Infantry Survivability

[Narwan]

That's backwards. All statistics show that the being an infantry grunt up front was the most dangerous job there was in WW2.
...
Safe job? Not really.

All statistics? Not the one's I've seen sofar. Sure there are examples with high rates of casualties among regular riflemen in specific actions or campaigns. But the chances off becoming a casualty where far higher when you were a tanker, an airmen, a submariner, etc. Crew served weapons tended to attract a lot of attention and firepower. A simple rifleman? Not nearly as much.
I never said it was a safe job so I'm assuming that remark was aimed at someone else. When its war few jobs in the army are safe. But when it came to combat assignments (and I did make the distinction between combat and non-combat assignments in my original post too), rifleman was the way to go if you wanted to maximise your chances of getting back out in one piece.

About HE effectiveness. Most casualties in WWII were from HE fire in one way of the other, in contrast to WWI where 80% was gunshot wounds.

Exactly, HE effectiveness, not HE efficiency. The amount of arty rounds spend to achieve that was gigantic. What you forget is that much of those losses are from 'quiet' periods at the front when there is relatively little direct fighting (rifle and mg fire) and a fair bit of artillery going back and forth. Most of the time most of the sectors were relatively 'quiet' like that. Combined with the advances in technology and the tendency to keep more distance from the enemy at the frontline than in ww1 it's no wonder that arty was the big killer. But it took a lot of time and a lot of rounds.
The game doesn't deal with those days or weeks of prep fire and the arty sniping in the downtime between attacks. It deals with those times and places when the front isn't 'quiet' but 'real' fighting takes place. The hours when much of those 20% gunshots wounds happened.

Narwan