AMERICANS AT WAR

Today it is widely understood that, for front-line troops, the fundamental experience of warfare is fear — fear of an intensity that seems nearly beyond human endurance. And yet, as often as not, soldiers manage to endure it. So the obvious questions are how they do it, and why.

These have become central questions of combat only recently. Until the second half of the nineteenth century, Western military science taught that the leadership of generals and the collective discipline they imposed on entire armies were what determined combat effectiveness. It was Charles Ardant du Picq, a French infantry officer, who first seriously argued that armed engagement is inevitably sealed by an outbreak of existential panic among one side’s privates — regardless of the training and direction they have received from above. Individuals in the rank and file are “the first weapon of battle,” his 1871 treatise Battle Studies proclaimed. “Let us then study the soldier in battle, for it is he who brings reality to it.”

But another seventy years went by before anyone thought to pursue such a study in systematic, eyewitness fashion. Throughout World War II, the American War Department, eager to discover how troops might overcome the terror of combat, sent Information and Historical Service teams into every theater of the war. The researchers collected mountains of paper evidence and conducted extensive oral interviews with the troops. Then, shortly after the war, they wrote a pioneering work of quantitative sociology, based on after- action questionnaires completed by the GIs themselves.

This study, The American Soldier, concluded that once the shooting starts, a man on the front line quickly restricts his mental energies to simple self-preservation. That soldier’s sense of mission only rarely extends further than his foxhole buddies, who, he is convinced, represent his only available and dependable support. Larger war aims and patriotism matter little to him. Indeed, at the front there is “a taboo against any talk of a flag-waving variety.”

This view of combat attitudes and behavior was given most extreme expression by S. L. A. Marshall, the Army’s highest-ranking historian during the war. Marshall’s Men Against Fire, published in 1947, reported that their instinctive recoil from violence was so powerful that at least 75 percent of American GIs in Europe and Asia could not bring themselves to use their rifles even once. Those few who did shoot back, the book insisted, were motivated exclusively by feeling for the men in their immediate company: “I hold it to be one of the simplest truths of war that the thing which enables an infantry soldier to keep going with his weapon is the near presence or the presumed presence of a comrade.”

Men Against Fire was profoundly influential. Its lesson about the primacy of small-group dynamics (“unit cohesion,” in contemporary parlance) was quickly and permanently absorbed into the tactical doctrine of every Western military establishment. And its portrait of the American combat soldier — bonded by fright to his platoon; heedless, even scornful, of cause and flag — assumed an unshakable place in the scholarly literature on the Second World War.

All of which, of course, is wildly paradoxical. American fighting units in World War II could not have been particularly “cohesive”: the turnover in their membership was too rapid. Thirty-seven U.S. divisions spent at least a hundred days in European combat, and more than half of them suffered losses, counting replacements, that exceeded their original strength. The 4th Infantry had a 252 percent casualty rate. The average lifespan of an American platoon leader in Europe, from the moment he took command, was thirty days. You can’t cohere with a dead man.

If, just for the sake of argument, these units were somehow cohesive, and cohesion was so vital a battlefield motivation, how is it that only a small fraction of GIs could summon the will to fire their weapons? If, for that matter, the vast majority of GIs were routinely too paralyzed by dread to help out in combat, how did the Allies ultimately prevail? Either way can it really be true that all these GIs served their time insensible to the fact that something even more important than their own lives was at stake — in this, the most fateful and least morally complicated of wars? And does not this last suggestion dishonor the dead, the survivors, and the country in which they were born?

Yes, it does. American historians have been ignoring or evading this problem for decades. They are ignoring and evading it still.

Stephen E. Ambrose, one of America’s leading popular historians of World War II, has recently published Citizen Soldiers. His 1994 book, D-Day, was an account of the Normandy campaign’s first twenty-four hours. This latest work, a sequel, pushes forward to V-E Day, eleven months later. Ambrose again relies upon memoirs, oral histories, and interviews with the junior officers and enlisted men who did the fighting. And he claims to be addressing the same issues raised in his earlier work: “Who they were, how they fought, why they fought, what they endured, how they triumphed.”

But except where the soldiers’ endurance is concerned, Ambrose doesn’t really have much new to say. He is a storyteller, not an original analyst. And the story he tells — though in the voice of the grunts — is consistent with the general conclusion of previous histories that focused on officers in the rear: It was principally the American logistical achievement that defeated Germany in the Second World War, the overwhelming weaponry and manpower we were able to send across the ocean and into the enemy’s lines.

