catherine merridale_introduction

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Introduction Author(s): Catherine Merridale Source: Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 41, No. 2 (Apr., 2006), pp. 203-209Published by: Sage Publications, Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30036382Accessed: 13-10-2015 02:23 UTC

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Journal of Contemporary History Copyright @ 2006 SAGE Publications, London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi, Vol 41(2), 203-209. ISSN 0022-0094. DOI: 10.1 177/0022009406062053

Catherine Merridale

Introduction

If the number of yards of shelf space that bookshops devote to military, as

opposed to social or economic, history is an indicator of public interest, combat soldiers are surely fascinating. They have also become the subject of a wide

range of types of study, commanding the attention of psychiatrists, socio-

logists, anthropologists, political scientists and cultural specialists as well as that of historians. War as a theme recurs in university teaching programmes across the world, and it occupies academic seminars as well as the strategic debates of government think tanks. Largely as a result of the explosion of research and masters' courses that deal with memory, war studies themselves seem set to be promoted to serious intellectual respectability from what John Keegan once described as 'the academic equivalent of the sports pages'.' Despite the weight of interest at all levels, however, and even despite the

presence of large numbers of battlefield veterans in contemporary societies, combat itself remains somewhat mysterious.2

Memory, as opposed to action, has provided an important focus for much new research because it is inclusive, allowing even the least military of aca- demics and their students to involve themselves in highly-charged debate. It is

easier, too, to think about memorials, or even about trauma and forgetfulness, than it is to reconstruct the surreal field of battle. As many of the contributors to this special edition of the Journal of Contemporary History have shown, however, memory has many shortcomings when the time comes to revisit combat itself. Few true participants (and not many observers) can reassemble a coherent account of events. Time moves differently in the extreme world of fighting, space is organized in new, specific ways. The moments of extremest danger, if not unrecoverable, are certainly remote from the kind of rational and measured exposition that most academic prose requires. 'War', as Samuel

Hynes observes, 'is not a place we could travel to.'3 It was combat itself, as opposed to its recollection and commemoration, that

1 The rueful remark was part of the introduction to John Keegan, The Face of Battle (London 1977). 2 There are so many recent accounts of warfare that it would be invidious to single out specific titles. However, the problem of combat - of soldiers' real lives - is a particular focus of John Keegan's book, cited above, and also of John Ellis, The Sharp End. The Fighting Man in World War II (London 1980). Our own conference was much informed by the papers collected in Paul Addison and Angus Calder (eds), Time to Kill. The Soldier's Experience of War in the West, 1939-1945 (London 1997). For the difficulty of narrating combat, see Samuel Hynes, The Soldier's Tale. Bearing Witness to Modern War (London 1998). 3 Hynes, op. cit., 8.



204 Journal of Contemporary History Vol 41 No 2

brought this group of specialists together. Their task was to discuss what can be known about the reasons why soldiers fight. As the initial organizer of the meeting, my own starting point had been surprise at the answers Russian respondents gave to a question about Red Army performance in the second world war. When I asked former Soviet veterans to tell me what kind of per- son made the best soldier, their unanimous answer, given despite the fact that I had mentioned neither nationality nor politics, was 'Russians'.4 Intrigued, and puzzled by the ideas that culture might influence combat motivation, I decided to invite a group of specialists to reflect on the problem. After two meetings and much debate, we agreed to work on our findings with a view to publication.' By that stage, too, we had also drawn up a range of working questions.

The motivation of soldiers, as everyone agrees, is not a constant. The idealism (or the economic need) that impels a volunteer to sign up for military service is very different from the motives that drive him (or, less frequently, her) to fight and remain in the field after a first experience of combat. Our discussions explored all forms of motivation, and several articles in this volume, including those by Josie McLellan, Tarak Barkawi and myself, describe the ways in which soldiers' imaginations change with each exposure to real war. Beyond that universal issue, however, we also wanted to know what might make some types of soldier perform better than others, and what might lie behind the reputation that some national or ethnic groups enjoy for military prowess while others are bywords for cowardice or failure. Were these stereo- types, we asked, no more than myths, or might there be some aspects of culture or history that influenced the performance of troops? Do beliefs matter, perhaps, or do culture, history or even individual physiology and character?

