Enduring Battle: American Soldiers in Three Wars, 1776–1945 (review)

Drawing on insights from psychology and sociology, Hamner has written an engaging history that seeks to understand the experience of combat as powerfully contingent upon time and place. Although recognizing some broad continuity across the centuries, Hamner rejects essentialist notions of a universal experience of battle, in which only the outer trappings, such as uniforms, change. In particular, his central analysis of the combat motivation of American infantry during the War of Independence, the Civil War, and World War II, leads him to conclude that the psychological landscape of battle changed profoundly as the stoic fatalists who composed eighteenth- and nineteenth-century battlelines, fighting shoulder-to-shoulder and swapping massed volleys at close ranges, gave way to the more autonomous, but isolated, soldier, fighting at greater ranges on a fluid, open battlefield.

Hamner proves ready to challenge conventional wisdom. Consider the notion that, first and foremost, soldiers fight for each other. From Marshall’s studies at the end of World War II onward, the notion of “primary group cohesion” (the idea that in combat the strong social bonds within small groups—mess mates or simply buddies—are the bedrock of motivation) has become an orthodoxy in professional military studies, academic works, and popular culture.¹ Hamner, however, reports, first, that even when death destroyed these bonds, soldiers continued to fight. He offers a poignant example in the Virginian infantryman William Burke, who lost the last of his mess mates at Gettysburg. Second, taking his cue from research in experimental psychology and sociology, Hamner points out that the rationale for tight primary-group cohesion is frequently opposition to organizational goals; the soldier whose overwhelming concern is the welfare of his wounded friend will forgo tactical success. “Comradeship” in the name of combat is hardly nonexistent, but it clearly has limitations as a universal explanation for the will to fight. On that key issue, Hamner offers insights specific to particular battlefields: On the close-order battlefields of the musket era, men refrained from running either because they wanted to avoid public shame or because officers and “file closers” physically prevented them from doing so. More recently, soldiers receive training that offers them skills and attitudes that confer a sense of control over events; the infantryman has evolved from automaton to autonomy.

Unfortunately, Hamner’s evidence derives exclusively from published sources, and the experiences of the twentieth-century American soldier dominate his analysis, at the expense of his eighteenth-century counterpart. Hamner’s stark dichotomy between the “linear” tactics of the musket era and the “dispersed” tactics of the twentieth century is also problematical. His view of the South African War of 1899 to 1902 as a decisive tactical turning point obscures the fact that European battlefields had witnessed the presence of the autonomous “skirmisher” since the late eighteenth century. Similarly, his closing discussion of “asymmetric post-industrial warfare” in Iraq and Afghanistan seems to overstate the novelty of this kind of campaign (210). Federal soldiers in 1864 Missouri would have recognized the current conflict in Afghanistan as guerrilla warfare and understood its particular psychological demands. Such quibbles aside, this book can be readily recommended as a study of combat motivation in history.