Throughout history, battlefields have placed a soldier's instinct
for self-preservation in direct opposition to the army's insistence
that he do his duty and put himself in harm's way. Enduring Battle
looks beyond advances in weaponry to examine changes in warfare at
the very personal level. Drawing on the combat experiences of
American soldiers in three widely separated wars--the Revolution,
the Civil War, and World War II--Christopher Hamner explores why
soldiers fight in the face of terrifying lethal threats and how
they manage to suppress their fears, stifle their instincts, and
marshal the will to kill other humans.
Hamner contrasts the experience of infantry combat on the ground
in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when soldiers marched
shoulder-to-shoulder in linear formations, with the experiences of
dispersed infantrymen of the mid-twentieth century. Earlier
battlefields prized soldiers who could behave as stoic automatons;
the modern dispersed battlefield required soldiers who could act
autonomously. As the range and power of weapons removed enemies
from view, combat became increasingly depersonalized, and soldiers
became more isolated from their comrades and even imagined that the
enemy was targeting them personally. What's more, battles
lengthened so that exchanges of fire that lasted an hour during the
Revolutionary War became round-the-clock by World War II.
The book's coverage of training and leadership explores the ways
in which military systems have attempted to deal with the problem
of soldiers' fear in battle and contrasts leadership in the linear
and dispersed tactical systems. Chapters on weapons and comradeship
then discuss soldiers' experiences in battle and the relationships
that informed and shaped those experiences.
Hamner highlights the ways in which the "band of brothers"
phenomenon functioned differently in the three wars and shows that
training, conditioning, leadership, and other factors affect
behavior much more than political ideology. He also shows how
techniques to motivate soldiers evolved, from the linear system's
penalties for not fighting to modern efforts to convince soldiers
that participation in combat would actually maximize their own
chances for survival.
Examining why soldiers continue to fight when their strong
instinct is to flee, Enduring Battle challenges long-standing
notions that high ideals and small unit bonds provide sufficient
explanation for their behavior. Offering an innovative way to
analyze the factors that enable soldiers to face the prospect of
death or debilitating wounds, it expands our understanding of the
evolving nature of warfare and its warriors.
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