The regiment had been organized in 1861, was sent to China after the Boxer Rebellion in 1900, served in the Philippines, and had the specific distinction of having been the last American regular Army regiment to serve in China — it was stationed in Tientsin (now Tianjin) until 1938, when it was withdrawn as Japanese expansion made the position untenable. The regiment’s motto, “Can Do,” had its origins in the Chinese service.
By the time Murphy joined it in 1943, the 15th Infantry had been in the European and Mediterranean theaters since the Operation Torch landings in North Africa in November 1942. It had fought through the Tunisia campaign, the Sicily campaign, and was in the process of fighting up the Italian peninsula. Its casualties by the time Murphy joined it had already been substantial.
Company B, specifically, was a standard rifle company of the period: commanded by a captain, with a table of organization of approximately 190 officers and men, organized into three rifle platoons and a weapons platoon. The specific Company B that Murphy arrived in was substantially smaller than the table of organization would suggest, because companies in sustained combat are rarely at full strength. The replacements who came in to fill casualties were absorbed into the company’s culture and its institutional knowledge as quickly as possible, with the result that a company’s experienced core — the men who had been there through the previous campaigns — bore a disproportionate responsibility for training replacements on the job, under fire.
Murphy’s progression from private to corporal to sergeant to staff sergeant to platoon sergeant within two years — with the battlefield commission to second lieutenant in October 1944 — was the trajectory of a soldier who consistently demonstrated the qualities that the Army promotes in wartime: reliability under fire, the ability to lead other soldiers, the specific competence in infantry tactics and weapons that keeps a unit functional in combat.