Six weeks after D-Day, for example, the German front in northwest France was held by General Fritz Bayerlein’s Panzer Lehr Division, spread along the N-800 highway between St.-Lo and Periers. On the morning of July 25, Panzer Lehr was attacked for twenty minutes by 550 American fighter bombers. Then it was attacked for an hour by eighteen hundred B-17s. Then it was attacked for another hour by a thousand U.S. ground guns while 350 P-47s dropped napalm and 396 Marauders did the mopping up. In all, sixteen thousand tons of explosives were released on a target twelve kilometers square. Panzer Lehr was obliterated. The next day, American troops began their unimpeded race east to the Seine.

By the end of the Normandy campaign, Germany had lost more than four- hundred-thousand men. It had recovered only twenty-four of the fifteen hundred tanks it had thrown into battle. Its fewer than six hundred remaining aircraft faced an Allied fleet of fourteen thousand. By the time the U.S. First Army captured the Ludendorff Bridge at Remagen in March 1945, and Americans began pouring into Germany, Allied pilots were flying eleven thousand sorties a day, and the Luftwaffe had ceased to function. The war ended two months later.

But between Normandy and the Rhine had come the winter of 1944-45, and it is in Ambrose’s gripping coverage of these months that his book makes an invaluable contribution. War is hell, we know to say, but the hell we have in mind is usually a Gettysburg photograph by Matthew Brady or the mud and idiocy of the Somme in 1916. The suffering of American combat forces before their epochal triumph in World War II has assumed a casually stipulated — and consequently disrespectful — quality in our popular imagination. Already a bestseller, Citizen Soldiers cannot help but restore the grim record.

They did not fight at night during the Civil War and routinely spent weeks marching or camping unmolested. Months sometimes went by without incident in World War I, and even during fire, Allied battalions were removed from the front for rest on regular sixteen-day rotations. Soldiers during World War II, by contrast, fought at the front until they were wounded or killed. They fought round the clock, on maybe two hours sleep, for as long as sixty days at a time.

In the Hurtgen Forest and the Ardennes, there was winter light only eight hours each day. The weather was the coldest in fifty years, frequently well below zero. The GIs had neither warm clothes nor snow boots. Trenchfoot took mens’ toes, frostbite took their fingers, and thousands of German “Bouncing Betties” — mines that sprang two and a half feet in the air, spraying a curtain of razor-sharp scrap metal — took their genitals. American foxholes and command posts, tenuously established in frozen mud, were subjected to continual artillery bombardments whose concussive force alone could break a soldier’s bones and whose noise was enough to send blood streaming from his ears. When he was able to march on actual roads, his feet slipped on the slime of dead bodies crushed by tanks. GIs wet themselves or wailed for their mothers or vomited from fear. One-fourth of all U.S. battlefield evacuations in Europe were for cases of nervous collapse.

How, then, did they endure such stress and continue fighting? Was S. L. A. Marshall right or wrong? Ambrose circles around this question, awkwardly and quickly, in both his introduction and epilogue, and winds up answering it both ways. He reveres the GIs too much to accept the obviously insulting judgment that they operated without any consideration for national objectives and ideals. “At the core,” Ambrose writes, our troops were patriots; it’s just that they were modernists, too — uncomfortable with public displays of passion and “embarrassed by patriotic bombast” about the war from combat- ignorant home folks.

At the same time, Ambrose is clearly daunted by the ironclad historical consensus about his “citizen soldiers.” “In general,” he concludes, “in assessing the motivation of the GIs, there is agreement that patriotism or any other form of idealism had little if anything to do with it. The GIs fought because they had to. What held them together was not country and flag, but unit cohesion. It has been my experience, through four decades of interviewing ex-GIs, that such generalizations are true enough.”

In other words: Our troops held together because they held together, not because they were patriotic. And they were patriotic. This is an explanation that doesn’t explain.

If Ambrose’s book is ultimately unsatisfying, however, Gerald F. Linderman’s latest work is ultimately unacceptable. In The World Within War, Linderman, a history professor at the University of Michigan, announces the same purpose as Ambrose — wishing to “see World War II through the eyes of those American combat soldiers.” But he has done it upside down and backwards. World Within War is a work of pure theory — viewing American combat soldiers through the eyes of an elaborate, pre-fabricated diagnosis of warfare’s general psycho-social effect on the individual. The book watches American combat soldiers at such close quarters it winds up going blind.

The GIs enlisted, Linderman reports, eager to fight, confident of their prowess, and certain of their personal invulnerability. Once they had seen combat, however, they were first amazed that anyone might mean them harm, and later silent, tense, and narrowly obsessed with their own security.

Standing alone, these observations are commonplace enough, and unobjectionable. But Linderman is not finished. He describes battle-hardened vets as almost feral. Stories of eerily fulfilled foreboding — a soldier is overwhelmed by the objectively inexplicable notion that a bomb is about to drop right there, and then it does — are ubiquitous in the literature of warfare. But Linderman treats his World War II examples with alarming seriousness, as though some GIs might literally have become animals of instinct. Bomber pilot John Muirhead, Linderman recounts, once broke radio silence over Italy to say “Group Leader, I smell flak.” “Yes, I smell it, too, ” came the reply. Then flak actually appeared.

And the GIs’ transformation into brutes, in Linderman’s account, grew deeper still. They became fully inured to the presence of death. Frank Mathias, whom Linderman identifies as an “Army machine gunner,” sat eating K- rations next to a Philippine-island ditch filled with Japanese corpses. “I absentmindedly watched bubbles of gas and liquid moving around under their tightly stretched skins as I munched my crackers,” Linderman quotes from Mathias’s memoir. “The June sunlight was bright and hot. They were in their world and I was in mine. I had to eat, didn’t I?” One half suspects this story is a piece of supermacho apocrypha; Mathias’s memoir, a buried footnote indicates, is called GI Jive: An Army Bandsman in World War II. But it suits Linderman’s purpose.

That purpose seems finally to be a denial that the Second World War contained any value or meaning for its soldiers. Even the legendary recourse to “unit cohesion” was at some point abandoned by these troops, Linderman says. After over a hundred days on Guadalcanal, a Marine corporal wrote his dad: “My best buddie . . . was caught in the face by a full blast of machine gun fire and when the hole we were laying in became swamped by flies gathering about him and [he] being already dead, I had to roll him out of the small hole on top of the open ground and the dirty SOBs kept shooting him full of holes. Well anyway God spared my life and I am thankful for it.” From such ambiguous evidence Linderman concludes that long service left GIs “bereft of any broad emotional support that might have checked some of combat’s denaturant effects.” In combat, at bottom, American troops could find “nothing of sufficient worth to justify their presence.”

This comes perilously close to a claim that America’s overall presence in World War II was unjustified. Gerald Linderman deeply pities the American soldier’s plight. But he does not much respect the work they did; indeed, he appears revolted by it. This is a sin. They were working to destroy Hitler.

And they were working pretty well. Trucks and planes and gasoline and explosive shells might have tipped the scale in World War II, but the conflict remained always one for territory, which ground troops alone could capture. The GIs on whom this mission fell were constantly frightened, of course. But they were never immobilized by this fear, not in any dangerous numbers. Marshall’s famous statistical contention that 75 percent of American troops never fired their weapons was thoroughly debunked in 1989 when Roger Spiller of the Army’s Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth went public with the results of his research among Marshall’s private papers and official records. The old man had never conducted company-level “fire- ratio” interviews; he had made the whole thing up, as his wartime assistant later acknowledged.

Why it took forty years for someone to figure this out is a mystery. The historical record is quite clear: The GIs were excellent soldiers. During the Battle of the Bulge, two thousand of them from the 28th Division held off a ten-thousand-man Panzer force for an entire day before falling back a few miles to regroup. Fifteen German divisions attacked Bastogne during the same battle. The town was successfully defended by a single American division, the 101st Airborne, and parts of another.

More important, the historical record is dotted with intriguing pieces of evidence that contradict the other half of received sociological wisdom about the war — that circular business about “unit cohesion” which portrays the GIs as bored by or deaf to or even contemptuous of the great civilizational crisis whose vortex they occupied. True enough, American soldiers had little time for fancy philosophical pronouncements. Their deeds, they surely felt, were sufficiently eloquent. At the war’s conclusion, Dwight Eisenhower issued a one-sentence statement from headquarters: “The mission of this Allied force was fillfilled at 0241 local time, May 7, 1945.”

But further down the line, the privates and corporals were sometimes more explicit about their overriding convictions and motivation. In the rivers of mail they sent back home to the States, full of unselfconscious tributes to America as “the best country on this Earth.” In their mumbled reactions to the German slave-labor camps they liberated. In a thousand other places, most likely. Gerald Linderman cannot bring himself to believe in such transparent patriotism. Stephen Ambrose, who might be expected to seize upon it, hesitates instead, and looks no further.

Linderman tells the story of a woman on a Kentucky public bus who was making good money off the wartime economy and was overheard to say she hoped the fighting might continue at least until she’d paid off her refrigerator. An old man on the bus became enraged. “How dare you!” he bellowed, and began crowning her on the head with his umbrella. No other passenger intervened. Eventually, someone with a spirit like that old man’s will write a history of the GIs in World War II. And then, finally, the citizen soldiers will get their due.

David Tell is opinion editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.