It is a very old belief that some peoples are naturally good warriors. The fourteenth-century chronicler, Jean Froissart, considered the Scots, for example, ‘a bold, hardy people, very experienced in war’.Footnote 1 The early nineteenth-century soldier and military theorist, Carl von Clausewitz, described ‘the natural qualities of a warlike people’ as bravery, aptitude, powers of endurance, and enthusiasm, and argued that such characteristics might compensate if the professional esprit de corps of an army was lacking.Footnote 2 Still quite recently, some military professionals accepted the existence of naturally warlike peoples. As late as 1973, Shelford Bidwell, for example, puzzled over ‘why some groups of people maintain their martial superiority for so long’. ‘Even today’, he asserted, ‘an impartial English observer would admit that the Scots regiments are the most consistently aggressive and successful’ and he cited the Germans as ‘the most redoubtable of European soldiers’.Footnote 3
Do ‘warlike peoples’ actually exist? This article will address this question through a review of recent historiography investigating the influence of culture on military proficiency. For a long time, the issue was neglected by academics. When studies on combat performance first began to appear on a large scale during the Second World War, they were conducted principally by psychologists and sociologists, whose main interests lay in the functioning of military institutions. Samuel Stouffer's magisterial two-volume study, for example, assessed the methods by which the US army had prepared its troops for battle and supported them in the war zone.Footnote 4 S. L. A. Marshall's Men against fire emphasized the necessity of relevant, realistic training in readying men for the stress of combat.Footnote 5 For Morris Janowitz and Edward A. Shils, whose work was based on interviews with German soldiers captured by the western Allies, military resilience derived principally from the social cohesion of the ‘primary group’ or squad, which acted as a focus of loyalty for its members and supported them in battle both physically and emotionally.Footnote 6 When the so-called ‘new military history’ examining the role of ordinary combatants in war appeared in the 1970s, it naturally inherited this organizational emphasis. John Keegan's pioneering Face of battle drew on crowd psychology and battlefield dynamics in order to explain men's behaviour at the battles of Agincourt, Waterloo, and the Somme.Footnote 7 Tony Ashworth investigated how military structures and technology were used to encourage aggression in the First World War, while John Baynes cited loyalty to the regiment as the prime source of the 2nd Scottish Rifles' robustness at Neuve Chapelle in 1915.Footnote 8 For the Second World War, Martin van Creveld's comparative study of the US and German armies argued that cultural distinctions were relatively unimportant in differentiating the two forces' ‘fighting power’. Instead, the latter's superiority stemmed from its organization and ethos, which were ‘geared to fighting in the narrower sense’ and ‘built around the needs, social and psychological, of the individual fighting man’.Footnote 9 Martial excellence was thus presented as at root organizational and therefore easily transferable from one nation or army to another. At most, as Tarak Barkawi has recently suggested, cultural factors merely add ‘surface colour’ to the ‘core properties of the regular military that generate group solidarity by acting upon general human capacities’.Footnote 10 To proponents of the military-institutional school of thought on combat performance, the ‘naturally warlike people’ is therefore a myth.
The existence of a dialogue between militaries and culture was first recognized within the literature of political science. Most importantly, Cynthia H. Enloe's groundbreaking Ethnic soldiers: state security in divided societies convincingly identified ethnicity and, by implication, culture, as dynamic, flexible qualities which can be manipulated by armed forces for the maintenance of their states' internal stability.Footnote 11 Yet considerations of culture's effect on armies' martial capabilities also hardly featured in this literature. Only lately has military historiography begun to examine this issue and challenge the notion that cultural factors possess only minimal influence over combat behaviour. Most vociferous is John A. Lynn's Battle: a history of combat and culture which aims ‘to bury the universal soldier’. Examining various civilizations between 800 bc and the present day, Lynn distinguishes between societal, military, and strategic cultures. The former encompasses civilian modes of thought and customs, such as conceptions of politics, gender, and religion, many of which may impact on how a society fights. Military culture is usually related to its parent civilian culture, yet remains distinctive, comprising an army's self-definition, operational traditions, and martial doctrine. Strategic culture, which lies outside the scope of this article, governs how nations wage war and derives from the combination of military and socio-political systems and their perceptions of armed conflict.Footnote 12 None of these constructs is static; rather, as Craig M. Cameron has explained, they are ‘the product of continuous discourses that construct and transform overlapping individual identities into multiple collective identities’.Footnote 13 Interest in the discourse between reality and cultural conceptions of conflict has prompted special issues of the International History Review and the Journal of Contemporary History, as well as the launch of a new journal, the Journal of War and Culture Studies.Footnote 14 It is also implicit in much recent, sophisticated literature on combat in the first half of the twentieth century. Whether writing about the imperial German army's operations in Southwest Africa, British citizen-soldiers in the trench warfare of 1914–18 or Soviet troops engaged in the brutal fighting on the Second World War's Eastern Front, historians have demonstrated a heightened sensitivity to the influence of culture on organizations' and individuals' actions in battle.
