[Milsurplus] Foxhole Radio - conclusion

[Hue Miller]

The opinion was also expressed that soldiers have often have time on their
hands, where boredom is an issue: thus, they would relish some activity
like the opportunity to build 'foxhole radios'. The original 'Foxhole Radio'
was per account, built by an infantry lieutenant. Perhaps he was in some
kind of support role. My reading of such infantryman accounts as "Foot
Soldier" by Roscoe Blunt, combat infantryman, taught me that very few
days of idleness weighed on them. Rather, there was continual movement,
and it was movement regardless of weather. It's hard to imagine people
subjected to near constant terrors, exposure to weather, miserable food,
being interested in listening to crystal radios. As for the claim that most
combat soldiers in the U.S. Army never or rarely ever fired their weapons,
this claim reminded me of something I'd read in the last few years about
this claim by historian S. L. A. Marshall.  You can research for yourself 
this
claim, but in short, "the methodology of his research has been called into
question. "  One short quotation from something I  looked at in this
regard:
"But without further corroboration, the source of Marshall’s conten-
tions about shockingly low fire ratios at least in some US Army divisions in
World War II appears to have been based at best on chance rather than 
scientific
sampling, and at worst on sheer speculation.
It seems most probable that Marshall, writing as a journalist rather than
as a historian, exaggerated the problem and arbitrarily decided on the 
one-quarter
figure because he believed that he needed a dramatic statistic to give added
weight to his argument. (16) "

via: Hue Miller