Throughout history, battlefields have placed a soldier's instinct for self-preservation in direct opposition to the army's insistence that he do his duty and put himself in harm's way. Enduring Battle looks beyond advances in weaponry to examine changes in warfare at the very personal level. Drawing on the combat experiences of American soldiers in three widely separated wars—the Revolution, the Civil War, and World War II—Christopher Hamner explores why soldiers fight in the face of terrifying lethal threats and how they manage to suppress their fears, stifle their instincts, and marshal the will to kill other humans.

Hamner contrasts the experience of infantry combat on the ground in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when soldiers marched shoulder-to-shoulder in linear formations, with the experiences of dispersed infantrymen of the mid-twentieth century. Earlier battlefields prized soldiers who could behave as stoic automatons; the modern dispersed battlefield required soldiers who could act autonomously. As the range and power of weapons removed enemies from view, combat became increasingly depersonalized, and soldiers became more isolated from their comrades and even imagined that the enemy was targeting them personally. What's more, battles lengthened so that exchanges of fire that lasted an hour during the Revolutionary War became round-the-clock by World War II.

The book's coverage of training and leadership explores the ways in which military systems have attempted to deal with the problem of soldiers' fear in battle and contrasts leadership in the linear and dispersed tactical systems. Chapters on weapons and comradeship then discuss soldiers' experiences in battle and the relationships that informed and shaped those experiences.

Hamner highlights the ways in which the "band of brothers" phenomenon functioned differently in the three wars and shows that training, conditioning, leadership, and other factors affect behavior much more than political ideology. He also shows how techniques to motivate soldiers evolved, from the linear system's penalties for not fighting to modern efforts to convince soldiers that participation in combat would actually maximize their own chances for survival.

Examining why soldiers continue to fight when their strong instinct is to flee, Enduring Battle challenges long-standing notions that high ideals and small unit bonds provide sufficient explanation for their behavior. Offering an innovative way to analyze the factors that enable soldiers to face the prospect of death or debilitating wounds, it expands our understanding of the evolving nature of warfare and its warriors.

ENDURING BATTLE

American Soldiers in Three Wars, 1776–1945By Christopher H. Hamner

UNIVERSITY PRESS OF KANSAS

Copyright © 2011 University Press of Kansas
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7006-1775-3

Introduction

Writing about his experiences in combat, Civil War veteran David Thompson gave a graphic description of the soldier's essential dilemma under fire. "The truth is," he wrote, "when bullets are whacking against tree trunks and solid shot are cracking skulls like egg shells, the consuming passion in the heart of the average man is to get out of the way." The gruesome violence of the battlefield placed the soldier's natural instincts for self-preservation in direct opposition to the army's equally real insistence that he do his duty. "Between the physical fear of going forward and the moral fear of turning back," Thompson concluded, "there is a predicament of exceptional awkwardness, from which a hidden hole in the ground would be a wonderfully welcome outlet."

That hidden hole, the magical exit from combat, never materialized for most soldiers. Yet despite powerful and often overwhelming reservations, they went forward into the maelstrom of battle. This book is about David Thompson and countless soldiers like him: American infantrymen who fought in the War of Independence, the Civil War, and the Second World War, exposing themselves to enemy fire and performing perilous and sometimes deadly duties amid the terror and trauma of the battlefield. The willingness to face the dangers of battle constitutes one of the most enduring puzzles of human behavior, in part because participation in combat demands behavior that violates so many powerful natural instincts for self-preservation. Army Air Forces psychiatrists Roy Grinker and John Spiegel summarized the problem aptly more than half a century ago in their work on World War II aircrews, Men under Stress: "What," they asked, "can possess a rational man to make him act so irrationally?"

Enduring Battle takes this mystery as a starting point. The following chapters search for changes and continuities in the way that soldiers were motivated to face battle from within and without by comparing the experiences of ground soldiers in three different wars. The first chapter explores some of the ways that technology reshaped the experience of infantry combat, beginning with the War of Independence and extending to the Civil War and Second World War, as warfare became progressively more industrialized and technically sophisticated. Subsequent chapters connect those changes to specific ways that soldiers' perceptions of battle and their reactions to it evolved over time.