Most new research into battlefield behaviour and performance during the first half of the twentieth century focuses on only one society and army. This historiographical review is therefore intended to provide a comparative analysis of recent findings on the relationship between culture and combat. It will highlight two particularly important areas of investigation. The first section will examine how military organizations are affected by the culture of their parent societies. A survey of recent literature indicates that although the basic prerequisites of ‘fighting power’ – realistic training, small-unit cohesion, ideological attachment, exemplary leadership, and adequate physical support (sufficient rest, recreation, and rations) – remain constant, cultural factors may contribute considerably to the success with which an army is able to implement them. In its second section, the article will then turn away from military institutions and instead investigate how far cultural distinctions affect individual combat motivation and resilience. Research during the last decade has suggested that peacetime education, occupational structures, and religious beliefs all influence societal attitudes towards armed conflict, affect men's willingness to fight and shape their psychological strategies for coping with battle stress. By drawing together, analysing and comparing the existing, predominantly national literature's conclusions, the article will thus shed greater light on the role of culture in influencing armies' and individuals' combat performances during the first half of the twentieth century.
I
After centuries of shared heritage, some co-operation, and intense competition, western militaries had developed a considerable degree of uniformity in both structure and operational methods by the early 1900s. In Europe and North America, nations fielded standing armies of enormous administrative complexity led by officer corps comprising social or professional elites. Fighting units had been standardized, so that the company, battalion, or division were terms used to denote approximately equivalent formations in every force. Men were assimilated into these organizations through common training techniques with roots in the strict marching drill imposed by Frederick the Great of Prussia on his army in the eighteenth century. Technology also hardly differed, yielding at most minor or temporary advantage.Footnote 15 Despite their considerable commonalities, however, these forces performed radically differently during the bloody first half of the twentieth century. While factors such as doctrinal superiority, material advantage, or the skill of individual commanders have all rightly been cited as contributing to the variable success of armies in the field, much recent research has argued that more subtle cultural factors also possessed considerable influence.Footnote 16
Historians differ in their assessments of how exactly societal cultures affected military structures and ethos. Some have posited a powerful and direct relationship. Markus Ingenlath's comparative examination of the French and German armies before the First World War, for example, emphasizes the role of parent political cultures in shaping military characters. The two forces he studies were institutionally extremely similar, having developed in parallel throughout the nineteenth century. Defeat, in particular, had prompted mutual emulation: the Prussians had copied Napoleon's innovative national conscript force after their reverse at Jena and Auerstedt in 1806, while disaster in 1870–1 prompted the French army to recreate itself on the basis of the now victorious Prussian model. By 1914, both forces were organized along identical lines, employing short-duration peacetime conscription, twenty-year reserve duty, regionally linked divisions and corps, and privileged terms of service for wealthy young men wishing to become officers.Footnote 17 Nonetheless, Ingenlath argues that the monarchical and republican governmental systems and beliefs dividing the two nations fundamentally stamped their armies' ethos. The conservative, aristocratic Prussian officer corps' leadership style stressed unbedingter Gehorsam (unconditional obedience), reflecting the autocratic nature of the regime which it upheld. In contrast, discipline in the French army, where officers were more socially heterogeneous, better able to express personal political opinions, and in charge of democratically minded citizens, was based on the principle of obéissance à condition (conditional obedience). The alleged results of this more liberal regime were closer inter-rank relations, less mistreatment of conscripts, and an emphasis on cultivating individual initiative among other ranks, all of which contributed to the French army's superior resilience and eventual victory during the First World War.Footnote 18
Two flaws exist in Ingenlath's reasoning. The first is that his theory oversimplifies the complexity of societal culture. France's political system may have been open and liberal by the standards of the day but it was by no means the only influence on the country's culture; recent French history, after all, included both the revolutionary terror and Napoleonic Empire. Enlightened republicanism notwithstanding, the army suppressed its first morale crisis – which took place already in August and September 1914 – with an exemplary force never matched by the supposedly more authoritarian imperial German army.Footnote 19 Secondly, as Isabel V. Hull has pointed out, armies themselves produce strong organizational cultures. Indeed, her new book, Absolute destruction, argues that the Wilhelmine military's distinctiveness derived less from its relationship with societal culture than isolation from it. The unique political position of the army under Bismarck's constitution and the prestige it had won in 1870–1 by uniting Germany detached the force from civilian input or supervision. Strategy formulation in the Kaiserreich was blocked institutionally through the separation of the military and civil, and the army was left to develop an extreme internal culture. Contemporary European military culture was in any case rigid, tended towards control mania, and overvalued force, but in the German army, lacking external