It was hot that July morning as I crouched in the brush aside a main path in the woods. I wore an Army-surplus shirt with patches sloppily and inaccurately sewn on. A far-too-large helmet liner with twigs attached for camouflage sat precariously atop my head. A toy version of an M-1 rifle was at the ready. Soon a squad of my friends, clearly battle-tested crack German troopers, would appear on the path, and I would sink further into the thick brush awaiting my opportunity for glory.
“Here they come.”
“Don’t breathe!”
“Vroom! Tanka-tanka-tanka!” roared my weapon, now curiously transmogrified into a cross between a BAR (Browning Automatic Rifle) and a semi-machine gun, with sound effects perfected by hours of watching Combat on TV. Germans “died” dramatically in front of me, and I emerged triumphantly from my ambush, mouthing politically incorrect, Pattonesque epithets.
War was great fun for a young boy growing up in South Portland, Maine in the late 1950s and early 1960s. All shots hit home! (Though I recall that tremendous disputes erupted whenever new kids joined us from another neighborhood. It seems that there was no universal referees’ guide for such war games, and some kids insisted that the skimpiest of foliage conferred bullet-proof status!) Death was theatrical and oh so temporary. And everyone was a hero—except for the obligatory younger brother of one of your friends, who insisted on playing with the big kids and promptly got killed—not unlike the occasional new character introduced in a Combat episode. New characters invariably got killed.
Of course, what we did in the woods back then bore almost no resemblance to the realities of combat. Fortunately, I did not come to learn about this disparity through direct experience. Like many historians—and not a few military historians—I have never been in combat. I must rely upon the accounts of those who have, and the work of scholars who have studied them. Two who have done just that are cultural historian Joanna Bourke of the University of London’s Birkbeck College and the prominent classicist-turned-military historian Victor Davis Hanson.
Recently, both have written widely reviewed books on the experience of men in battle. In her controversial and frequently disturbing revisionist analysis of twentieth-century warfare, An Intimate History of Killing , Bourke seeks “to put killing back into military history.” Meanwhile, in The Soul of Battle, Hanson has written a provocative essay on a distinctive democratic way of war. Both authors ask why men—ordinary men, not professional soldiers—fight and kill in battle. And while Bourke and Hanson alike dispel many romantic notions about the experience of men in battle, their conclusions could hardly be more different.
The received wisdom is that soldiers endure war. The literature on men in battle stresses the importance of training and male bonding, the apprehension of battle, the confusion and disorientation of battle (“the fog of war”), the ubiquity of fear, the psychological adjustment made in the face of death, the frequency of boredom punctuated by spasms of violence, the attempts to cope with the trauma of combat (superstition, drink, drugs, and religion), the close identification with one’s buddies, and the long-term psychological after-effects of combat.
Based on her examination of the source material of British, American, and Australian involvement in both world wars and Vietnam, Joanna Bourke turns this conventional understanding of combat experience on its head. She claims that killing in battle is often associated with pleasure, even ecstasy, and that this reaction is by no means confined to a few psychopaths, but is common among ordinary soldiers. Whereas traditional military historians emphasize the fear, anxiety, and pain of combat, Bourke asserts that excitement, joy, and satisfaction are equally important emotions in such a setting, inspired by the combatants’ “imagining that they had scored a good, clean ‘kill.'”
Others have noted that war has its strange appeals, but few scholars before Bourke have suggested that the pleasure of killing is central to the experience of combat. Surprisingly, Bourke’s “ordinary killers” are able to cope with the horror of their acts with minimal psychological damage, re-entering society with amazing smoothness. In her view, the reticence of many veterans to discuss their combat experiences may be attributed less to the fear of dredging up traumatic memories than to veterans’ reluctance to admit that they actually enjoyed killing the enemy—perhaps even enjoyed killing noncombatants. The traditional military historian is in for a rough ride with Bourke’s book.