These questions are not new to scholarship, but they have been neglected for decades. Part of the problem is that one answer, a highly suggestive and influ- ential one, has dominated the field since the 1950s. It was in the wake of the second world war that a generation of sociologists - themselves adherents of a pioneering discipline - set out to explore combat motivation, using tech- niques that included qualitative interviews, questionnaires and historical comparisons. The answer that they formulated was that men fought for their mates. Close friendships and relationships of mutual trust were more important to soldiers' morale, they concluded, than abstract notions such as patriotism, religious faith or regimental loyalty. This conclusion has not been discarded since those formative days. The classic texts, beginning with the pathbreaking work of Edward A. Shils and Morris Janowitz, remain central

4 This question was one of many that I put to Soviet veterans as part of an ESRC-sponsored project on the Red Army at war. For more information, see my Ivan's War. The Red Army, 1939-45 (London 2005). 5 The project was organized and sponsored by the Centre for History and Economics, King's College, Cambridge. I am grateful to the directors, their staff, and postgraduate students at the Centre for their support, encouragement and efficient help throughout.



Merridale: Introduction 205

for students of combat almost everywhere.6 The crucial element in soldiers'

motivation, state the classic texts, is loyalty towards the primary group, the men's circle of comrades, brothers in arms.

No one has yet proposed that this idea is simply wrong. Instead, arguments have developed in parallel, exploring other sources of motivation, including ideology or deconstructing the notion of the primary group to see exactly what kinds of relationship and what circumstances affect soldiers with different specialisms, from different ranks or in specific types of war.7 Some of the articles in this issue take this broad approach, for the question of group loyalty was a constant theme in our discussions of soldiers' motivation. Among the objections that contributors raised to the simple idea of the primary group was that it provides an incomplete answer. As Hew Strachan pointed out, for instance, tightly-knit groups of comrades are as capable of fomenting a mutiny or conspiring to desert as they are of fighting heroically together. Even where the model seems to work, so many other factors seem to bear on battlefield

performance that it seems perverse to focus on this single one, especially as it relates principally to American and British troops and mainly to the second world war. Might it not also matter whether soldiers think that they are fighting for a just cause? Does it matter if they consider that they have solid support from people at home? What about the probability of victory? Do soldiers not fight with greater energy when they expect to win, or even if their own side might, whatever their own personal fate? And what happens when so many soldiers are killed that small groups never remain together for more than a week or two?

Our discussions involved people with expertise in a range of geographical areas and types of culture. A number of academic disciplines were represented, too, including psychiatry and anthropology as well as history. We were fortu- nate to be joined by several former members of the armed forces, including the psychiatrist Professor Ian Palmer, and the historian and former member of the French Foreign Legion Alan Fitzgerald. For all our diverse interests and back- grounds, however, the articles that have reached this final stage are focused on one specific historical era, the century from 1870 to 1970, a period in which large nationally-based armies fought using technologies such as the machine gun, heavy artillery, tanks and bombers. The past two or three decades have seen changes in the face of war. It will remain for others to debate the human impact of those changes from the soldiers' point of view.

The first article in this broadly chronological collection suggests an alterna-

6 Edward Shils and Morris Janowitz, 'Cohesion and Disintegration in the Wehrmacht in World War II', Public Opinion Quarterly, 12, 2 (1948). See also S.L.A. Marshall, Men against Fire. The Problem of Battle Command in Future War (New York 1947); Samuel Stouffer et al. (eds), The American Soldier. Combat and its Aftermath (Princeton, NJ 1949). 7 Omer Bartov's pathbreaking work on the Wehrmacht, for example, privileged ideology at the

expense of close networks of friends. See The Eastern Front, 1941-45. German Troops and the Barbarisation of Warfare (London 1985) and Hitler's Army. Soldiers, Nazis and War in the Third Reich (New York and Oxford 1991).




tive to the primary group in looking for the key to soldiers' effectiveness. Hew Strachan's contribution, which is principally based on information from the British and German armies in the first world war, emphasizes the role of training. As he explains, training proved crucial for building morale in twentieth- century wars, creating both individual and collective confidence, and, through repetitive drill, reducing the shock and confusion associated with combat itself. Shared drill routines may also have reduced the importance of ethnic, cultural and other differences within armies, going some way to achieving the military dream of taking raw recruits and fashioning them into efficient, loyal and team-spirited members of the regiment. A well-trained group of soldiers has the capacity to withstand the shock of battle because frequent drill has made the necessary actions almost automatic. Such troops will also act in unison because effective group cohesion is something they have learned. Finally, the mutual trust - and faith in their officers - that soldiers have to build will have developed over months of effort. Training encompasses the primary group, for such soldiers have drilled, worked and lived together, but only through structured exercises can buddies be turned into professional soldiers, as opposed to doomed romantic heroes.