feedback and under considerable pressure to maintain its exalted social reputation, these traits became particularly pronounced. Officers adopted a radical conception of victory as solely the annihilation or complete prostration of the enemy, attempted to quell anxiety through the imposition of an exaggerated order, and developed an obsessive focus on the purely combative (as opposed to logistical) features of war. The result, as Hull argues through studies of the force's genocidal repression of the Herero uprising in 1904 and its ruthless performance during the First World War, was unrealistic planning, inflexibility, and irrational bloodshed. Unchecked by civilian oversight, the army's standard practices and basic assumptions led it to launch overambitious concentric offensives, abuse civilians in the name of ‘military necessity’, and respond to failure, not by exploring other strategic options, but instead by focusing still more on operational or even tactical minutiae, and repeating its dysfunctional, spiralling scripts of violence to the point of self-destruction. Halted in 1918 by exhaustion and revolution, Wilhelmine military culture survived the defeat and, when harnessed to Nazi racial ideology twenty years later, created murder and suffering on an even greater scale in the Second World War.Footnote 20
Still more than the Wilhelmine military or its French opponent, the German army which fought the Second World War was fundamentally shaped by the regime which fostered it. Whatever its inheritance from the Kaiserreich, much historiography has recounted how the Wehrmacht embraced Nazi ideology explicitly and adapted itself to the principles of unquestioning and absolute loyalty to Hitler and the ‘racial community’ (Volksgemeinschaft). The belief in (or at least acceptance of) Nazi values demanded by the Third Reich of its citizens was also cultivated and enforced within the army. As in wider society, propaganda became a key tool by which troops' allegiance and obedience were secured.Footnote 21 In itself, this was not novel; the imperial army had already sought to guide its men's attitudes and bolster morale by so-called Vaterländischer Unterricht (Patriotic Instruction) from 1917, and other forces also made use of propaganda during the Second World War.Footnote 22 As Frank Vossler has argued, however, indoctrination in the Wehrmacht was considerably more ambitious, especially after the Stalingrad defeat in early 1943, when an unprecedented effort began to create explicitly Nazi soldiers. Divisional welfare officers, later renamed ‘National Socialist Leadership Officers’ (NSFOs), were appointed to conduct political education, a new propaganda arm was created, and efforts were made to instil troops with the ‘strength of fanaticism’ and foster an ‘intractable hatred and readiness to annihilate’.Footnote 23 Moreover, under National Socialist influence, discipline too changed radically. As Christoph Jahr has observed, the Kaiser's force had been lenient by contemporary standards, executing only eighteen deserters (and forty-eight men in total) during the First World War.Footnote 24 In contrast, Manfred Messerschmidt has shown in his recent research that, determined to avoid any repeat of 1918's morale crisis and capitulation, the Nazified Wehrmacht judiciary punished military crime harshly as a betrayal of the Führer and Volksgemeinschaft. The death penalty was dispensed to as many as 22,000 soldiers during the Second World War for a miscellany of offences, including mere defeatism.Footnote 25
Already twenty years ago, Omer Bartov suggested that this totalitarian combination of intense indoctrination and punitive discipline explained both the Wehrmacht's formidable resilience and its extreme brutality. Arguing that the exceptionally cohesive ‘primary groups’ cited by traditional military-institutional interpretations to account for the army's performance could not have survived beyond early 1942 in the murderous fighting against the Soviet Union, he claimed instead that fanatical Nazi belief had been the mainstay of the army's fierce resistance until 1945. The primitive conditions on the Eastern Front and vicious discipline had terrorized and brutalized men, causing them to accept the view of the war provided by Nazi indoctrination as a desperate struggle for racial survival.Footnote 26 More recent research has both modified this view and provided greater understanding of the relationship between societal culture and military institutions. Klaus Latzel's examination of thousands of soldiers' letters concluded that although German troops evinced fervent loyalty to Hitler, identified with the image of martial manhood promoted by the Nazis, and did adopt their racist vocabulary when referring to Soviet partisans and civilians, the hate propaganda against the Red army made little impact and the Third Reich's political goals were not internalized.Footnote 27 Rüdiger Overmans's detailed analysis of casualty statistics has also shifted the debate back towards military-institutional explanations of the army's resilience by indicating that the backbone of old soldiers and NCOs which sustained the Wehrmacht's ‘primary groups’ suffered catastrophic losses only in 1943–4.Footnote 28 In fact, however, as recent work by Thomas Kühne implies, any sharp dichotomy between ideology and ‘primary groups’ is false. The Wehrmacht proved so resilient primarily because the cultural values which the Nazis established with their ideology actually reinforced traditional military institutions. Drawing on a mythologized memory of the First World War's Frontgemeinschaft (front community), the Nazis placed a quintessentially military value, ‘comradeship’, at the centre of their social revolution. The unremitting promotion of this virtue within the German Volksgemeinschaft, and especially among front soldiers, worked to strengthen the army's resilience by actually facilitating the formation of cohesive small units capable of pressuring their members into both fighting and committing atrocities.Footnote 29
