They Wouldn’t Shoot

When S. L. A. Marshall said that relatively few of our soldiers actually fired their rifles in combat in World War II, he spoke with the authority of being head of the Army’s Historical Division, and he backed his surprising claim with statistics gleaned from exhaustive after-action interviews with rifle companies. Marshall’s figures came to be widely accepted. But one ex-GI just didn’t believe him, and determined to find the real story. It turns out to be pretty amazing.