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  • Enduring Battle:An Interview with Christopher H. Hamner
  • Conducted by Donald A. Yerxa
Donald A. Yerxa:

What you are attempting to accomplish in the book, and how is the book structured?

Christopher H. Hamner:

The research for the book sprang from an abiding interest in how human beings have experienced combat and responded to its traumas, particularly the ways they stifle powerful instincts for self-preservation amid the danger and chaos of battle. That deceptively simple question—What makes soldiers fight?—strikes me as one of the most fascinating puzzles of human behavior, with implications that extend far beyond the subfield of military history.

As a historian, I was interested not just in the factors that drove soldiers in combat but in the ways those factors changed over time. Enduring Battle explores the nature of infantry combat and the motivations to fight comparatively, placing the battle experiences of soldiers from the Continental Army alongside those from soldiers of the Civil War armies and the GIs of World War II. The opening chapter explores some of the similarities and differences that connected the battlefields of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries by sketching some details of the individual soldier's combat experience in three battles separated by more than a century and a half. The second chapter examines fear, the most universal response to the danger of combat, and the ways that the expression and understanding of fear in battle evolved over time. Subsequent chapters explore the evolution of factors like training, leadership, and camaraderie, examining how those influences evolved to enable soldiers to perform under fire in very different environments.

Yerxa:

Would you briefly compare and contrast the character of infantry combat in the 18th and 19th centuries with that of World War II?

Hamner:

Certainly there are some profound commonalities among these conflicts. Danger, chaos, the risk of death, and the necessity of killing are near-universal elements of ground combat that appear in accounts of battlefields from ancient times and from 21st-century combat zones. As one World War II veteran put it, for the individual soldier, one war appears much the same as the next: only the uniforms change.

But many factors have changed, as even a cursory glance at depictions of different battlefields reveals. In the 18th and 19th centuries, infantry combat resembled a clash between two armed mobs. Soldiers deployed in dressed lines, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with their comrades in tightly packed formations. The armies were highly conspicuous: soldiers often wore brightly colored uniforms, carried large banners and flags, and maneuvered to the sound of loud drums, bugles, and shouted commands from commanders. Soldiers marched lock-step [End Page 12] and loaded and discharged their weapons in unison, and maintaining the formation's physical cohesion in combat was critical—one of the most disastrous things that could happen in battle was for a formation to dissolve into panic and rout. The exchange of fire between formations represented a terrifying ordeal for the individual soldier, who had to stand, exposed and in the open, within sight of enemy ranks. Battle demanded that soldiers expose themselves to enemy fire without seeking cover while loading and firing their weapons mechanically—contemporary military leaders often noted that to become an effective soldier, a man must first be transformed into an automaton. Not surprisingly, individuals found those demands profoundly trying: one colonial soldier of the mid-18th century remarked with surprise that battle required him to "stand still to be shot at."

The battlefields of the Second World War looked vastly different. Observers frequently characterized 20th-century combat as the "empty battlefield": gone were the brightly colored uniforms, exposed formations, and prominent banners that characterized earlier conflicts. Because stealth had acquired a new, urgent importance, soldiers dispersed from the massed ranks, employed camouflage, and frequently went to ground. Those actions left a battlefield that, by earlier standards, appeared almost deserted.

Where their predecessors strove to behave as automatons, soldiers on the empty battlefield had to exercise a high degree of autonomy, deducing where dips and swells in the terrain provided cover from an enemy machine gun, for example, or the safest route to flank an opposing position. That autonomy...

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