A comparison with the Wehrmacht's principal opponent during the Second World War, the Red army, reinforces the argument that cultural specificities could be crucial in either retarding or accentuating the functioning of the standard military institutions analysed by older literature. As Catherine Merridale has demonstrated in her new book, Ivan's war, the Soviet military bore much in common with Hitler's force. The product of another totalitarian regime which placed little value on human life and much emphasis on ideological conformity, it initially motivated its troops through a similar but more extreme mix of indoctrination and harsh discipline. In contrast to the late appearance and limited numbers of the German NSFOs, every Soviet regiment and battalion possessed a political commissar, and each company a so-called Politruk (political officer) responsible for troops' ideological purity, already at the opening of hostilities. During the war, moreover, no fewer than 158,000 men were sentenced to death for military offences. Far from ensuring fighting excellence comparable to that of the Wehrmacht, however, Merridale blames this combination for the Red army's near-defeat in 1941. Cultural distinctions appear to have been responsible for the difference: while the Nazi cultivation of comradeship within the Volksgemeinschaft strengthened troops' cohesion, Soviet culture, especially the legacy of suspicion from the 1930s, conflicted with the traditional tenets of military excellence. Red army junior officers, shadowed by Politruks and mindful of the recent purging of their ranks, were terrified of political error and provided poor leadership. Cohesive ‘primary groups’ were actually discouraged for fear that close relationships between soldiers might lead to subversive activity. Moreover, far from instilling men with Communist fervour, the emphasis on political purity merely impaired military readiness. Only a remarkably sudden alteration in the Red army's priorities turned its fortunes: in the autumn of 1942, political concerns were finally pushed aside and traditional military methods of improving fighting power were instead prioritized. Combat officers' status and authority were raised while the Politruks lost their privileges within the command structure, the value of comradeship began to be promoted to the men, and new stress was placed on thorough, realistic training.Footnote 30
In contrast to continental European armies, which throughout the twentieth century's first half were tied to their parent societies through conscription, the British army was a smaller professional volunteer force, expanding into a citizen army only during the crises of the World Wars. Although apparently an aberration, there were good geopolitical and strategic reasons for this choice of military. First, Britain's island location meant that unlike continental powers, the country could rely principally on its navy for home defence. Secondly, as Hew Strachan has pointed out, the army's primary duty in this period was to garrison the vast British empire, a role which short-service conscripts were poorly suited to perform due to the great distances and acclimatization involved.Footnote 31 Finally, cultural factors were also relevant: in George Q. Flynn's view, the low prestige associated with soldiering and the high value placed on minimal government and individual rights by British society made the introduction of peacetime conscription politically impossible for much of the period.Footnote 32
The British army's greater distance from mainstream society meant that it was even less likely to reflect civilian values directly than its German or French counterparts. Its exceptionally rigid command doctrine, which cultivated obedience and control over initiative and was conditioned by the unwillingness of any but the least intelligent and worst educated to enter its ranks, contrasted starkly with Britons' favoured stereotype of themselves as an open-minded and freedom-loving people.Footnote 33 Similarly, the entrenched liberalism in British culture was less important in shaping the army's disciplinary system during the First World War than its own experience of hard colonial campaigning with lower-class soldiers, with the result that it proved far more ready than its enemy to exploit the deterrent effects of the death penalty, executing 346 military offenders.Footnote 34
Nonetheless, certain mollifying factors halted the force from heading in the same direction as the German army. As Hull herself has pointed out, Britain's own political culture acted as a policing mechanism. Effective parliamentary supervision and a well-informed public were able to arrest or at least limit excesses, notably in the Boer War.Footnote 35 After the first mass experience of military service between 1914 and 1918, they also modified its disciplinary system, so that in 1929 the death penalty was abolished for all military crimes except mutiny, for which no soldier was executed during the Second World War.Footnote 36 Additionally, however, there were factors internal to the army which shaped its development and fighting style. Most important was its comparative decentralization. A general staff, which Hull characterized in the German case as the ‘main arbiter’ of military culture after 1871, was only established in the British army in 1906.Footnote 37 Among its officers, the strong corps identity or sense of caste found in continental armies was totally lacking.Footnote 38 Instead, it was the regiment which defined British military culture. As Hew Strachan and David French have explained, this formation gained a unique importance after 1881, when territorialized multi-battalion regiments were created. These quickly became attached to civilian local identities, raising the army's popularity and profile within the nation. Dispersal across the globe meant that their component battalions acted as substitute military ‘families’, with the result that regiments also became professional soldiers' primary source of allegiance. These parochial loyalties and accompanying fragmentation helped to ensure that the army in Britain did not become a politically destabilizing force.Footnote 39 Moreover, they also affected its combat performance. With no single mission for which to prepare and most officer training being conducted within regiments rather than centrally, the British army was unable to reproduce the doctrinal uniformity which made the German officer corps so formidable on the battlefield. In consequence, its units were often more variable in their performance and began major wars with a training deficit, but the army as a whole was also probably less vulnerable to the institutional blindness and ‘group think’ which Hull argues led the Germans into repetitive spirals of irrational violence.Footnote 40
