I was reading this article on MOUT in the March-April Infantry magazine and thought about you guys from WWII. It gives a pretty lengthy synopsis of the fight for Aachen and it made me wonder if any of you had the misfortune of slogging through a large city. My understanding of Salerno and Anzio was that the towns were taken relatively quickly but the attempted break-outs were where there was tremendous difficulty.
MOUT is something that the military has spent a lot of time and money studying. The Marine Pub is the MCWP 3-35.3 (Marine Corps Warfighting Publication) and the Army's is the FM 90-10. The Army pub is from 1993 and the Marine's is only from five years later in 1998. No doubt new chapters are being written as we speak by the soldiers and Marines in Iraq and Afghanistan but unfortunately that pub probably won't be released for years later. As the article says toward the bottom, however, most of the MOUT knowledge from today came from WWII, Korea, and Viet Nam. Odd how slowly the military takes to learn lessons. Just as soldiers had to make up doctrine as they went in Aachen, the Marines were doing the same decades later in Hue. Another similarity is a dearth of information on the city they were attacking. Marines at Hue used gas station maps of the city! Today, at least, we have satellite images and UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) feeds.
Just wondering what your experiences had been.
Medals of Honor