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CULTURE AND COMBAT IN THE WESTERN WORLD, 1900–1945

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2008

ALEXANDER WATSON
ALEXANDER WATSON*
Affiliation:
Clare Hall, Cambridge
*
Clare Hall, Cambridge, CB3 9ALajw226@cam.ac.uk
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Abstract

This article reviews recent research investigating the impact of societal culture on combat performance in the western world during the first half of the twentieth century. It identifies two main strands of historiography. One group of studies has focused on societal culture's influence in shaping the form and functioning of military institutions. A second approach adopted by current scholarship has been to examine societal culture's effect on individual soldiers' resilience and motivation. The article compares and evaluates the results of this research. It concludes that, while sometimes overstressed at other factors' expense, especially combatants' common humanity and the complexity of militaries' own cultures, societal culture has proved to be a subtle yet important influence on martial performance.

Type
Historiographical Reviews
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 51 , Issue 2 , June 2008 , pp. 529 - 546
Copyright
Copyright © 2008 Cambridge University Press

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References

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15 For overviews of military developments during the last 300 years, see Archer Jones, The art of war in the western world (London, 1988), and the chapters by John A. Lynn and Williamson A. Murray in Geoffrey Parker, ed., The Cambridge illustrated history of warfare: the triumph of the west (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 164–339.

16 Notable new operational histories are Edward J. Erickson, Defeat in detail: the Ottoman army in the Balkans, 1912–1913 (Westport, CT, and London, 2003), and Robert A. Doughty, Pyrrhic victory: French strategy and operations in the Great War (Cambridge, MA, and London, 2005). Recent examinations of generals include Matthew Hughes and Matthew Seligmann, eds., Leadership in conflict, 1914–1918 (Barnsley, 2000); Annika Mombauer, Helmuth von Moltke and the origins of the First World War (Cambridge, 2001); Gary Sheffield and Geoffrey Till, eds., The challenges of high command: the British experience (Basingstoke, 2003); William Mulligan, The creation of the modern German army: General Walther Reinhardt and the Weimar Republic, 1914–1930 (Oxford, 2005); and Keith Jeffery, Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson: a political soldier (Oxford and New York, 2006). Economic factors in conflict have been freshly addressed in Mark Harrison, ed., The economics of World War II: six great powers in international comparison (Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, and Madrid, 1998), and Stephen Broadberry and Mark Harrison, eds., The economics of World War I (Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, and Madrid, 2005).

17 Markus Ingenlath, Mentale Aufrüstung: Militarisierungstendenzen in Frankreich und Deutschland vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg (Frankfurt am Main and New York, 1998), pp. 40–4, 71–3, and 433–6.

18 Ibid., pp. 247–318 and 392–4.

19 See Hew Strachan, The First World War: to arms (3 vols., Oxford, 2001), i, pp. 224–5.

20 Isabel V. Hull, Absolute destruction: military culture and the practices of war in imperial Germany (Ithaca and London, 2005), pp. 1, 4, 10–92, 103–9, 137–43, 169–71, 182, 197–323, and 333.

21 For the significance of propaganda to the Nazis' social revolution, see particularly David Welch, ‘Nazi propaganda and the Volksgemeinschaft: constructing a people's community’, Journal of Contemporary History, 39 (2004), pp. 213–38.

22 See Anne Lipp, Meinungslenkung im Krieg: Kriegserfahrungen deutscher Soldaten und ihre Deutung, 1914–1918 (Göttingen, 2003), particularly pp. 62–89. For comparison, see S. P. MacKenzie, Politics and military morale: current-affairs and citizenship education in the British army, 1914–1950 (Oxford, 1992).

23 Frank Vossler, Propaganda in die eigene Truppe: Die Truppenbetreuung in der Wehrmacht, 1939–1945 (Paderborn, Munich, Vienna, and Zurich, 2005), pp. 110–13, 156–68, 180, and 190. Cf. also Jürgen Förster, ‘Ludendorff and Hitler in perspective: The battle for the German soldier's mind, 1917–1944’, War in History, 10 (2003), pp. 321–34.

24 Christoph Jahr, Gewöhnliche Soldaten: Desertion und Deserteure im deutschen und britischen Heer 1914–1918 (Göttingen, 1998), p. 18. For a comparison of different armies' use of the death sentence during the First World War, see David Stevenson, Cataclysm: the First World War as political tragedy (New York, 2004), pp. 173–4.

25 Manfred Messerschmidt, Die Wehrmachtjustiz, 1933–1945 (Paderborn, Munich, Vienna, and Zurich, 2005), especially pp. 168 and 453.

