Military

General Omar Bradley, the Commanding General of the 12th Army Group, tells us in his 1951 autobiography, "When the rains came in November with a blast of wintry cold, our troops were ill-prepared for winter time campaigning. During our race to the Rhine, I had deliberately by-passed shipments of winter clothing in favor of ammunition and gasoline. We now found ourselves caught short, particularly in bad-weather foot wear. We had gambled and were now paying for the bad guess." Bradley pleaded with Eisenhower for more and more infantry replacements. Soldiers were wrapping their boots and feet in blanket shoes to try to avoid cold injury. The hospitals were filled with cases of frostbite and trench foot. The real cost was added up after the war. It was found that 90 percent of the cold weather casualties in the combat forces were in the infantry. They had an average hospital stay of 87 days; half of the cases went back [to] the United States and only 2 percent ever went back into combat. In the war altogether we had lost 84,000 soldiers to cold weather injuries. 2