Men may fight most effectively, then, when they have been trained to act in certain ways, when their response to terrifying and confusing circumstances can be almost reflex in its speed and accuracy. But training can never be enough. Positive reasons for fighting - and for continuing to fight despite the risk and horror of combat - may also play a part. These are issues which academic researchers, few of whom have any experience of battle, let alone much taste for it, tend to overlook. But interviews with veterans suggest that war is not always all bad. The possibility arises that some soldiers enjoy their work, that killing can even be pleasurable. This idea has been explored in several recent works, including excellent studies by Niall Ferguson and Joanna Bourke.8 Most of our contributors discussed the question at some point, and two of the articles here address it directly.

Edgar Jones revisits what he calls the revisionist theory of combat motivation by applying his training as a psychiatrist to newly-released archival material. He remains sceptical about the notion that soldiers enjoy killing, and in particular about the idea that such violence is an inborn aspect of the human male. He also doubts that killing itself (as opposed to action) may help protect against shell shock. Most soldiers, he argues, are inspired by a desire to survive rather than an urge to kill. He does not dispute that war involves moments of euphoria, but argues that these come from the intense cama- raderie of the front, those close-knit groups, and also from the intoxicating sense of adventure that some young men did report. In discussion, his article drew lively debate about the contrast between the extreme passions of combat

8 Niall Ferguson, The Pity of War (London 1998); Joanna Bourke, An Intimate History of Killing (London 1999).




itself and the pleasure experienced vicariously by those who write about and

study it. Alexander Watson, whose work also focuses on the first world war, takes a

slightly different line. Trench warfare, he insists, was not awful all the time. More hours were spent in boredom, in waiting and talking, than were ever

passed under fire, let alone in real combat. The men survived their circumstances by making the trenches into a way of life. They had no choice, of

course, and few would have opted for the mud, the cold, the drill or danger. But given that these things were unavoidable, soldiers managed to customize their world in such a way as to make it habitable. Humour played a major part here, as did songs, tobacco and booze. These things helped to reduce the war to a size that men could contemplate, and certainly worked to defuse their fears. Individually, too, they had their ways of handling an apparently arbi-

trary and terrifying universe, and in particular of dealing with the unpre- dictability of death. Many cherished totems and amulets to protect themselves, and systems of portents and taboos, either private or shared, were widely believed to predict - and thus, in a way, control - the next move of the hand of fate. If men do not necessarily glory in killing, in other words, they do have

ways of coping with the misery of front-line service. Their memories, for that reason, are not all black.

Whatever strategies they use to help them cope, however, some soldiers will

always find repeated stress unbearable. Turning the question of motivation on its head, psychiatrist Simon Wessely reviews the problem of soldiers who cease to fight and the ways in which their plight has been treated or punished in the century since the first world war. As he explains, drawing on material from the British and American armies, attitudes to battle stress have varied over time, as have the ways in which the symptoms have been identified and even presented by sufferers in the field. There is no stable absolute answer, in other words, to the problem of men ceasing to be fit, in psychological terms, to fight. Even trauma, to a large extent, needs to be understood in terms of the prevailing culture. The treatment of psychiatric casualties, too, even more than their diagnosis, depends on politics and military culture. Such a conclusion must support the view that what Martin van Creveld called an army's fighting power depends in large measure on factors like culture, language and the choices made by the political, as well as the military, leadership.'

While the first articles in this issue are largely based on English-language sources, the second group deals with soldiers in other cultures and in less familiar settings. Taking up the question of ideology as a motivating factor, my own article and that of Josie McLellan both describe soldiers who fought, ostensibly at least, for communism. McLellan's subjects are the German volunteers who fought on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. Her account of their reasons for enlisting goes beyond the usual range, for these

9 Martin van Creveld, Fighting Power. German and US Army Performance, 1939-1945 (London 1983).




were people who already felt that they were ostracized at home, outlawed by a nazi regime that regarded communists as criminals. For them, the chance to advance a cause was almost as crucial as the opportunity of adventure in a foreign and exotic land. Only combat itself would change their view, dissolv- ing their idealism in a hail of fire and death. Thenceforth, as McLellan suggests, other motivations, including their desire not to appear cowardly or to betray their mates, took over where ideology, their illusions, broke off. Like formal religious practice, ideology is more important to the states that make war, and also to the officers they place in charge of their armies' morale, than it is to infantrymen as they face enemy fire. After the fact, as they begin to reconcile themselves to episodes of surreality and violence, some soldiers may well find that the stories their leaders tell them about the war help to create a justifying narrative, but at the time abstract ideas, and certainly those that come from outside the men's own world, do not seem to play a decisive role.

