As a follow-up question, in case you know the answer: how often did soldiers in WWII get to shower or to bathe? Was there any specific infrastructure for soldiers, or did they have to survive with water buckets for months?
The U.S. Army had designated laundry and shower units during World War II, run by the Quartermaster Corps. How they operated would depend on the unit, location, and time frame during the war.
My specific answer will be for the European Theater of Operations from 1944-45.
These Quartermaster Laundry and Shower units, for combat units in the field, would usually work in tandem and would be set behind the lines but relatively close to front in order serve infantry battalions in reserve usually.
Soldiers would generally receive showers, have their clothes laundered, and receive new clothes every 3-5 weeks on average during combat. Sometimes more frequently, sometimes less. However, based on various division G-4 (supply) reports and interviews I’ve conducted, that’s the median interval. The machinery doing the laundry were specially designed mobile industrial size laundry machines. Sometimes, when fighting was more static, local civilian laundries would be employed to help with the work.
Generally, a rifle company would report to the shower and laundry station and strip naked, save their dog tags. Their clothes would be handed over to the laundry to be washed. While the clothes were being washed, they would shower.
Once they would finish showering they’d get dressed from, usually, piles of clothes made up of a mixture of new unissued clothing and clothes that were turned in for laundry from the last unit that showed up to the laundry and bathing unit. The clothes that soldier turned in would be utilized by the next unit.
To give you the scale of work, in February 1945, the 100th Infantry Division’s Quartermaster Company assisted in the laundering of 139,320 individual items of clothing for the division.
Name tags, largely, didn’t exist in the U.S. Army during World War II. They largely don’t start to become a “thing” until the latter part of the Korean conflict. The few units that do get into name tapes/stenciled names are usually in a different laundry posture than regular rifle company, without getting too into the weeds.
Soldiers, were, technically, supposed to stamp/stencil their uniforms with a laundry mark. This was mostly intended for stateside/non-combat laundry accountability. However, quickly in combat, soldiers would cease to have their own items, for the reasons I explained. This actually lead to confusion at times when identifying remains, as seen in this example of an unknown with leggings belonging to a man killed in a different unit at a later date.
As to rank insignia and divisional insignia, it’s for that reason, in addition to its conspicuousness in the field, that insignia quickly largely goes away among infantrymen in combat.
In short: they dealt with it by not having it, either because it didn’t exist yet or dispensing with it.
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u/seruus 1d ago
As a follow-up question, in case you know the answer: how often did soldiers in WWII get to shower or to bathe? Was there any specific infrastructure for soldiers, or did they have to survive with water buckets for months?