” ‘...American infantry units fired 25,000 rounds [WWII] to kill just one ... Korean War, ... 50,000 rounds, ... Vietnam War ... 200,000 rounds ...’
Anyone else find this difficult to believe?”
Yes.
But those are the official figures as stated by the US Army Ordnance establishment. Give or take a couple thousand rounds.
The Army Dept has never disclosed supporting data nor revealed the methodology it used to establish these numbers.
They are highly aggregate, and over-generalized, and thus are only approximate. They take no account of the totality of circumstances on the battlefield, where soldiers are not killed exclusively by other soldiers firing bullets from rifles, but can be hit by shell fragments, rocketry, burning debris & hot gases from fires & explosions, aircraft munitions, naval missile or gun projectiles, mines, grenades, even chunks of soil thrown up by impact of projectiles or detonation of warheads (bayonet & knife casualties still happen but are not a large chunk of the total: shrank into single-digit percentages during the American Civil War). And many other lethal items.
After the Second World War, the Army judged that these ever-increasing numbers of fired rounds per kill meant that individual aimed fire had declined in importance, so “firepower” was officially redefined as shots per minute.
In doing so, officials relied heavily on the work of Samuel Lyman Atwood Marshall, journalist, author, and wannabe Army officer, who revolutionized combat history collection techniques during WWII and published his signature work, Men Against Fire, in 1947: it contained the controversial conclusion that only 25 percent of troops fired their individual weapons in combat.
SLAM (he was said to delight in the nickname formed by his initials) was unusually talented at ingratiating himself with senior Army leaders and was granted unprecedented access to troops during WWII and Korea. His conclusions were taken to heart as Absolute Truth, and he remained a revered “wise man” in the eyes of the Army’s scholarly education and training establishment, enjoying acclaim for the rest of his life, receiving numerous requests for special consults during US involvement in Southeast Asia.
In the late 1980s, WWII combat veterans began casting doubt on SLAM’s conclusions; many were members of units he claimed to have interviewed exhaustively, but none could remember any after-action interview process at all. Doubts began to sharpen when Korea veterans noted that SLAM’s interview teams could never have debriefed the numbers of troops they said they did, in the time officially recorded as what they used.
So far, the Army establishment still enshrines SLAM’s theories as orthodoxy. Believe or not and draw your own conclusions.
I read Men Against Fire, and some other of his works. I'm not entirely convinced ...
But calling him a "wannabe" officer is simply not correct.
I remember seeing the startling estimate that only 25% of soldiers fired their weapons in combat. I thought perhaps that was because so many were working in non-combat positions in the rear. Also IIRC because of that report the army changed their training methods to de-sensitize soldiers to killing the enemy.
As far as the rounds fired/dead enemy the simplest way to get those numbers would be to take an estimate of the number of rounds sent to the theater of operation, minus the amount returned, and divide that by the estimated number of enemy dead. That would be a wild azz guess at best.
If they counted all the 7.62/5.56 ammo for gunship door gunners, miniguns etc. with the actual infantryman on the ground, maybe the numbers would jive. The average daily load for the rifleman at about 2 to 4 m16 bandoleers at 140 rounds per bandoleer holding 7-20 rd mags. If the unit was in a prolonged firefight with possible resup difficulty, order of the day was 'no rock n roll'. If you ran out, bad news bears. You grabbed dead gook AKs and bandoleers when you could to supplement.