26 Omer Bartov, Hitler's army: soldiers, Nazis, and war in the Third Reich (New York and Oxford, 1991), particularly pp. 28, 38–43, 59–61, 95, 104–8, and 180–3. See also his updated and published doctoral thesis, The Eastern Front, 1941–1945: German troops and the barbarisation of warfare 2nd edn (Basingstoke, 2001).

27 Klaus Latzel, Deutsche Soldaten – nationalsozialistischer Krieg? Kriegserlebnis – Kriegserfahrung, 1939–1945 (Paderborn, Munich, Vienna, and Zurich, 1998), pp. 370–1.

28 Rüdiger Overmans, Deutsche militärische Verluste im Zweiten Weltkrieg (Munich, 1999), p. 298.

29 Thomas Kühne, Kameradschaft: Die Soldaten des nationalsozialistischen Krieges und das 20. Jahrhundert (Göttingen, 2006). Cf. also Vossler, Propaganda, pp. 44 and 47–51, who emphasizes the care taken by the army to ensure that the form of address ‘comrade’ was not devalued in front soldiers' minds through gratuitous or inappropriate use by non-combat propaganda personnel.

30 Catherine Merridale, Ivan's war: the Red army, 1939–1945 (London, 2005), pp. 12–14, 56–63, 69, 108–9, 138–43, 157, and 240–1. The distrust felt by many Soviet soldiers for their officers in 1941, and their tendency, probably influenced by the purges and show trials of the 1930s, to suspect them of being ‘spies’ and causing the military debacle deliberately is, additionally, highlighted in Robert W. Thurston, ‘Cauldrons of loyalty and betrayal: Soviet soldiers’ behaviour, 1941 and 1945', in Robert W. Thurston and Bernd Bonwetsch, eds., The people's war: responses to World War II in the Soviet Union (Urbana and Chicago, 2000), pp. 235–7, at p. 240. The damaging effect of Soviet political commissars is also noted in Dale R. Herspring, Soldiers, commissars, and chaplains: civil–military relations since Cromwell (Lantham, MD, 2001).

31 Hew Strachan, ‘The British way in warfare’, in David Chandler and Ian Beckett, eds., The Oxford history of the British army (Oxford and New York, 1996), pp. 408–9.

32 George Q. Flynn, Conscription and democracy: the draft in France, Great Britain, and the United States (Westport, CT, and London, 2002), particularly pp. 3–4 and 10–14.

33 See Martin Samuels, Command or control? Command, training and tactics in the British and German armies, 1888–1918 (London, 1995), pp. 116–19, and David French, Raising Churchill's army: the British army and the war against Germany, 1919–1945 (Oxford and New York, 2000), pp. 45–7 and 52–60. Only during the second half of the First World War did the army make a major effort to delegate command and cultivate initiative among its then high-quality citizen soldiers. See Paddy Griffith, Battle tactics on the Western Front: the British army's art of attack, 1916–1918 (New Haven and London, 1994), and Gary Sheffield, Forgotten victory: the First World War: myths and realities (London, 2001), pp. 133–220.

34 Cathryn Corns and John Hughes-Wilson, Blindfold and alone: British military executions in the Great War (London, 2002), pp. 103–4.

35 Hull, Absolute destruction, pp. 183–5.

36 See Corns and Hughes-Wilson, Blindfold and alone, pp. 425–8 and 432–3.

37 Hull, Absolute destruction, p. 111. The classic work on Germany's General Staff remains T. N. Dupuy, A genius for war: the German army and general staff, 1807–1945 (London, 1977).

38 See for comparison the extensive work on the German officer corps' identity, including Karl Demeter, The German officer-corps in society and state, 1650–1945 (London, 1965); Martin Kitchen, The German officer corps, 1890–1914 (Oxford, 1968); and Hanns Hubert Hofmann, ed., Das deutsche Offizierkorps, 1860–1960 (Boppard am Rhein, 1980).

39 Hew Strachan, The politics of the British army (Oxford, 1997), pp. 195–214, and David French, Military identities: the regimental system, the British army, and the British people, c. 1870–2000 (Oxford and New York, 2005), pp. 10–30 and 232–58.

40 The emphasis on strategy in post-1918 staff officer training may also have inhibited the formation of such dysfunctional tendencies, albeit at the cost of time which could otherwise have been used for tactical and operational instruction. See French, Military identities, pp. 145–63, 177, and 259–74. For studies of individual regiments' combat performances, see Timothy Bowman, The Irish regiments in the Great War: discipline and morale (Manchester and New York, 2003), and Mark Connelly, Steady the Buffs! A regiment, a region, and the Great War (Oxford, 2006).

