World War 2 Soldier Stories Part V: True Soldier Stories from the African Front by Ryan Jenkins

Author:Ryan Jenkins [Jenkins, Ryan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Success First Publishing
Published: 2014-10-28T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter 4: Learning the Hard Way

When the Americans went to war in 1941-42, they believed that they had the best guns, the best planes, the best tanks in the world. American boys, brought up on glorious and edited stories of World War One, believed they would go “over there” (whether “over there” was the Pacific or the European Theater), roundly defeat the “Krauts” and the “Japs”, and come home after showing the English and everyone else how it was done.

They were in for a rude awakening. While in the Pacific the Americans did very quickly develop and build better planes than the Japanese Zero, for the first months of the war, they learned the Zero and the pilots that flew them often far outclassed most of the American planes and pilots in the sky.

The Japanese, who many Americans believed to be near-sighted and not able to shoot, proved more than adequate shots at sea, on land and in the air, defeating the Americans at Pearl Harbor, Wake, Guam, and the Philippines. Even after the tide of war in the Pacific changed in the Americans' favor, the Japanese proved to be remarkably tough, resilient and insanely brave. The Marine, soldier, sailor or airman the underestimated the Japanese was making a very big mistake. This was a lesson that men learned quickly – or they died.

It was the same in the European Theater. American propaganda had fooled many Yanks that their tanks especially and other weapons were superior to the Germans. Many US Infantrymen/Marines in both the Pacific and Africa carried the Springfield '03 bolt action 30.06 rifle into battle – the same weapon that their older relatives and neighbors had carried into battle in WWI. Though this weapon (it stayed in service as a fine and quite accurate sniper rifle) was being phased out by the time of the Africa campaign, Americans were beginning to learn that not everything they had been told back home on the newsreels and in basic training was true.

This was especially true regarding armor. In the Pacific, what tanks the Americans encountered were small. Under-powered and under-gunned Japanese tanks. The terrain on which the Japanese fought and the opponents they encountered did not require the development of a strong armored force, and Japanese armor stagnated during the war.

That was not the case in Germany. When the Germans invaded France in 1940, it was their tactics and overall strategy (including how they formed tank formations) that defeated the French, not necessarily the strength of their tanks. The tanks that the Germans had the most of, the Panzer Mark I's and II's were thinly armored and under-gunned. The Mk.I was armed solely with machine guns. They also both had riveted armor – more about that in a minute. These tanks were almost already obsolete when the war began. Some French tanks, like the Char B1bis were more than a match for these tanks and were evenly matched against the best German tank of 1940, the Mark III, which the Germans had in limited quantities in France.

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