Societal culture therefore impacted on militaries in a number of ways. It contributed to shaping their form and composition: officer corps, for example, might embody the aristocracy's traditional warrior function in more conservative societies or reflect a socialist, racial, or democratic concern for equality of opportunity. It also played a role in shaping their ethos, most obviously in the case of totalitarian societies' armies, which absorbed their parent regimes' emphasis on absolute belief and indifference towards individual human life. Never, however, was societal culture alone in forming armies' characters: international competition and collaboration, geopolitical circumstance, and military organizations' own traditions, history, and mission all heavily influenced their internal cultures. Examinations of the French and Italian armies during the Second World War have warned that crude stereotypes about (un)martial cultures are far less likely to explain poor battlefield performance than purely military variables such as incompetent leadership, substandard equipment, and inadequate training.Footnote 41 Yet this does not mean that societal culture was insignificant: rather, it exerted its influence through those military institutions identified by older literature as providing the key to combat efficiency. The Red army and Wehrmacht used similar extreme means of motivating their troops, but with initially very different results due to their diverse societal cultures. French Second World War armoured equipment, as Julian Jackson has observed, was partly influenced by political-ideological considerations, while the British decision to specialize martial functions within a professional military ensured that pragmatism would be mixed with the preoccupations of the force's own internal culture.Footnote 42 Societal culture, while therefore not directly determining combat performance, could influence the structure and character of armies enough to hinder or accentuate their functioning. In the fiercely competitive and emulative social Darwinist world of the early twentieth-century military, this could be decisive.
II
The long belief in ‘warrior peoples’ is rooted less in the diverse military organizations created by societies than in the influence of different cultures on soldiers themselves. The popular stereotypes of peoples in conflict are hugely problematic, for they exaggerate national groups' homogeneity while simultaneously disguising their often considerable similarities with members of other warring parties. Additionally, as much research has demonstrated, martial qualities have often been invented, embellished, and mythologized for political reasons. The exploits of Australian and Canadian manhood during the First World War, for example, were seized upon to provide these countries with heroic national foundation stories, yet closer examination by historians has revealed that their soldiers' undoubted battlefield prowess owed less to supposedly distinctive cultural values such as ‘mateship’ and egalitarianism than military advantages in training and organization.Footnote 43 Similarly, as Terence Denman has argued, persistent stereotypes of Irishmen as tough, impulsive, and ferocious in the attack, yet lacking the discipline and tenacity for good defence, were not grounded in reality. Instead, Irish nationalists promoted the myth's more positive aspects for reasons of patriotic pride, while for the English, its suggestion of Celtic inconsistency and emotionality both reinforced and was supported by the claim that Ireland's people were temperamentally unsuited for responsible self-government.Footnote 44
Nonetheless, other historians have increasingly asserted that culture did impact on individuals' perceptions and behaviour in battle. Lynn, for example, contends that diverse American and Japanese attitudes to death were reflected in their soldiers' very different fighting styles during the Second World War.Footnote 45 Other historians, notably Craig M. Cameron and John W. Dower, have argued that the incitement of ingrained racist attitudes within both societies made their clash in the Pacific especially brutal.Footnote 46 Combat motivation may be conditioned by cultural values: as long ago as 1980, the sociologist, Stephen Wesbrook, stressed that military efficiency in modern armies depends on their soldiers possessing an attachment to their unit or ‘national sociopolitical system’ and some form of moral involvement with their goals.Footnote 47 Even psychological resilience may be influenced by societal norms. Ben Shephard's recent study of twentieth-century Anglo-American military psychiatry contrasts past generations' stoicism with what he styles as a post-Vietnam ‘culture of trauma’.Footnote 48 A commentator on the British army, Alan Hawley, has similarly compared today's recruits unfavourably with those of a century ago. The decline of class and religious certainties, he argues, has meant that modern society places less worth on military qualities such as ‘selflessness’ and ‘commitment to the common good’ and more value on individualism, with the result that soldiers are now more vulnerable to combat stress than their predecessors.Footnote 49
