There was a letter to the editor in Wednesday's Edmonton Journal that calls for rebuttal. The Journal doesn't print my letters because it reserves that space strictly for mouth-breathing leftists whose idea of a rhetorical masterstroke is to call George Bush a moron.
So I thought I'd print it here. Alas, there's no link to the original letter, but to summarize:
War is evil. So evil that even the evil soldiers are so revolted that only one out of four pulls the trigger on his evil weapon, because the majority of evil soldiers cannot bear to kill. Until the evil Pentagon got into the act, and designed evil deprogramming techniques that, by Vietnam, induced 90% of its evil troops to shoot to kill.
Now this is nonsense on stilts; but I recognized where it came from. It's a line peddled by Dave Grossman, who first came to prominence in the wake of the Columbine shooting. Grossman is a former Lt. Colonel in the U.S. Army, an assistant professor of psychology (or Behavioral Sciences, anyway -- his CV doesn't indicate a psychology degree) at West Point, and the founder of the most unfortunately-named discipline of Killology, which purports to explain the nature of violence and killing, usually by blaming it on video games. (Yes, he's in big demand as an "expert witness" these days.)
I knew that what Grossman was dishing out was for the most part bullshit, but I couldn't entirely dismiss it, because I'd seen those same stats somewhere myself, and they seemed plausible.
Not for the reason that Grossman suggests -- that men are pacific creatures more tempted to pick daisies than piss off an opponent. A few moments contemplating history should disabuse you of that notion; and if that doesn't do it, the crack of a bullet by your ear surely will.
The commentator that I read was more inclined to attribute it to the average soldier's sense of self-preservation.
What the study also showed was that soldiers manning machine guns (or BAR or Bren gunners) or flamethrowers or mortars were far more likely to use their weapons, as were troops close in their vicinity, or under the direct command of an officer.
The poor dumb infantryman at the end of the line was quite naturally reluctant to stick his head up to snap off one or two wildly unaimed shots that could have no appreciable effect on a firefight.
Soldiers that can lay down steady suppressive fire are much more likely to engage the enemy, as was borne out with the experience of assault troops or commandos, armed with submachine guns.
Even the American M-1 rifle was a substantial improvement in this regard, with its semi-automatic fire. Try (as a mental experiment, only, unless you want to really freak out the neighbors) sprinting across a road, with eighty pounds of kit on your back, while working the bolt on a Lee-Enfield or Mauser. It's as awkward as hell and almost impossible to fire quickly or accurately enough to cover your advance.
I tried to find the original study, but the U.S. Army publishes a lot of stuff, and I gave up after a few desultory searches. (Nor was I going to buy a copy of Grossman's book, on the chance that he'd have footnoted it.)
But the letter-writer mentioned a name -- General S.L.A. Marshall -- which rekindled my interest. That is someone I recognized, and a couple of minutes with Google turned up Grossman's source.
Marshall was one of the most eminent American military historians of the century, and a very good writer on the nitty-gritty of combat. But unfortunately this particular claim of trigger-shy troops was based on scanty empirical data, as later historians discovered:
From The Royal United Services Institute for Defence Studies:
— S.L.A. Marshall, 1947
"Marshall's ratio of fire...appears to have been an invention."
— Roger J. Spiller, 1988
...
Source: Roger J. Spiller, "S.L.A. Marshall and the Ratio of Fire", The RUSI Journal, Winter 1988, pages 63-71. The article is copyright © RUSI Journal.
The author's bio in this article read as follows: "Professor Roger J. Spiller is Deputy Director of the Combat Studies Institute, US Army Command and General Staff College, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas."
Since then, Dr. Spiller authored "Not War But Like War: The American Intervention in Lebanon" (Combat Studies Institute, US Army Command and General Staff College, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, January 1981). He also served as an editor for the American Library's World War II journalism volumes.
...
In 1947, a slim book entitled Men Against Fire: The Problem of Battle Command in Future War made the reputation of S.L.A. Marshall.
During the war, Marshall was employed as a popular historian with a newspaperman's talent for getting a story through interviews. Indeed, the best parts of Men Against Fire are soldier's folk wisdom about staying alive.
But that aspect of his book did not make Marshall's reputation as a social scientist of the battlefield. The book's central argument did. Marshall stated:
In an average experienced infantry company in an average day's action, the number engaging with any and all weapons was approximately 15 per cent of the total strength. In the most aggressive companies, under the most intense local pressure, the figure rarely rose above 25 percent of the total strength from the opening to the close of the action.
Marshall's claims certainly raised eyebrows in disbelief. Significantly, his "ratio of fire" does not appear in the official history series, The United States in World War II. Nonetheless, Marshall found many followers among the gullible. It wasn't until 1988 that a scholarly article set the record straight.
The article, "S.L.A. Marshall and the Ratio of Fire," appeared in the British journal, The Royal United Services Institute for Defence Studies. The author was professor Roger J. Spiller, and his task was an unpleasant one because he believed that Marshall was basically right about the primacy of ground combat. Nonetheless, Spiller pulled no punches. He writes:
had no use for the polite equivocations of scholarly discourse. His way of proving doubtful propositions was to state them more forcefully. Righteousness was always more important for Marshall than evidence....