Citizens of Stalin's Soviet Union may or may not have shared the German communists' idealism, but what marked them out was the fact that they had no choice. Like that of McLellan's International Brigaders, the mentalities of Red Army soldiers changed radically as the war progressed, but in this case part of the transformation was a shift of generations. The first Soviet army, that of 1941, was destroyed - dead or captured - within six months of the German invasion. Cynics and callow idealists alike were killed. The next 18 months of war would see the forging of a new mentality, stiffened by a renewed interest in military professionalism, as opposed to declamatory patriotism, and rendered implacable by the soldiers' hatred and thirst for revenge. By the war's end, this new army, the second wave, had also been destroyed and replaced, for few survived as front-line fighters for longer than a matter of months.

The very brutality of Stalin's war also shaped motivation in the field. Surrender, as early captives would learn, was not an option. Prisoners were almost certain to perish and cowards were shot. Bloody struggle (or, occasion- ally, desertion) was the only route to individual security and peace. Group loyalty undoubtedly played a part for the men, but it bears emphasizing that, with mortality rates exceeding German ones by three to one, many of the strongest ties soldiers might feel were with the dead. I chart the development of these front-line mentalities, assessing such issues as hatred of the enemy, the desire for loot and the absence of alternatives. In the end, for an invaded people threatened with annihilation, the latter proved the only universal truth.

Tarak Barkawi's essay on ethnic identities in the Indian army affirms that the nature of the enemy must play a central part. Wars where no prisoners are taken will have very different effects on rivalry and ambition among soldiers than wars where surrender (and even joining the enemy against one's original side) is an option for disaffected troops. The paradox of the Indian regiments was their loyalty to an empire - the British Raj - whose yoke they were determined to throw off. As Barkawi explains, it was the experience of war against Japan, the confrontation with an enemy whose reputation for cruelty




grew with each passing week, that generated the strongest feelings of loyalty and group cohesiveness in multi-ethnic formations. This hatred was not a

primary motivation (training had played its part among the Indian regiments before the war); it was a consequence of battlefield conduct. Like many other

responses to atrocity, too, it was also shaped by enemy treatment of civilians. This helpful perception suggests that other insights might be gained by look-

ing at the justifications for individual wars. Antonius Robben originally set out to compare two successive types of conflict in Argentina, the so-called 'dirty war' of the 1970s and the 1980s conflict over the Falkland Islands. As he

points out, and as several other articles show, soldiers' own explanations for their actions depend partly on the type of war that they are called upon to fight and also on its place in a specific sequence of historical events. In cultures where honour and shame are crucial, too, the language in which men and officers describe their actions will reflect the specific nature of their collective universe. Robben's perceptions as an anthropologist enrich our understanding of military culture and practice. They also remind us to take the men's own words seriously, listening for the specific meanings that each gives to terms that might seem equivalent but are always open to local interpretation and the influence of history.

The reasons why soldiers join up may be susceptible to social scientific research. Ideology, economics, peer pressure and romantic dreams all play their parts, as - in wartime - do patriotism and the desire to defend both

family and home. When it comes to combat, however, there remains a great deal to be learned, not just about the reasons why men fight, but also about resilience, effectiveness and the limits of both. These aspects of human activity, so commonly experienced and yet so hard to recollect, remain enigmatic. War is changing, too, and the empty battlefield of the twenty-first century (empty, that is, except for millions of civilians) will pose new problems for the troops involved. So, too, do local wars, guerrilla wars, the many wars for land, power and resources that continue to rage beyond Europe and the English-speaking world. Despite our efforts, we were unable to persuade fieldworkers from Africa or Afghanistan to contribute to this volume, although some were

present for our deliberations. If their comments showed anything, it was to reassert that the articles collected here provide only partial answers to questions framed about a certain type of war. It will remain to extend the debate in future.



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