41 For France, see Julian Jackson, The fall of France: the Nazi invasion of 1940 (Oxford, 2003), particularly pp. 146–82 and 224–7, and Alexander, Martin S., ‘After Dunkirk: the French army's performance against “Case Red”, 25 May to 25 June 1940’, War in History, 14 (2007), pp. 219–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For Italy, see Brian R. Sullivan, ‘The Italian soldier in combat, June 1940–September 1943: myths, realities and explanations’, in Paul Addison and Angus Calder, eds., Time to kill: the soldier's experience of war in the west, 1939–1945 (London, 1997), pp. 177–205.

42 For the interwar political considerations influencing French armoured equipment, see Jackson, Fall of France, pp. 225–6.

43 For the Australian and Canadian military-centred national foundation legends, see Alistair Thomson, Anzac memories: living with the legend (Melbourne, Oxford, Auckland, and New York, 1994), and Jonathan F. Vance, Death so noble: memory, meaning, and the First World War (Vancouver, 1997). Recent detailed analyses of their armies' performances in the First World War can be found in Jeffrey Grey, A military history of Australia (revised edn, Cambridge, New York, and Melbourne, 1999), particularly pp. 85–6 and 106–8, and Shane B. Schreiber, Shock army of the British Empire: the Canadian corps in the last 100 days of the Great War (Westport, CT, and London, 1997).

44 Denman, Terence, ‘The Catholic Irish soldier in the First World War: the “racial environment”’, Irish Historical Studies, 27 (1991), pp. 352–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Enloe, Ethnic soldiers, pp. 23–49, who examines similar martial stereotypes belonging to other peoples, including Gurkhas, Cossacks, and Kurds, and highlights the political and economic incentives for such peoples themselves to embrace such a reputation.

45 Lynn, Battle, pp. 219–80.

46 Cameron, ‘Race and identity’, pp. 550–66; idem, American samurai. Myth, imagination, and the conduct of battle in the First Marine Division, 1941–1951 (Cambridge, New York, and Melbourne, 1994); and John W. Dower, War without mercy: race and power in the Pacific war (New York, 1986).

47 Stephen D. Wesbrook, ‘The potential for military disintegration’, in Sam C. Sarkesian, ed., Combat effectiveness: cohesion, stress and the volunteer military (Beverly Hills and London, 1980), pp. 244–78, at p. 274.

48 Ben Shephard, A war of nerves: soldiers and psychiatrists, 1914–1994 (London, 2002), pp. 385–99.

49 Alan Hawley, ‘People not personnel: the human dimension of fighting power’, in Hew Strachan, ed., The British army, manpower and society into the twenty-first century (London and Portland, OR, 2000), pp. 213–26, at pp. 217–19.

50 See Marieluise Christadler, Kriegserziehung im Jugendbuch: Literarische Mobilmachung in Deutschland und Frankreich vor 1914 (Frankfurt am Main, 1978), and Peter Parker, The old lie: the Great War and the public-school ethos (London, 1987).

51 See J. O. Springhall, Youth, empire and society: British youth movements, 1883–1940 (London, 1977); Christoph Schubert-Weller, ‘Kein schönrer Tod … ’: Die Militarisierung der männlichen Jugend und ihr Einsatz im Ersten Weltkrieg, 1890–1918 (Weinheim and Munich, 1998); and Ingenlath, Mentale Aufrüstung, pp. 111–33.

52 For example, Thomas Rohkrämer, ‘August 1914 – Kriegsmentalität und ihre Voraussetzungen’, in Wolfgang Michalka, ed., Der Erste Weltkrieg: Wirkung, Wahrnehmung, Analyse (Munich and Zurich, 1992), pp. 759–77. For recent revisionist work on ‘war enthusiasm’, see especially Jeffrey Verhey, The spirit of 1914: militarism, myth, and mobilization in Germany (Cambridge, 2000).

53 Bernd Ulrich, ‘Die Desillusionierung der Kriegsfreiwilligen von 1914’, in Wolfram Wette, ed., Der Krieg des kleinen Mannes: Eine Militärgeschichte von unten (Munich and Zurich, 1992), pp. 110–26, and Jahr, Gewöhnliche Soldaten, p. 176.

54 Ute Frevert, A nation in barracks: modern Germany, military conscription and civil society (Oxford and New York, 2004), particularly pp. 4–6 and 170–223.

55 Hew Strachan, ‘Ausbildung, Kampfgeist und die zwei Weltkriege’, in Bruno Thoß and Hans-Erich Volkmann, eds., Erster Weltkrieg Zweiter Weltkrieg: Ein Vergleich (Paderborn, 2002), pp. 265–86.

56 Heather Streets, Martial races: the military, race and masculinity in British imperial culture, 1857–1914 (Manchester and New York, 2004), pp. 6, 173–81, and 190–219. A similar point has been made with regard to Irish soldiers in Thomas Bartlett and Keith Jeffery, ‘An Irish military tradition?’ in Thomas Bartlett and Keith Jeffery, eds., A military history of Ireland (Cambridge, New York, and Melbourne, 1997), pp. 1–25, at p. 18.

