Out of the 16 million who served how many Americans actually saw combat during World War 2?

Answer 1

I don't know that an answer is possible to this question.

The US had by FAR the biggest "logistical tail" of any major WWII combatant nation. I've read that sixteen men were required for every one who was actually on the front lines fighting.

Two million of the sixteen million served in the US 8th Air Force, engaged in the strategic bombing of Europe. Only a tiny fraction of that 2 million was combat crews, of course. The rest slept every night with a stomach full of warm food between clean sheets, when they got back from the local pub. But they still might have had the horrible luck to get killed by a freak late war bombing raid, or a buzz bomb. Is that combat? Only 27,000 men of the 8th AF were killed in the war.

If you're one of thousands of sailors in a Task Force, on dozens of ships, and a Japanese submarine torpedoes one of them, have you seen combat?

For the war the US put into the field six Marine Divisions and 91 Army divisions. The Marine divisions were all infantry. The Army had sixteen armored divisions, five airborne divisions, one mountain division, two cavalry divisions, and the rest were infantry divisions. This total proved to be just barely enough to fight a world war, and was so few that it meant that once committed to action, a division got no respite from the line.

The army also had hundreds of independent battalions of various types, to supplement the divisions as needed - artillery of differing calibers, tank, tank destroyer, signals, engineers and so on. Some of these saw considerable action and suffered heavy losses.

Even among infantry divisions there was disparity. The 3rd Infantry Division went ashore in North Africa, then fought in Sicily, in southern Italy, spent four months at Anzio then helped capture Rome, then made the southern France landings and fought for nine more months continuously until the war was over. That division had over 6600 men killed (compare that to the total of the 8th AF, which was over one hundred times more numerous) and over 27,000 wounded (many multiple times), out of a strength of less than 15,000. But other infantry divisions only arrived in Europe six or seven months after D-Day and saw a few weeks of very light action.

Even in an infantry division, with just under 15,000 men as its authorized strength, there were only a portion who actually did what most people think of as fighting. These were the foot soldiers of the rifle companies, who had to advance, weapon in hand, hunting for the enemy.

A rifle company, (or a line company or letter company) had 225 men at the start of the war, and 187 by late war organization. These were in four platoons. One platoon was a "weapons platoon". It was MUCH, MUCH safer to be in the weapons platoon than in the other three rifle platoons.

And even in a rifle platoon, there were four squads, but one was the weapons squad, and again, this was much safer than being in the other three rifle squads.

The basic US foot soldier formation was the rifle squad of twelve men. A rifle platoon, at full strength, had thirty-six riflemen. There were three rifle platoons to an infantry company, so one hundred and eight riflemen, out of one hundred eighty-seven on the Table of Organization. An infantry battalion had four companies, three rifle companies and a weapons company. So an infantry battalion, with 850 men, and only 324 riflemen. A regiment had three battalions. So an infantry regiment, with 3200 men, had only 972 actual foot soldiers. An infantry division, with close to 15,000 men, had three regiments, but only 2916 were actual infantry riflemen.

So the army had around 65 infantry divisions among its more than eight million troops, but less than 210,000 of them were actual foot soldiers at any one time, to handle an entire world war.

And by FAR, FAR, by a HUGE margin, the riflemen were the people who got killed, and who shot the enemy. In a formation such as the 3rd Infantry division, which saw so much action (and there were several divisions with comparable records), the average rifleman in the line companies had to be replaced around ten times during the war. There were VERY, VERY few, if any, who started the war in this job who were still there at the finish in divisions which saw any amount of action at all. Within two weeks after going into action the rifle companies of a division would be completely depleted.

Answer 2

The population of the USA in 1940 was 132,500,000 million people, in round numbers. There were 15 million men and women in uniform during WWII. That is over 11% of the population.

Answer 3

The number of Americans who served in the military during World War II was 16 million. The number who actually saw serious combat has been estimated to be 999,000 or fewer.

Answer 4

It was about 8% of the US population that served in the military during World War 2 and as a side note, over 60 million people were killed which is about 2.5% of the world population.

Answer 5

I believe it was 1 out of 10

Answer 6

I believe it was 1 out of 10

Answer 7

30 percent