The focus in this work is mainly on the individual soldier's experience of combat. This approach is something of a departure: to date, the bulk of the discourse on combat motivation has focused on battle primarily as a group phenomenon. The following pages return to a few central questions again and again: What makes soldiers fight? How do they manage to suppress their fears, stifle their instincts for self-preservation, and marshal the will to kill enemy soldiers amid the terror and confusion of the battlefield?

Such questions have bedeviled armies for centuries. Over time, a number of hypotheses have emerged to explain them. Most brutally straightforward is the contention that vast numbers of soldiers fought because they were forced to do so. Military systems furnished direct and uncompromising punishments that persuaded combatants to suppress their fears, at least temporarily, and go forward into enemy fire. Coercion drove soldiers in most eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European armies. Prussian general Frederick the Great believed that an effective infantryman must go into battle "more afraid of his officers than of the dangers to which he is exposed." The power of coercion as a motivator is easy to comprehend: officers and noncommissioned officers replaced the potential danger of enemy bullets with the more direct certainty of friendly ones. (An American Marine in the First World War overheard a terse description of this coercive mechanism: "Don't you turn yellow and try to run," his sergeant shouted at a comrade. "If you do and the Germans don't kill you, I will.") But coercion alone could not always suffice to compel soldiers to fight. In some cases, the practical realities of the battlefield made it difficult to apply punishments effectively and reliably; in other cases, social or cultural expectations prevented armies from motivating soldiers expressly with the lash. When a Northern nurse asked Abraham Lincoln why he did not order more executions in the Union armies given the prevalence of desertion in the ranks, he replied, "Because you cannot order men shot by dozens and twenties. People won't stand it, and they ought not stand it."

Recognition that coercion alone could not furnish a universal explanation for soldiers' willingness to fight gave rise to another hypothesis to explain behaviors observed even in the absence of direct and explicit threats. That explanation posited a class of pressures and inducements that were based not on the promise of physical punishment but instead on the desire for acceptance from some valued social group. Concern for reputation, friendship, mutual interdependence, and trust among members of a unit, according to this argument, could eclipse soldiers' own instincts for survival, if only for a time. Following the Second World War, a trio of influential studies distilled those factors into a single concept: primary group cohesion. Released between 1947 and 1949, S. L. A. Marshall's Men against Fire, Edmund Shils and Morris Janowitz's "Cohesion and Disintegration in the Wehrmacht in World War II," and Samuel Stouffer's The American Soldier all credited primary group cohesion with the ability to help soldiers endure the physical and mental stress that worked suddenly or over time to break them down and render them incapable of performing their duties. In infantry combat, the primary group usually constituted some small unit whose members knew each other intimately and had regular, face-to-face contact. The combination of affection, obligation, and concern for standing within the group coalesced to create loyalties that overshadowed the individual's concern for his own well-being, at least temporarily. Marshall defined the relationship plainly: "I hold it to be one of the simplest truths of war," he wrote, "that the thing which enables the infantry soldier to keep going ... is the presence or presumed presence of a comrade."

In the decades following the Second World War, primary group cohesion became the orthodox theory of combat motivation, employed by historians to explain soldiers' often inscrutable behaviors in a variety of eras and conflicts. The appeal of the group cohesion thesis is twofold: it is both consistent with the firsthand observations of countless generations of soldiers and intuitively satisfying. Scholars continue to assign the group cohesion thesis considerable explanatory power. The notion that soldiers fight primarily for one another has appeared repeatedly in the literature on battlefield experience and combat motivation to explain behavior in a wide variety of conflicts, eras, and cultures. Sociologist Nora Kinzer Stewart built her analysis of motivation in the 1982 Falklands Islands War, Mates and Muchachos, upon the idea. Civil War historian James McPherson stressed the importance of these bonds in his work on combat motivation among Union and Confederate soldiers, titling the book For Cause and...