57 Frevert, Nation, p. 248.

58 See Stephen G. Fritz, Frontsoldaten: the German soldier in World War II (Lexington, KY, 1995), pp. 14–15 and 163.

59 Merridale, Ivan's war, pp. 35–8.

60 Bartov, Hitler's army, pp. 108–17.

61 Vossler, Propaganda, pp. 170–3. For evidence that the Waffen-SS was fighting more fiercely than the Wehrmacht at the end of the war, see Overmans, Deutsche militärische Verluste, p. 321.

62 Gary Sheffield, Leadership in the trenches: officer–man relations, morale and discipline in the British army in the era of the First World War (Basingstoke, 2000), particularly pp. 72–3.

63 Jay Winter, The experience of World War I (London, 2000), p. 159, and John Bourne, ‘The British working man in arms’, in Hugh Cecil and Peter H. Liddle, eds., Facing Armageddon: the First World War experienced (London, 1996), pp. 336–52.

64 J. G. Fuller, Troop morale and popular culture in the British and Dominion armies, 1914–1918 (Oxford, 1990), particularly pp. 138–48.

65 Helen B. McCartney, Citizen soldiers: the Liverpool Territorials in the First World War (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 49, 135–6, 162–5, 185–7, and 199–241.

66 Janet S. K. Watson, Fighting different wars: experience, memory, and the First World War in Britain (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 41–52 and 298–9. Cf. McCartney, Citizen soldiers, p. 51.

67 Gerald F. Linderman, The world within war: America's combat experience in World War II (New York, London, Sydney, and Singapore, 1997), pp. 185–234.

68 Ibid., pp. 48–55.

69 Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau and Annette Becker, 1914–1918: understanding the Great War (London, 2002), pp. 114–31.

70 Annette Becker, War and faith: the religious imagination in France, 1914–1930 (Oxford and New York, 1998), pp. 96–113.

71 See, respectively, Peter S. Kindsvatter, American soldiers: ground combat in the World Wars, Korea, and Vietnam (Lawrence, KS, 2003), pp. 113–17, and Linderman, World within war, pp. 65–6.

72 Michael Snape, God and the British soldier: religion and the British army in the First and Second World Wars (London and New York, 2005), p. 179.

73 Richard Schweitzer, The cross and the trenches: religious faith and doubt among British and American Great War soldiers (Westport, CT, and London, 2003), p. 258.

74 Bartov, Hitler's army, p. 107, and Merridale, Ivan's war, p. 175. Cf. Fritz, Frontsoldaten, p. 10.

75 See Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau, Men at war, 1914–1918: national sentiment and trench journalism in France during the First World War (Providence and Oxford, 1992), p. 188; Stephen E. Ambrose, Citizen soldiers: the U.S. army from the Normandy beaches to the Bulge to the surrender of Germany June 7, 1944–May 7, 1945 (New York, 1997), p. 473; and Kindsvatter, American soldiers, pp. 136–41.

76 Linderman, World within war, p. 264, and French, Military identities, pp. 283–4. Even ideologically committed soldiers, such as German Communists during the Spanish Civil War, found social support essential in battle. See McLellan, Josie, ‘“I wanted to be a little Lenin”: ideology and the German International Brigade volunteers’, Journal of Contemporary History, 41 (2006), pp. 287–304, at p. 300CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

77 Merridale, Ivan's war, p. 168.

78 See Watson, Alex, ‘Self-deception and survival: mental coping strategies on the Western Front, 1914–18’, Journal of Contemporary History, 41 (2006), pp. 247–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at pp. 253–5. Cf. Kindsvatter, American soldiers, pp. 117–19; Fritz, Frontsoldaten, pp. 73–5; and Merridale, Ivan's war, pp. 172–3.

79 Linderman, World within war, pp. 55–89; Fritz, Frontsoldaten, pp. 73, 99–102, and 152–3, and French, Raising Churchill's army, p. 137. Cf. Watson, ‘Self-deception and survival’, pp. 247–68.

80 Keegan, Face of battle, p. 297.

81 French, Military identities, pp. 61–144.

82 For pioneering work which has just begun to investigate these topics, see especially Barkawi, Tarak, ‘Peoples, homelands and wars? Ethnicity, the military and battle among British imperial forces in the war against Japan’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 46 (2004), pp. 134–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Ford, Douglas, ‘Strategic culture, intelligence assessment, and the conduct of the Pacific war: the British-Indian and imperial Japanese armies in comparison, 1941–1945’, War in History, 14 (2007), pp. 63–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar.