Abstract
The desire to probe the existence of “war” bravery in the trench combat of World War I concerned Joseph Shapiro, a private soldier and veteran of World War I all his adult life. He wrote the poem that heads this chapter in 1919, and reworked it in 1976 before sending his papers to Carlisle Barracks.
Is there such a thing as “war” bravery?
I would say yes.
I witnessed many an incident, I must confess,
Soldiers be they black or white, Americans all,
Who had answered their country’s call.1
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Notes
Gerald F. Linderman, Embattled Courage: The Experience of Combat in the American Civil War (New York: The Free Press, 1987) 61, 64–5.
John Keegan, The Face of Battle: A Study of Agincourt, Waterloo and the Somme (New York: Penguin, 1978) 277.
Edward M. Goffman, The War to End All Wars: The American Military Experience in World War I (Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986) 245.
General Erich von Ludendorff quoted in S. L. A. Marshall, World War I (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987) 388.
Russell Weigley, The American Way of War (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1977) 203.
Paul Fussell in The Great War and Modern Memory (New York: Oxford, 1975) located the origins of modern irony in the battle experience of the war. The divorce rate after the war as a possible result of the trauma of the war was a concern in the popular press of the 1920s; Stephen Kern, “The Cubist War,” in The Culture of Time and Space (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1983). Kern related the spreading understanding of the modernist innovations and perceptions of the early 20th century to the “‘Composition’ of the fighting itself.’”
Over There! A Journal of the First World War, Vol. 1, No. 4 (Winter, 1988): 1. Marine Corps Museum, Washington Navy Yard.
For example, John Dollard and Donald Horton, Fear in Battle (Washington: The Infantry Journal, 1944). The authors concern themselves with motivating soldiers to choose courage; Charles McMoran (Baron Moran), Anatomy of Courage (London: Constable, 1966) takes this matter of choice as its starting point.
See, for example, Anthony Kellett, “Beliefs, Values, and Commitment,” in Combat Motivation: The Behavior of Soldiers in Battle (Boston: Kluwer-Nijhoff Publishers, 1982) 165–97, who traced the diminution of the importance of individual beliefs and values and the increasing importance of the military unit to soldier motivation through this century; William Darryl Henderson, Cohesion, The Human Element in Combat (Washington: National Defense University Press, 1985), located American military weakness in the independence of soldiers to make their own choices due to high pay and too great contact with surrounding society, emphasized loyalty to the small group around an individual soldier and the authority of noncommissioned officers; Morris Janowitz and Roger Little, Sociology and the Military Establishment (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1965), also emphasizes loyalty to a small group and is much cited by others presenting this argument; Elmar Dinter, Hero or Coward (London: F. Cass, 1985), emphasizes unit cohesion and relies heavily on the work of Samuel Lyman Atwood Marshall during and after World War II and the Korean War; see Marshall’s Men Against Fire: The Problem of Battle Command in Future Wars (Washington: Infantry Journal, 1947).
Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward (New York: New American Library, 1960).
Walter Benn Michaels, “An American Tragedy or the Promise of American Life,” in Representations 25 (Winter, 1989): 71–98. Michaels wrote that the concept of individuality destabilized as a result of mass production after the Civil War. He found that progressives redefined the individual as only existing against a standard, or machine background and “systematic management.” Michaels used the example of Civil War uniforms found in Egal Feldman, Fit for Men: A Study of New York’s Clothing Trade (Washington, D.C., 1960) 97; the United States Army in World War I made an excellent testing ground for “systematic management,” see Michael O’Malley, Keeping Watch (New York: Viking, 1990) 250–3; Fred Davis Baldwin, “The American Enlisted Man in World War I,” doctoral dissertation, Princeton, 1964, especially, “Results of the Army’s Testing program,” 70, and “The Army’s Education Program,” 116.
William Mitchell, Memoires of World War I: “From Start to Finish of our Greatest War” (New York: Random House, 1960) 10, quoted in Weigley, The American Way of War, 203.
Raymond Stenbeck in The Way it Was, Vol. II, Humbolt State University, Retired Senior Volunteer Program, 1980. Raymond Stenbeck Papers, Sixth Marine Rgt. 73rd Co. Second Division, US Army Military History Institute, Carlisle Barracks.
The History of the Provost Marshall, National Archives, Record Group 120, #57, gives no figure for such executions, nor does the report on stragglers and desertions prepared by the Army War College for World War II, Carlisle Barracks; John J. Pershing, My Experiences of the World War (New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company, 1931) vol. II, 98. Pershing mentions forty-four death sentences in all, and thirty-three executions, all for murder or rape. Many soldiers, however, wrote that they believed desertion to be punishable by summary execution.
Provost Marshall, History of the Provost Marshall, Vol. 1, 11, Record Group 120, #57, National Archives, Washington, D.C.
Provost Marshall, History of the Provost Marshall, Vol. 1, Record Group 120, #57, National Archives, Washington, D.C.
“Trials of an MP,” The Stars and Stripes, May 2, 1919, anonymous poem reprinted in Alfred E. Cornebuise, ed., Doughboy Doggerel (Athens, Ohio: University of Ohio Press, 1985) 19. This question and answer remained a joke in the army through World War II.
Eric Leed, No Man’s Land: Combat and Identity in World War I (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979), see chapter 4 “Myth and Modern War,” 115–62.
“Private Burningham’s Story,” in Defenders of Democracy (New York, 1919) 112. The anonymous editors of this book collected the testimony of hospital patients in the New York area, just after the war.
Harry Croft, quoted in Stanley Weintraub, A Stillness Heard Round the World (New York: Dutton, 1985) 170.
Frank Sibley, With the Yankee Division in France (Boston, 1919) quoted by Weintraub, A Stillness Heard Round the World, 170.
Tony Ashworth, Trench Warfare, 1914–1918: The Live and Let Live System (New York: Macmillan, 1980).
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© 1997 Mark Meigs
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Meigs, M. (1997). “It’s a great life if you don’t weaken, but believe me there are few who don’t:” The Meaning Americans Gave to Action at the Front in World War I. In: Optimism at Armageddon. Studies in Military and Strategic History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-13934-7_3
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