Undoubtedly, military values were far more strongly ingrained in European society one hundred years ago than they are today. Older historiography argued exhaustively that contemporary education systems were designed to instil nationalism, a heavily romanticized vision of military service, and even xenophobia into their pupils.Footnote 50 The military-style youth groups providing boys with shooting practice, marching drill, and field craft have also been examined in detail.Footnote 51 Especially within the culture of the Kaiserreich, war glorification occupied a central position according to older German literature: admiration for military titles and uniforms, universal conscription, and the veneration of 1870–1 war veterans were all thought to have encouraged a popular bellicosity most clearly expressed in the infamous, but now recognized as largely mythical, ‘war enthusiasm’ of August 1914.Footnote 52 Curiously, few historians were prepared to argue that this militaristic culture advantaged Germany in wartime. Bernd Ulrich, for example, contended that it engendered unrealistic expectations of battle which caused a rash of psychiatric disorders among idealistic war volunteers in 1914, while Jahr suggested rather vaguely that it made German troops less flexible than their British opponents, thereby contributing to the army's collapse.Footnote 53 More recent work revises these conclusions, however. Ute Frevert's excellent study of German conscription over two centuries reveals that the transfer of military values was far more subtle than hitherto presented; conceptions of masculinity, for example, became closely linked to military service, while efforts to use the army as the ‘school of the nation’ may have had some success in spreading conservative political attitudes and loyalty to the monarchy.Footnote 54 Peacetime army training had practical benefits in war, conferring martial skills which, Strachan has argued, raised the standard of German troops above that of their enemies in 1914.Footnote 55 More speculatively, militaristic cultures may also have improved combat performance simply by encouraging men to invest emotionally in a warrior identity. Recent work by Heather Streets on nineteenth-century British ‘martial race’ ideology is suggestive in this regard. Observing that neither Punjabi Sikhs nor Scottish Highlanders were ethnically homogeneous and that the Nepalese Gurkha identity was an invention of the British themselves, she argues that these so-called ‘martial race’ troops may nonetheless have been superior to other soldiers because they absorbed and strove to live up to their idealized representation as an ultramasculine elite. Analysing Highlanders' writings, she concludes that ‘the army's use of martial language – with its attendant expectations of valour and loyalty – co-opted men into behaviours that ultimately served the state’.Footnote 56
If militaristic cultures do indeed produce superior warriors, then the mid-century's totalitarian dictatorships were especially advantaged. As Frevert has observed, the Third Reich's education system was based on the precept that ‘men were to be trained as soldiers from their earliest childhood’. Boys passed through the pseudo-military Hitler Youth (Hitler Jugend) and then often undertook National Labour Service (Reichsarbeitsdienst) before being conscripted.Footnote 57 The experience of communal living and discipline provided by this education and the values of ‘camaraderie, sacrifice, loyalty, duty, honour, endurance, courage, obedience’, and racial superiority which it extolled eased young Germans' transition to military life.Footnote 58 Soviet children were subject to similar influences: Stalin's regime portrayed military service as an honour and eulogized the hero's death in battle. Paramilitary instruction was provided by organizations such as Osoaviakhim, the society for air and chemical defence, which counted three million members by 1938 and ran army-style camps.Footnote 59 Of course, as has already been argued, other cultural trends may have worked against any martial advantages conferred by such upbringing. Nonetheless, historians of the German army in particular contend that it did bolster resilience and motivation among Hitler's soldiers. Bartov, for example, stressed that Nazi indoctrination in the formative years of their lives provided the foundation for many young men's fanatical devotion to the Führer and readiness to sacrifice themselves for his racial vision.Footnote 60 Vossler supports this opinion. Observing that propaganda programmes in the Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS were virtually identical by 1944, he attributes the latter's stiffer resistance during the war's final year instead to its elite identity and the greater youth of its recruits, whose exposure to National Socialist education had left them more prepared to die for the regime than middle-aged army conscripts raised before 1933.Footnote 61
Although the current historiographical consensus indicates that the imposition of explicitly martial ideals on a society could help to prepare its men for war, the effect on battlefield performance of cultural values not directly originating from the military is more difficult to assess. Work on the quickly raised British citizen army in the First World War has tackled this question, however. Attempting to explain the force's formidable resilience when so few of its members possessed previous military experience, historians have sought the answer in the structure of British peacetime society. Gary Sheffield, for example, has suggested that the paternalism–deference exchange which governed the country's rigid class relations was transferred directly to the trenches, ensuring harmonious interaction between upper-class officers and working-class other ranks.Footnote 62 Jay Winter argues that the highly industrialized nature of British society stamped its population with a strong discipline, while John Bourne contends that the traditions of impassivity and mutual solidarity which developed out of factory employment's hardship, boredom, and subordination helped to support workers once in the army.Footnote 63 J. G. Fuller's pioneering work also presented working-class culture as the key to the resilience of Britain's citizen-soldiers, emphasizing particularly the importance of music hall humour and sport in providing men with strategies to understand and cope with the horrendous conditions on the Western Front.Footnote 64 Middle-class men may have found adaptation to conditions in the trenches more difficult: Helen McCartney's recent examination of two Liverpool Territorial battalions notes that their middle-class complement needed time to acclimatize to the physical demands of soldiering and initially lacked practical skills. Nonetheless, they proved intelligent and highly motivated soldiers, allowing the units to operate with a relaxed disciplinary system.Footnote 65 As work by Janet Watson demonstrates, the readiness of these Liverpool men to defend (as they saw it) their city and country from invasion was not exceptional; through their education, a strongly ingrained sense of patriotic duty was widespread among Britons, particularly the middle classes. The satisfaction of discharging this perceived obligation and proving one's manhood in battle meant, she notes, that for many ‘service could lead to fulfilment as well as disillusionment’.Footnote 66
