking about him too. And for some reason the scene where the guy just runs on over to the German line, goes back, and then does it again. The whole context of it has been lost to me over time, since I last watched it when VHS was the best option, but the scene was so crazy I kinda had to believe it actually happened. Since I get most of my war-related knowledge from videogames, I have to ask what a frag is, then. I always related it to the frag grenade, actually. I guess the results are mostly the same, though.
Fragging is the slang term for getting rid of a another soldier (usually higher ranking) which was often done with a frag grenade because it was harder to prove who did it and it could easily be blamed on the enemy (unlike gunfire where different armies may use different calibers, etc.) I've heard fragging was often used on officers that didn't want to do their job, which I've always understood that to mean asking subordinates to do dangerous tasks that they should share. But that may be me misunderstanding the common motive. There was a theory (or conspiracy theory) that Pat Tillman, the former football player who died via friendly fire in Iraq, was fragged due to his criticism of the War on Terror and other views but I don't think there was any evidence of it other than the tight grouping of his bullet wounds which some suggest means he was killed in close combat. Of course, a grenade wasn't used, but 'fragging' would still be the term if he were in fact murdered by fellow soldiers (which there is no evidence he was).
Fragging was a vietnam term for killing superiors* - usually officers or high ranking sergeants who were deemed incompetent or otherwise dangerous- with a fragmentation grenade...it was considered preferable to shooting them since it was untraceable... generally a frag grenade was either tossed into a bunker or foxhole or it could be rigged to explode under their cot. (*occasionally medics/corpsmen who were chickenshit and didnt do their jobs recovering casualties under fire might also be targettted) It did happen a little bit in ww2 and korea but to a far lesser extent because military discipline has to have broken down quite considerably for enlisted men to think its okay to murder their officers...the major thing being that it wasn't just the person who did the fragging who thought it was okay, but his fellow soldiers Likewise it hasn't happened much since vietnam. More recently its also become a general term for being hit by shrapnel or frag metal , as in ' the IED fragged sergeant smith but good, he died before the IRT arrived' A random point being that in military parlance you'll also hear people talk about frag orders... a frag order has nothing whatsoever to do with fragging... its fragment of of a larger order issued from higher which is assigned to a particular battalion, company or whatever
Well, damn. That puts my K/D ratio in some serious perspective. It makes me the good guy, because I suck at those games.
Surely the figures are going to be quite different for the British, US and various types of imperial troops (Canadian, Indian, Oz, etc). I imagine by D-Day experienced British or imperial officers in particular would be dead, injured, or scattered across half the globe holding down theatres or colonies they were sent to at the start of the war.
I didn't really look into the others. I wanted a Texan character somewhere in my story from the first attempt at writing a book, and this one turned out so Texan that it makes Sam Elliott go, "Cud y'all tone it down in thar?"