Conceding that technological developments have depersonalized killing to a degree while making it more efficient over greater distances, Bourke nevertheless asserts in her introduction that “[t]he characteristic act of men at war is not dying, it is killing.” Moreover, “the narrative of personalized killing remains central to men’s experience of war,” despite the fact that in much of twentieth-century combat the enemy’s face was not seen.
But in World War II and especially in Vietnam, support troops vastly outnumbered soldiers on the firing end. Surely their “experience of war” isn’t readily comprehended by Bourke’s thesis?
Not to worry. When soldiers did not actually observe the effect of their actions, Bourke says, they imagined killing. Their war stories, she admits, are permeated with fantasy. Well, fine. But by conflating fantasy with real experiences she is charting a dangerous methodological course.
Predictably, Bourke’s thesis has drawn hostile fire. Despite nearly 100 pages of documentation, she pays very little attention to the scholarly work on combat experience by Dave Grossman, John Keegan, Richard Holmes, or J. Glenn Gray. Moreover, she builds her case with insufficient discrimination. Firsthand accounts form the backbone of her argument, and she accepts them as gospel rather than sometimes the product of hyperbole and braggadocio. One of her critics has suggested that she and her readers take heed of General Sir Ian Hamilton’s caution that “on the actual day of battle naked truths may be picked up for the asking; by the following morning, they have already begun to get into their uniforms.”
Anecdotal sources, of course, can be helpful provided care is used to develop their context, motive, and representiveness. Clearly, radically different histories of “face-to-face killing” in the twentieth century could be constructed by selecting other sets of war narratives and source materials. In addition to the numerous firsthand accounts from diaries and letters, Bourke also uses literary and cinematic sources as well as anti-war polemics without much concern for bias and veracity. In a Chronicle of Higher Education interview, she states: “Look, this isn’t moral history; it’s morally engaged history. The text is uncertain; the author is uncertain.”
This approach to source material may be justified by postmodern notions that all written documents are fictional in some measure. But, warns British historian Niall Ferguson, anyone who cares about historical methodology should be concerned by such a “cavalier approach to sources.” Bourke’s approach is also too narrow for the claims she makes. The Anglo-American experience in twentieth-century combat is of course an important subject, but killing in twentieth-century warfare is by no means comprehended without comparative examination of the combat experience of German, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, and French soldiers. As Ferguson has noted, “English speakers have not been the century’s leading exponents of face-to-face killing. Any attempt to theorize about the phenomenon without reference to the German and Russian experiences is bound to be skewed.”
An even more serious concern is that Bourke weaves her argument without enough attention to context.1 Events from World War I, for example, are juxtaposed with those from the Vietnam War without care to develop the context.
This approach fosters two very problematic impressions. First, Bourke seeks to suggest that warfare is solely about killing; training for it, actually committing the slaughter, and finally coping with it after the fact. She pays far too little attention to the humdrum side of military life and fails to indicate that most of war is marked not by lethal combat but by more mundane activity.
Second, Bourke is too willing to apply the standards and hindsight of the 1990s to much earlier and different circumstances. History is about both continuity and change. Bourke assumes far too much continuity.
On one key point Bourke is absolutely correct: twentieth-century warfare was bloody awful! Placed in circumstances of routine boredom punctuated by rushes of adrenaline brought on by the heightened emotions of combat, ordinary soldiers killed other humans—sometimes with ferocity. I agree with military historian Brian Holden Reid that these soldiers did not always “be have like social workers.” And, with qualification, I will also grant Bourke that war has its appeal.
But what disturbs me most deeply about An Intimate History of Killing is that Bourke’s focus on killing and the pleasure of killing ignores many of the larger dimensions of war and, thereby, fundamentally misunderstands it. Her treatment of Vietnam, for example, seems to suggest that American soldiers routinely perpetrated My Lai-type atrocities without provocation or military warrant. So completely does Bourke identify military life with the joy of slaughter that Australian military historian Alan Ryan has confessed that “it is hard not to feel soiled by some of the accounts” in her book. I concur.