The conservative nature of British society in 1914 therefore instilled its men with many qualities useful in war: patriotism, discipline, a natural sense of hierarchy, and – a virtue associated less often with the regular military – humour. American society twenty-five years later was very different: less hierarchical and more individualistic. The result, according to Gerald F. Linderman, was that US troops fighting during the Second World War possessed neither the same consciousness of ‘duty’ nor the socially ingrained discipline of European soldiers. Sometimes this could be advantageous: American soldiers were particularly good at technical problem-solving, imaginatively adapting arms and equipment to resolve specific logistical or operational difficulties. Often, however, it hindered the army's operation. Lacking a naturally paternalistic officer corps, inter-rank relations appear to have been far more strained than in the British army of the First World War, and the men's inclination to resist discipline impaired group cohesion, which ultimately cost lives.Footnote 67 Still, like the earlier British citizen-force, Americans did find civilian experiences useful in interpreting their environment and strengthening their resilience. For most US servicemen, the war was understood in civilian terms as a ‘job’. The positive values which these men, for whom the mass unemployment of the Great Depression was still a recent memory, attached to work were directed towards the ultimate ‘job’ of winning the war. The concept encouraged soldiers to accept military authority and take pride in even mundane tasks, linked front and home by providing a common point of reference, and delimited the horror and violence of combat, cast it in a familiar and more comprehensible light and thereby made it more manageable.Footnote 68
While many historians have concentrated on how experience of civilian employment provided soldiers with coping strategies in war, other recent research has focused on the support offered by religion. The church could legitimate participation in conflict: as Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau and Annette Becker have asserted, the moral authority of Christianity combined with national sentiment underpinned the French war effort during 1914–18, turning the conflict into a ‘crusade’ of civilization versus barbarism.Footnote 69 Personal faith was also extremely important in sustaining many individuals in battle. Becker has explained elsewhere how French combatants in the First World War derived considerable comfort from both religion and superstition: shared faith acted as an emotional conduit between combatants and their families, lent a sense of security, and offered comfort in death.Footnote 70 Americans fighting throughout the twentieth century were, as Peter Kindsvatter has observed, more likely to regard organized religion's efforts to cast armed conflict as a ‘crusade’ with scepticism. Nonetheless, personal belief in salvation or divine protection constituted their most important psychological support in battle: more than four-fifths of US infantrymen interviewed in Italy during the Second World War stated that prayer ‘helped a lot’ in combat, and another survey discovered that a similar proportion felt that active service had increased their faith in God.Footnote 71 Some historians have even suggested that religious convictions actually made men better soldiers. Michael Snape notes that many of the British Expeditionary Force's best units, including the 15th (Scottish), 36th (Ulster), 51st (Highland), and 56th (London) divisions, were recruited from communities with a particularly high proportion of churchgoers and also remarks on the fact that the First World War's only double Victoria Cross winner, Captain Noel Chavasse, was a ‘staunch churchman, a son of the Bishop of Liverpool and the twin brother of an army chaplain’.Footnote 72 Richard Schweitzer similarly concludes in his examination of American and British troops' beliefs that Christianity played a crucial role in upholding morale. The common conviction among First World War commanders that the pious made good soldiers is, he argues, borne out by the frequency with which loss of religious faith was accompanied by disillusionment with the patriotic cause.Footnote 73
Despite the cultural specificities which these studies highlight, a comparative reading of recent literature on combat experience reveals that far more united than divided different peoples in battle during the first half of the twentieth century. Ideological attachment, however vague, motivated troops of all nationalities: if many Germans saw the world ‘through Nazi ideological filters’, on the Soviet side, even shtrafniki – men in punishment battalions – were fighting out of love for the Motherland.Footnote 74 As Audoin-Rouzeau has stressed, ‘national feeling’ also lay at the heart of French resilience between 1914 and 1918, and even US troops, long portrayed as totally indifferent to great causes, fought during the Second World War because they felt they were on the side of ‘right’, vaguely associated with their own democracy, against ‘wrong’.Footnote 75 All studies similarly testify to the importance of social support for men in battle: Linderman finds that comradeship ‘met needs of practicality, of emotion, and – even amid combat – of idealism’ for Americans, while French argues that British soldiers in both World Wars regarded their regiments less as impersonal institutions than diminishing groups of comrades.Footnote 76 Individual coping strategies too appear to have been international. Perhaps due to a common need to control the dangerous and unpredictable environment, most soldiers, regardless of their previous religious convictions, embraced the supernatural; even atheistic Soviet troops superstitiously wore crucifixes and crossed themselves before entering combat.Footnote 77 Humour too was not only universally appreciated to quash fear and humanize horror but, probably due to the powerful sense of disempowerment generated by the depersonalized fighting, appears to have been similarly dark and macabre among all combatants.Footnote 78 Other adaptive strategies were also held in common: the ability to recognize threat through sound or smell, gradual emotional desensitization, often helped by alcohol, and the adoption of an often increasingly fatalistic attitude seem less culturally conditioned than simple human responses to intense stress.Footnote 79