The foundation of his conviction was not scholarship but his own military experience, experience that he inflated or revised as the situation warranted. Marshall often hinted broadly that he had commanded infantry in combat, but his service dossier shows no such service. He frequently held that he had been the youngest officer in the American Expeditionary Forces during the Great War, but this plays with the truth as well. Marshall enlisted in 1917 and served with the 315th Engineer Regiment—then part of the 90th Infantry Division—and won a commission after the Armistice, when rapid demobilization required very junior officers to command "casual" and depot companies as the veteran officers went home. Marshall rarely drew such distinctions, however, leaving his audiences to infer that he had commanded in the trenches. Later in life, he remarked that he had seen five wars as a soldier and 18 as a correspondent, but his definitions of war and soldiering were rather elastic. That he had seen a great deal of soldiers going about their deadly work was no empty boast, however. This mantle of experience, acquired in several guises, protected him throughout his long and prolific career as a military writer, and his aggressive style intimidated those who would doubt his arguments. Perhaps inevitably, his readers would mistake his certitude for authority.
What of Marshall's claims for his research in the field during World War II? Spiller writes:
In Men Against Fire Marshall claims to have interviewed "approximately" 400 infantry rifle companies in the Pacific and in Europe, but that number tended to change over the years. In 1952, the number had somehow grown to 603 companies; five years later his sample had declined to "something over 500" companies. Those infantry companies—whatever their actual number—were his laboratories, the infantrymen his test subjects, and at the focal point of his research was the ratio of fire. "Why the subject of fire ratios under combat conditions has not been long and searchingly explored, I don't know," Marshall wrote. "I suspect that it is because in earlier wars there had never existed the opportunity for systematic collection of data." [Emphasis added.]
Opportunity aplenty existed in Europe: more than 1200 rifle companies did their work between June 1944 and V-E day, 10 months later. But Marshall required by his own standard two and sometimes three days with a company to examine one day's combat. By the most generous calculation, Marshall would have finished "approximately" 400 interviews sometime in October or November 1946, or at about the time he was writing Men Against Fire.
This calculation assumes, however, that of all the questions Marshall might ask the soldiers of a rifle company during his interviews, he would unfailingly want to know who had fired his weapon and who had not. Such a question, posed interview after interview, would have signalled that Marshall was on a particular line of inquiry, and that regardless of the other information Marshall might discover, he was devoted to investigating this facet of combat performance. John Westover, usually in attendance during Marshall's sessions with the troops, does not recall Marshall's ever asking this question. Nor does Westover recall Marshall ever talking about ratios of weapons usage in their many private conversations. Marshall's own personal correspondence leaves no hint that he was ever collecting statistics. His surviving field notebooks show no signs of statistical compilations that would have been necessary to deduce a ratio as precise as Marshall reported later in Men Against Fire. The "systematic collection of data" that made Marshall's ratio of fire so authoritative appears to have been an invention.
Puncturing the Marshall legend was Dr. Spiller's duty rather than his pleasure. He ended his piece this way:
History has a savage way about it. A reputation may be made or unmade when history seizes upon part of a life and reduces it to caricature. S.L.A. Marshall was one of the most important commentators on the soldier's world in this century. The axiom upon which so much of his reputation has been built overshadows his real contribution. Marshall's insistence that modern warfare is best understood through the medium of those who actually do the fighting stands as a challenge to the disembodied, mechanistic approaches that all too often are the mainstay of military theorists and historians alike.
DR. SPILLER'S BIBLIOGRAPHY AND SOURCES
The S.L.A. Marshall Military History Collection at the University of Texas at El Paso is the main repository for Marshall's official and personal correspondence, draft manuscripts, and ephemera.
A considerable body of correspondence between Marshall and B.H. Liddell Hart is collected at the B.H. Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives, King's College, London.
The US Army Military History Institute, US Army War College, Carlisle Barracks, PA, holds several of Marshall's field notebooks.
For Marshall on Marshall, see almost anything he wrote but specifically: S.L.A. Marshall, "Genesis to Revelation," Military Review, Vol. 52, No. 2 (February 1972); "The Human Equation in Combat", in S.L.A. Marshall at Fort Leavenworth: Five Lectures at the US Army Command and General Staff College, ed. by Roger J. Spiller (US Army Command and General Staff College, Fort Leavenworth, KS, 1980).
And...
Dale L. Walker, interview with S.L.A. Marshall, 18 May 1972, typed transcript, in S.L.A. Marshall Military History Collection, Library of the University of Texas at El Paso, Texas.
For more on John Westover, see: John G. Westover, "Describing the Colonel," Newsletter of the S.L.A. Marshall Military History Collection, No. 11 (Summer 1985), pp. 1-4 ; "The Colonel Goes Interviewing," ibid., No. 12 (Winter 1985-1986), pp. 1-3; and "Marshall's Impact," ibid., No. 13 (Summer 1986), pp. 1-3.
For a colleague's assessment (pre-Spiller) the "the ratio of fire" was probably hokum see: Hugh M. Cole, "S.L.A. Marshall (1900-1977): In Memoriam", Parameters, Vol. 8 (March 1978, p. 4).
I think that what Marshall was reporting was intuitively correct (possibly he later realized that he should have studied it more intensively), but for the reasons I outlined above, not Grossman's fanciful reworking of it for purposes that I consider essentially dishonest.
And for someone who boasts of being Professor of Military Science and Chair of the Department of Military Science, Arkansas State University, 1994-1998 on his website, you'd think that Grossman would at least have known about the controversy over Marshall's claim.
Certainly he's counting on the general public being unaware of it.