Wars, for better or worse, are more than occasions for killing. They are grand, unpredictable, and terrible spectacles undertaken in political and moral contexts. They involve a volatile mix of technology, tactical doctrine, logistics, leadership, and morale in the service of strategic goals. Unless the unspeakable horrors of war that Bourke recounts in excruciating detail are placed in these larger contexts, all killing becomes gratuitous slaughter, and accounts like hers run the risk of engaging in what Richard Homes has called “military pornography.” 2
Victor Davis Hanson, a historian at California State University, Fresno and an expert on the military history of ancient Greece, provides a very different look at battle in his extended essay, The Soul of Battle. Using three case studies—the fourth century B.C. invasion of Sparta by Theban general Epaminondas; General William Tecumseh Sherman’s 1864 “march to the sea” and follow-on march through the Carolinas; and General George S. Patton’s swift campaigns in 1944 and 1945 across France and Germany—Hanson explores the way that democracies can transform the horror of killing in war to a higher purpose of saving lives and freeing the enslaved.
The “soul of battle,” Hanson writes, is “a rare thing that arises only when free men march unabashedly toward the heartland of their enemy in hopes of saving the doomed, when their vast armies are aimed at salvation and liberation, not conquest and enslavement.” Only in such situations does battle “take on a spiritual dimension, one that de fines a culture and teaches it what civic militarism is and how it is properly used.”
Space does not permit a detailed summary of these three great campaigns. I suspect that most readers will share my polite interest in Epaminondas’ liberation of the helots of Messenia from Spartan enslavement; will be much more engaged by the account of Sherman’s Georgia campaign, which was far more structured and dangerous than this historian had ever understood; and will be fully absorbed with Hanson’s account of the colorful and brash Patton, whose strategic instincts far outstripped his political savvy.
As I read Hanson’s narrative, I found myself angered by the decisions of the Allied brass that reined in Patton’s swiftly moving Third Army and probably delayed the collapse of the Third Reich by several months—several months that enabled the Nazis to exterminate hundreds of thousands more innocent people (including Dietrich Bonhoeffer) and allowed Soviet forces to penetrate hundreds of miles further into Europe. Hanson’s argument hinges precisely on the kind of moral outrage that stirred within me as I revisited those momentous months in 1944 and 1945. Democratic marches that exhibit the soul of battle are indeed brutal affairs borne out of the moral imperative to prevent worse casualties, end the war sooner, and establish an enduring and more just peace.
Paradoxes, Hanson notes, abound. Both Sherman and Patton have received reputations as half-mad, bloodthirsty killers, but neither’s army engaged in the kind of widespread gratuitous slaughter that preoccupies Bourke. Both men freely used the destructive mobile firepower at their disposal to bring the war to their enemies’ doorsteps, sap his will to resist, and shorten the length of their respective wars.
Hanson concludes The Soul of Battle with a meditation on whether contemporary American democracy can still marshal the will to engage in wars of liberation. Can we endure the instantaneous satellite images of war’s brutality? Does our culture and education system encourage the strength of character needed for leadership in such situations? And do we believe any more that there are times in the lives of nations—as of individuals—when choices between good and evil must be made, and that, “the real immorality is not the use of great force to inflict punishment, but … the failure to exercise moral authority at all?”3
Consider the orders to halt the American advance toward Baghdad in the Gulf War and the negotiated armistice that followed. Hanson views these as “the greatest military blunders since Viet Nam.” He speculates that had Epaminondas led the Allied forces in Desert Storm, he would have established new and defensible societies for Kurds and Shiites and held the Iraqi army at bay until both cultures had established sufficient defenses to keep them safe from retribution. Sherman would have cut a swath of destruction through Iraq, destroying every one of Saddam Hussein’s many palaces, munitions factories, and the entire Iraqi military infrastructure, as well as the homes of the Bath party elite. Such is the price for supporting a murderer!
