artillery, the company also created ammunition shortages for that headquarters. Divisional reconnaissance suffered because the troop lacked sufficient strength and its vehicles were too lightly armored and armed. The decision to have fewer divisions and to maintain them through a constant flow of replacements proved costly. Many recruits were killed or seriously wounded before they could be effectively worked into the fabric of frontline units.[1]
The armored division lacked sufficient infantry and medium artillery. To solve this problem, attachments took place when such units were available. Combat experience also dictated that the division have three combat teams. Under the 1942 structure the infantry regiment's headquarters in the 2d and 3d Armored Divisions was often provisionally organized as a third combat command. In the other divisions, under the 1943 configuration, an armored group headquarters and headquarters company was attached to serve as a combat command.[2] These expedients created command and control problems and complicated teamwork. The division's reconnaissance unit and replacement system suffered from the same weaknesses as in the infantry division.[3]
In January 1945, recognizing these organizational problems, the War Department began to revise the infantry division structure for units planned for redeployment from Europe, after the defeat of Germany, to the Pacific theater to aid in the conquest of Japan. The War Department cast aside its policy of rejecting changes in units because of personnel considerations and directed staff agencies to prepare tables for sound fighting teams. It ordered the elimination of dual assignments for personnel, the addition of any equipment listed earlier as special but that had been used routinely, provisions for more adequate communications in all components, and an expansion of military police resources. The infantry regiment was to receive more mobile, self-propelled howitzers and better antitank weapons. Later the War Department instructions indicated that the revised structure would not be limited to use in the war against Japan.[4]
On 1 March 1945 Army Ground Forces submitted three proposals for reorganizing the infantry division. Each specified different manning levels, but the planners recommended the one that maximized the division's size and firepower. An enlarged infantry regiment with 700 additional men provided more punch. The weapons platoon in each rifle company had two new sections, one with six 2.36-inch rocket launchers and the other with three 57-mm. recoilless rifles.[5] In the battalion's weapons company a new platoon of six 75-mm. recoilless rifles augmented the two platoons equipped with light and heavy machine guns. Because the regiment's 105-mm. howitzers lacked cross-country mobility for close support, commanders had tied the cannon company to the field artillery fire direction center to serve as an additional indirect fire battery. Army Ground Forces thus replaced the cannon company with a tank company comprising nine tanks. The tanks also replaced the 57-mm. towed guns in the antitank company, which were too lightly armored and judged to be too road-
- ↑ General Board, ETO, Report 17, Types of Divisions—Postwar Army, pp. 8–9, 1945, DAMH-Library.
- ↑ The armored group headquarters and headquarters company was organized almost identical to the headquarters and headquarters company of a combat command in an armored division. It contained the necessary staff, communication, and transportation to enable it to function as the headquarters of a task force comparable in size to a combat command.
- ↑ General Board, ETO, Report 17, Types of Divisions, pp. 12–13.
- ↑ Greenfield et al., Organization of Ground Combat Troops, pp. 454–55.
- ↑ Recoilless rifles had been developed during the war, and the weapons combined the effect of artillery with the mobility of hand-carried arms by using high velocity gas ports to counteract recoil, as opposed to absorption of recoil by springs and/or oil flowing through various orifices.
