Abstract
Christopher Hamner’s Enduring Battle: American Soldiers in Three Wars, 1776–1945 offers a smoothly written, closely argued, but perhaps deceptively compelling explanation why Americans confronted with the horrors of the battlefield generally choose fighting over flight. Looking at the experiences of American soldiers in the War of American Independence, the Civil War, and the Second World War, Hamner argues that changes in fighting methods required new mechanisms to allow soldiers to endure battle.
After an opening chapter generally comparing the three wars, Hamner offers in chapter 2 the unsurprising conclusion that fear and the instinct for self-preservation were common to all three. What changed over time were the subjects of the next four chapters – training, leadership, weapons, and comradeship.
Training, Hamner argues, evolved significantly. As the close formations of the Revolution and the Civil War were replaced by the ‘empty battlefield’ of the Second World War, top-down discipline sustained by physical and social coercion was obsolete, and infantry combat came to involve a considerable degree of individual agency. While drill survived and training pamphlets advertised the importance of rote learning (p. 104), new forms of training ‘encouraged soldiers to think about the battlefield as an environment that was controllable to some degree; to see combat as a system of choices and to detect patterns between the choices they made and their outcomes in battle’ (p. 98).
Such soldiers, argues chapter 4, obeyed leaders because of their competence rather than, as in linear war, their exemplary courage, but Hamner also describes leadership as important because ‘people in stressful situations often want to be told want to do’ (p. 124) without seeing how this plausible conclusion conflicts with personal agency. Indeed, the officers’ role in rallying retreating troops suggests that soldiers tended to exercise agency counterproductively. Also requiring a more nuanced discussion is the death rate among officers from the twentieth-century soldier’s need to be led rather than driven (p. 133), which sounds far closer to the Civil War pattern than Hamner allows.
‘Weaponry’ tends to repeat material from the initial chapter. The most interesting passage introduces the idea that changing relationships between men and armament might have led the soldier of the Second World War ‘to wonder whether his weapons and gear were there to serve him or whether he was there to serve the weapons’ (p. 166). The question reminds one that the Browning Automatic Rifle was the centrepiece of squad-level tactics and that American infantrymen fought less as individuals on an empty battlefield than as members of teams.
The final chapter, ‘Comradeship’, reviews some intelligent criticisms of the ever-popular ‘Band of Brothers’ explanation of combat motivation. As Hamner points out, a strong sense of group cohesion may disincline soldiers to actions likely to result in the deaths of comrades, and unit cohesion can conflict with individual agency: ‘In combat, comrades provided critical military support, but that dependence upon others lessened the degree of direct control the individual soldier perceived over his own battle outcome’ (p. 199).
Hamner’s conclusion reiterates the theme that, as the nature of combat evolved over time, the American army increasingly encouraged soldiers to believe their individual choices ‘could help increase the odds of survival’ (p. 204). Weakening any conclusions about the decline of coercion, however, is the general reticence of Hamner’s sources on the subject of punishment. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. While the brutality of the physical suasion employed in military training has diminished, training continues today to be based in large part on what Hamner euphemistically calls ‘coercive techniques’ (p. 31).
John Keegan’s The Face of Battle set the standard for the detailed study of battle. The Face of Battle is also a warning of the dangers of reconstructing widely dispersed epochs on a basis of limited evidence. Enduring Battle falls between expert case study and synthetic argument. While Hamner supports his analyses of the three American wars with well-chosen anecdotal evidence and references to the appropriate secondary literature, the constraints of dissertation research and the limitations of a 220-page book preclude a satisfactory depth of analysis.
For example, Hamner’s claim for the exceptional frightfulness of the wounds inflicted by Civil War Minié balls (pp. 37, 39) conflates issues of calibre, muzzle velocity, and spin so as to obscure the destructive impact of the Revolutionary War musket with its even larger ball and lower velocity. Hamner’s assumption about ‘rampant’ dehydration in Civil War armies is plausible, but the cited anecdotes are evidence only for thirst (pp. 74–5). His uncritical acceptance of an American memoirist’s assessment of German strength at the battle of the Bulge leads him to the misleading claim that ‘thirty-eight German divisions assaulted a group of American infantrymen’ (p. 79).
There is little room in Hamner’s analysis for cultural factors such as notions of manhood. He tends towards a narrow, desexualized equation of masculinity with stoicism (p. 127). The idea that ‘a sense of masculine honor would replace the sergeant’s ever-present eye’ appears only at the book’s end, and in a context implying that images of manhood had a more important role in the Second World War than earlier. Hamner unconsciously underscores the chaste tone of his argument when he uses Daniel Morgan’s exhortation before the battle of Cowpens – ‘And then when you return to your homes, how the old folks will bless you, and the girls will kiss you’ – to illustrate the importance of positive thinking (‘when you return’) rather than the nature of warrior’s rewards.
Troublesome details notwithstanding, Enduring Battle is a pleasure to read. Most of the difficulties arise from Hamner’s attempt to compress what ought to be three monographs into a comprehensive, but situational, theory of American behaviour in combat.
Why men fight obsesses many historians, especially those of us who have never been in the position to answer the question for ourselves. Hamner’s opening comment on the challenges faced by the uninitiated in dissecting the experience of battle is thoughtful and unapologetic. Like so much in this book, it points to larger questions than it answers. This particular question is why the copious ‘why they fought’ literature is dominated by what David Grossman tellingly dubbed ‘virgins writing about sex’. Why are the veterans unable to explain the experience of war? As long as they cannot, will we ever understand it?