largest tank battle in ww2 ww2 date battle of the bulge

The army selected from this pool 300,000 officer candidates, who received their commissions after attending newly created officer candidate schools. But most of the nearly six million soldiers who served in the ground forces of the AUS arrived via the Selective Service Act, enacted on September 16, 1940, as the first peacetime draft in American history.

The Officer Reserve Corps, the product of ROTC training at the nation’s land grant colleges, added 180,000 officers to the rolls, while the War Department commissioned another 100,000 officers (mostly specialists) directly from civilian life. Roosevelt called the National Guard to federal service that fall, more than doubling the size of the army by adding 300,000 soldiers (including 19,000 officers) to active-duty rolls. A small percentage of American GIs began their service as members of the small Regular Army (189,000 soldiers, including 15,000 officers, at the beginning of World War II), which played an outsized role in providing cadres to form new units once wartime mobilization began after the fall of France in the summer of 1940. The Army of the United States (AUS) was composed of the Regular Army, the National Guard, and the Organized Reserve, along with newly created “draftee” divisions.

Although plenty of American GIs marched to war between 19, the percentage of the force that rode in wheeled or tracked vehicles was greater than that of any other army in history to that point. Logistics and transportation were strong suits of the American armed forces no other ground force in World War II was as mobile or as well supplied. Beyond these factors, the American way of war featured the ability to project power across vast distances. These enduring realities were overlain with the impact of new technologies largely introduced before and during World War I and upgraded during the Interwar period, such as armored vehicles, mobile breech loading artillery, and an array of automatic weapons that gave enormous firepower to soldiers. Ground combat in World War II featured physical and psychological elements common to war since the ancient world, such as physical exertion, stress, confusion, discomfort, fatigue, hunger, boredom, homesickness, loneliness, group bonding, courage, and fear.

Largest tank battle in ww2 ww2 date battle of the bulge