And Patton, of course, would have pushed on with deliberate speed to ward Baghdad and not departed until the Republican Guard was annihilated and Hussein either dead or in chains. To be sure, our delicate sensitivities would be injured and the actions of these generals would be branded as excessive and even obscene. But, notes Hanson, a killer would not still be in power in Iraq and many innocent people would have been spared from murder or its continuing threat.
While An Intimate History of Killing and The Soul of Battle are military histories, neither Joanna Bourke nor Victor Davis Hanson was trained as a military historian. I was, and an evaluation of their two books provides an opportunity to speak to the present state of the sub-discipline of military history.
Perhaps the most popular military historian alive today, John Keegan, believes that the craft of military history is experiencing a renaissance. Certainly the general reading public shows no signs of tiring with military history. In deed, in the decade just past Keegan himself has written several books that have achieved bestseller status.
Is military history’s popularity with the general public responsible for its precarious standing in the academy? It seems so, at least in part. As a group, military historians have been reluctant to embrace some of the more novel historiographic approaches that have left their mark on the field more generally. In his essay “The Dilemmas of the Contemporary Military Historian” (1999), Hanson contends that it is one of military history’s great virtues that it provides a corrective to the nonsense that infects a good deal of contemporary historical writing.
In the same vein, in a recent Atlantic Monthly article, journalist Robert D. Kaplan laments that despite military history’s many virtues (its avoidance of philosophical abstractions, its relevance to policy makers, its interest to nonacademic readers, its realistic view of human nature, and its centrality to broader historical understanding), it has few supporters in the academy. And Hanson observes that even many military historians themselves go to great lengths to deny their craft and are reluctant to acknowledge that they study war and killing.4
This negative assessment of the standing of academic military history is shared by University of Illinois military historian John Lynn, whose essay “The Embattled Future of American Military History” appeared in the October 1997 issue of The Journal of Military History. Lynn depicts an increasingly hostile academic environment, where faculty slots in military history are being lost to more trendy approaches to the study of the past. In the name of diversity, Lynn claims, many university history faculties are becoming more homogeneous in their exaltation of theoretical complexity and novelty—something military historians typically avoid.5
What will be lost if this trend continues? First, military history is extremely important to understanding the past on the large-scale level. In deed, military history plays a critical role in our tentative attempts to understand world history.
Nearly every world historian considers cross-cultural contacts to be a primary engine of change in human history. Unfortunately, cross-cultural contacts have almost never been benign. Men and microbes have often collided with violent and long-lasting effect. The much-maligned story of the emergence of Western civilization, for example, is in comprehensible without a basic understanding of the military context in Europe and the differentials in military technology with Europeans spilled out into Africa, Asia, and the Americas from the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries. On a smaller scale, American history is virtually in comprehensible without reference to what C. Vann Woodward called the “free security” that Britain’s Royal Navy provided the fledgling nation in its vulnerable formative years.
The value of military historians’ contribution to the larger historical community was clearly illustrated to me at the American Historical Association’s annual meeting in Washington, D.C., in January 1999. Andre Gunder Frank was holding court at a session devoted to assessing his new book: ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age. He was making bold claims about how prior to the Industrial Revolution, the economic and military power of the West was weak in comparison to that of the great states of Asia. A noted historian familiar with the military-naval historical literature raised his hand and remarked with wonderful clarity that European men-of-war thoroughly dominated those coastal Asiatic waters in which they chose to sail. End of discussion. Interpretation yielded to “unalterable fact.”
Military history also serves a moral purpose. Victor Davis Hanson contends that the prevailing ethos among American intellectuals is to view war itself as “unnatural and inevitably evil, and thus, through education and proper understanding, preventable.” He asserts that the great task of contemporary military historians is to resist the temptation to condemn war as uniformly wrong or immoral; rather, they should identify the stupidity, barbarity, and tragedy of needless battles (as Hanson himself has done in The Soul of Battle). The military historian should resist the “easy condemnation of war’s brutality” and appreciate the dilemma of twentieth-century humanity: contemporary evil in the form of Hitlerism, Stalinism, and Maoism murdered some one hundred million people.
