I do veteran's advocacy work and a bit of the difficulty I have with the public is trying to figure out where their image of deployment comes from - but I think that's a broader question to go into later. The question I'm grappling with right now is about popular perceptions of the Combat Arms.
Why does the public imagine combat to consist of only infantry and armour?
I served 6 years in the artillery branch including time overseas. I now talk about that time with high school students, and often field questions from them.
What I have noticed is that in pop culture and general history books, which I'm guessing mostly informs their questions, the focus on military operations is entirely on the Infantry and Armour, to the exclusion of Combat Engineers and Artillery.
Most good military history books cover how crew-served weapon systems, both in direct and indirect fire account for most (I was told 90% in Artillery School, but that may be biased) casualties. Similarly, operational studies emphasize how engineers facilitate movement of friendly forces and impede those of the enemy. I don't expect high school students to have an academic interest in military history, but I thought that these ideas would diffuse though the culture they consume. Why is there a disconnect between Field Artillery and Firepower and TV, movies and video games?
I'd say there's an iron triangle at work here: print, Hollywood, and video games. Each one connects to the others.
For print, I think wartime reportage played a big part in how we remember the war. Tankers and infantrymen were compelling subjects to write about. They fought a personal war with acts if heroism large and small. They won the vast majority of medals. They were the vast majority of combat soldiers. If a war correspondent was going to write about an American fighting man, odds are he was going to write about a rifle-toting "dough." Ernie Pyle, the beloved columnist, wrote expensively about infantrymen. One of his most enduring pieces, "The Death of Captain Waskow," was about an infantry company commander killed in Italy. G.I. cartoonist Bill Mauldin made his comic strip about Willie and Joe, the scruffy-faced infantrymen. It wasn't that gunners and engineers didn't get written about, but from the very beginning tankers and dogfaces got more inches and ink.
The enduring photographs of the war, the ones that made it into yesterday's newspapers and today's history books are all infantry- and armor- focused. Robert Capa's "Magnificent Eleven" photos show 1st Infantry Division riflemen and DD tanks fighting for their lives on Omaha Beach. Same with Robert Sargent's "Taxi to Hell and Back" D-Day photos. Joe Rosenthal's iconic flag-raising photo on Iwo Jima is full of Marine infantry soldiers. I'm hard-pressed to think of a similarly-iconic image of gunners or combat engineers.
For books, think about the defining memoirs and combat-level accounts of WWII. Many of the books are about infantrymen or tankers. In the Pacific, you have Eugene Sledge's "With the Old Breed..." or Robert Leckie's "Helmet for my Pillow." In Europe you have Otto Carius' "Tigers in the Mud," about a Tiger tank commander. Stephen Ambrose's two better-known books, "Band of Brothers" and "Pegasus Bridge," are both about airborne units.
This phenomenon goes back even earlier to WWI Ernst Junger writes about his experiences as a stormtrooper in "Storm of Steel." Erich Maria Remarque "All Quiet on the Western Front" is about German infantry in the trenches. Robert Graves' bestselling "Goodbye to All That" is about his time as an infantryman. You evn see this trend going back to the Civil War. Stephen Crane's "The Red Band of Courage" is about an infantryman and the very personal war infantrymen fight.
Now, the bulk of combat soldiers in every war have been infantrymen, so the bulk of wartime combat accounts will be from them. But I think there's something about an infantry soldier's experience that is uniquely engaging to people. The really gripping accounts of fighting, of coming face to face with the enemy and escaping death, of the full horrors of war are infantry stories. Artillerymen fight a much more impersonal war. From late 1914 onwards, it's become increasingly rare for gunners to see their targets, much the effects of their barrage.
Artillerymen and engineeres faced enormous danger, but to some extent, they fought more impersonal war that doesn't carry over as well to the screen and the page. Consequently, their stories didn't get written down. And the ones that did simply didn't grip public imagination.
So when it came time for movies to be made, the infantry and armor stories came to the fore. HBO adapted Leckie and Sledge's memoirs into its "The Pacific" miniseries. "Saving Private Ryan" brought the black and white photos of Omaha Beach to life.
And those movies and TV shows in turn inspired a raft of WWII games. Game designers realized gamers would rather be a Tommy Gun-wielding GI in Call of Duty or drive a Tiger I in War Thunder than pick their way through a minefield as a combat engineer or fill fire mission after fire mission as an artillerymen 15 miles away from the action.
http://mediaschool.indiana.edu/erniepyle/1944/01/10/the-death-of-captain-waskow/ http://www.awon.org/willie/willie2.html https://www.google.co.kr/amp/s/www.vanityfair.com/culture/photos/2014/06/photographer-robert-capa-d-day/amp