There is no doubt that some cultures were more martial than others. Europeans before 1914, especially on the continent, were closely tied to the army through education, popular sentiment, and, most importantly, conscription. The totalitarian societies of the 1930s and 1940s were even more strongly permeated by military values. How far this affected their soldiers' performance in war is, however, debatable. On one hand, the practical skills which men learnt in peacetime army service were certainly beneficial when they entered combat. Some evidence also exists to suggest that the adoption of martial identities may also have raised resilience and motivation. On the other hand, as work on the Soviet Union and Britain testifies, armies' efficiency could be impeded or supported by cultural qualities originating from sources unrelated to the military. Even American society, often portrayed as pragmatic, anti-hierarchical, and individualistic, supplied its soldiers with a cause to uphold and a framework through which to interpret battle experiences. Moreover, far from being distinctive, western peoples responded to combat remarkably similarly. Minor differences in psychological coping strategies did exist but a comparative overview of the recent literature strongly suggests that, as Keegan remarked thirty years ago, ‘what battles have in common is human’.Footnote 80
III
Older historiography on combat performance during the first half of the twentieth century presented fighting power as the product of military institutions which supported and motivated men by acting upon universal human psychological characteristics. Behaviour under fire was believed to derive principally from military organization and battlefield conditions, with the result that the existence of ‘naturally warlike peoples’ was hardly considered. Recent literature, in contrast, has tended to reject this stance, arguing instead that military efficiency was influenced heavily by societal culture. Some peoples, it implies, may well have been ‘naturally’ better prepared for war than their rivals.
The new work can be divided into two strands. First, much research has concentrated on the effect of societal culture in shaping men's responses to combat. It indicates that some societies did indeed equip individuals better for battle: a militarized upbringing, for example, could help to prepare a man for army life, perhaps encourage him to conform to a masculine stereotype favouring martial ideals, and also cultivate strong ideological convictions useful for generating combat motivation. Nonetheless, two factors indicate that these advantages can be overstated. First, as French's work demonstrates, almost irrespective of upbringing, effective armies were fully capable of inculcating peaceable civilians with martial identities through military training and socialization, moulding them into soldiers.Footnote 81 Secondly, the predominance of studies focusing on only one army and society has sometimes led historians to overestimate the distinctiveness of their subjects. A comparative analysis of current literature in fact suggests that men reacted to the danger and disempowerment of modern combat in remarkably similar ways. Certain military institutions do indeed appear to have been universally effective precisely because, under fire, common humanity rather than cultural diversity defined the psychological needs and coping strategies of all peoples.
As the second strand of the historiography demonstrates, however, societal culture was by no means irrelevant in determining combat performance, for it helped to shape the institutions guiding, supporting, and coercing men on the battlefield. While the ingredients of martial excellence – realistic training, small-unit cohesion, ideological attachment, exemplary leadership, and adequate physical support – appear to have been universal, armies' widely differing abilities to implement and embody these factors was greatly determined by their societal and political environments. Ideology, history, or popular sentiment might influence a military's composition and organization, shape its management of discipline and training, and accentuate or retard the effectiveness of its supportive institutions. Despite their basic similarities in structure, armies' ethos and functioning, and thereby the behaviour and resilience of their soldiers, were therefore profoundly influenced by societal culture.
Much research on the relationship between culture and combat during the first half of the twentieth century is still needed. More comparative studies would sharpen historians' understanding of societal cultures' role in distinguishing armies' and individuals' behaviour in battle from that of their allies and rivals. Especially desired are academic examinations of non-western militaries and soldiers. Current historiography still concentrates on European armies during the two World Wars – above all on the British Expeditionary Force between 1914 and 1918 and the Wehrmacht between 1939 and 1945. Comparison with Asian, African, or South American soldiers and armies fighting in these and other conflicts would confirm whether the similarities observable among western troops in battle are indeed universal human reactions or rather traceable to the fact that the cultural differences between these combatants were comparatively slight. Finally, closer examination of the relationship between strategy and culture could be undertaken: in an age of total war, the ‘naturally warlike people’ was often not the best prepared for battle but rather that which mastered the diverse diplomatic and economic demands of warfare. Emphatically, the last word on culture and combat has not yet been written.Footnote 82