What ways do we have to resist evil of such magnitude other than force? In our current academic environment, the military historian grappling with such weighty matters is made to feel that somehow his topic is an aberration, a vast tragedy of senseless killing. Hanson argues, and I second, that Saving Private Ryan was flawed not because it showed graphically the harsh realities of modern combat—ripping to shreds romantic notions of battle, and thus serving the truth—but rather because the film utterly failed to convey the larger purpose and context for those famous first 30 cinematic minutes of mayhem on Omaha Beach. Nazi Germany was a murderously evil state, and each day that the Allies moved eastward toward the heartland of Germany was one day less that the industrialized camps of death operated.
Yes, those men whose grotesque remains floated along the shores of Normandy were sacrificed, but not in vain. Theirs was a noble purpose. Military history, according to Hanson, retains its moral capital by de scribing the gore and carnage for a larger purpose than the “macabre interests of … readers.” It is pornographic to titillate with blood and guts, and it is the grossest of errors to turn killing into “a soulless, antiseptic enterprise.”
Military history does far more than provide a haven for academics like me who used to play “army.” Its specificity and focus provide a corrective to interpretations of the past that blush at the unpleasantness of this most obvious manifestation of original sin. And in the hands of its most thoughtful practitioners, military history offers a rationale for retaining forceful options in a fallen world where innocent people do get slaughtered.
Near the end of The Soul of Battle, Hanson comments that Epaminondas, Sherman, and Patton were “deemed vulgar for the necessary though brutal work they do for the rest of us.” In many respects, the same could be said of those who practice the “dark craft” of military history.
Donald A. Yerxa is professor of history at Eastern Nazarene College. He is the author of Admirals and Empire: The U. S. Navy and the Caribbean, 1898-1945 (Univ. of South Carolina Press, 1991).
Footnotes
1. Elsewhere I have registered my sympathy with the view that an inordinate attention to historical context not only betrays epistemological naivete but frequently serves to distance the historian from moral considerations. All that is true, but a cavalier disregard for context is surely a dangerous stance for any historian. I commend to the reader the rich historical epistemology of John Lukacs (interviewed in the July/August issue of Books & Culture), who offers a sensible via media.
2. If the reader really wants to wrestle with the issue of men in battle, I recommend J. Glenn Gray’s eloquent The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle (Reprint: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1998). His brief chapter on “The Enduring Appeals of Battle” is vastly more insightful than anything found in An Intimate History of Killing.
3. Of course, not all readers of this Christian review will agree with Hanson’s sentiment. While one could certainly be both a pacifist and a military historian, I confess that I have been drawn over the years to the Christian realism of Reinhold Niebuhr.
4. In an interview, Joanna Bourke notes that she has no interest in being known as a military historian. “What an awful thing to be,” she told a journalist. She mentions the sexism that she experienced at the only military history seminar she ever attended. Her paper, “Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain, and the Great War,” was interrupted by the session’s convener, a man who apparently blurted out something to the effect that “This is a gender-free zone.” The all-male audience responded with “Hear! hear!” and her Q&A time was marred by jokes about women’s knickers.
5. It should be noted that some military historians are engaged in sophisticated and creative use of traditional and non-traditional sources. Prime examples are John W. Dower’s War without Mercy, Michael S. Sherry’s The Rise of American Airpower: The Creation of Armageddon, Daniel Pick’s War Machine: The Rationalisation of Slaughter in the Modern Age, and Craig M. Cameron’s American Samurai: Myth, Imagination, and the Conduct of Battle in the First Marine Division, 1941-1951. But most military history is fairly conventional in its source materials and methods.
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