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Your recollection doesn't actually count as evidence.
It was in Antony Beevor's book on D-Day, which I don't see very many reasons to consider fabricated. Don't have my copy at hand to give you a page though.
But like I said it's been reproduced independently many times. du Picq's Études sur le Combat had similar numbers for instance.
There's something about it that doesn't pass the smell test. Were pre-firearm armies gently poking each other with spears to make sure no one gets hurt? Combat was way more visceral in those times, so I'd imagine people would be even more inclined to avoid harm. Taking it further, when these armies were pillaging conquered cities, were they forced to do it, or were they having the time of their life?
Not pre-firearm, and I'll try to dig up a primary source later, but I've read in several books and heard from numerous Civil War Reenactor lectures when I was a kid, that American Civil war soldiers often refused to use Bayonets, preferring to club each other with the butt ends of their rifles, so as to avoid conscious guilt for having killed another human. A reenactor would frequently quote a letter to us that went something like "I hit them with the butt of the gun, so if I have to answer to the Lord I can say I just knocked him out."
We do have evidence of Pre-Modern armies engaging in warfare that relied on non-violent shows of skill and ability. And one must keep in mind that before the gunpowder era armies were rarely, if ever, made up of peasantry. They were typically an upper or upper-middle class endeavor. Even Rome and Sparta, famed for their citizen armies, were societies in which citizens were nearer the top of the pyramid than they were to the slaves at the bottom.
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I've seen many ways people try to reconciliate this with the brutality of antic and medieval combat. Some claim it wasn't actually that brutal and war was mostly about boasting harder than the enemy before industry.
I don't buy it. I think it's better explained by the sociological element, much like the increased ratio for crew served weapons. It's much harder to not participate in melee or the sort of unit tactics of that time than it is not firing at the enemy in modern times.
Of course it's hard to compare when we only have hard numbers from after records were properly introduced. But for all of the controversy surrounding SLAM's particular ratio of fire claim it's hard to argue there is nothing to the idea when so many independent sources replicate it.
Falsifying it would required some cross-cultural methodological error that I just don't see how to introduce.
Well, I'm not necessarily questioning the numbers, just their interpretation. You can observe that the fire ratio in battle doesn't match the fire ratio in training, but to jump from there to "they must be subconsciously avoiding killing their opponents, even though they themselves in mortal danger" seems like a stretch. My first guess would be "it's one thing to hit a target when you know you're safe, it's another when someone is actually firing at you".
I definitely agree that some of it probably has to do with the chaotic nature of modern combat. Certainly tracks with other surprising figures like the hit probability studies that gave rise to SPIW.
But how come they did manage to raise the ratio with those alterations to training? What would be the confounding factor? Technology? Some of it might be cooking numbers but other armies (like the Canadians) got similar results by implementing similar training techniques.
Psychology is unfortunately a very methodologically challenged discipline, but for all of my personal disdain for some of the extrapolations of Grossman groupies, there has to be something here.
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