Appeared
in:
American Heritage, March 1989, Volume 40, Number 2
THE
SECRET
OF THE
SOLDIERS
WHO DIDN'T
SHOOT
By Fredric Smoler
When Col. Samuel Lyman Marshall
came home in 1945, he was one of millions of Americans who had served
in the Second World War. Perhaps a third of then, had seen combat, and
Marshall, as the European theaters deputy historian, had talked to an
unprecedentedly large number of them. In a few months he began the little
book that was to make him S. L A. Marshall, a respected and highly influential
military historian. In the 211 pages of Men Against Fire, Marshall made
an astonishing assertion: In any given body of American infantry in combat.
no more than one-fifth, and generally as few as 15 percent, had ever fired
their weapons at an enemy, indeed ever fired their weapons at all.
From that day to this, S. L. A. Marshall is famous as a man who penetrated
a great and terrible mystery. His writing on the refusal to fire-what
Marshall called the ratio of lire- was the keystone of his achievement
While a fair number of people had always had an impressionistic sense
of the phenomenon, Marshall had replaced anecdotal evidence with hard
numbers.
Marshall, in the eyes of his many admirers, had shifted the history of
war on its axis, turning it away from the annals of generalship toward
the discovery of what men actually did and thought and felt on a battlefield.
The admiration Marshall's discovery inspired is caught in the words of
John Keegan, the dean of the school of military history that is deeply
indebted to the traditon that Marshall dominates: Marshall was touched
by genius," Keegan wrote, a man who had brilliantly democratized
the study of war.
Samuel Lyman Marshall was born with the century in the village of Catskill,
New York. His father was a bricklayer and lay preacher, and the family
moved repeatedly, ending up in El Paso, Texas, in 1914. El Paso was in
those days a tough border town, with a sprawling red-light district and
gunfights in the streets. It was also a window on the early days of the
Mexican Revolution; across the river Pancho Villa was in control of the
state of Chihuahua and spent a fair amount of time in Ciudad Juárez.
In his memoirs Marshall said he once went across from El Paso into Juárez
and ordered a hamburger and a beer in the Black Cat, a casino owned by
Villa. The general walked in and bet a friend that he could shoot a comb
off a waitress's head; the bullet shuck her in the forehead, and she fell
dead, her skull split open. Marshall claimed to remember both men laughing
uproariously. It was he said, his first sight of a shooting death; he
was fifteen years old.
Marshall left high school in 1917 to enlist in the army. In his autobiography,
Bringing Up the Rear, he speaks of participating in the Soissons, St.-Mihiel,
Meuse-Argonne, and Ypres-Lys campaigns, and writes: "I finished the
war 11:11 AM on 11 November as a lieutenant of infantry in a foxhole not
far from Stenay. It was the day that I had never expected to see. A brigade
commander from the 89th Division, Col. J. H. Reeves, happened along.
He said: Young man, have you anything to drink?'
I said: Water.'
He said: let us drink to it in water.'"
A footnote to this incident says that Marshall "was commissioned
from the ranks and at age seventeen was the youngest commissioned officer
in the AEF [American Expeditionary Forces]."
He spent the years between wars as a newspaperman, first in El Paso and
later on the Detroit News, working as a reporter and reading about war.
Sometime during these years he invented his sturdy nickname, Slam, an
acronym made up of his own initials with another family name folded in
to supply the vowel. In 1940 he published Blitzkrieg, the first of what
would be thirty books on war. The following year he produced Armies on
Wheels, and events were kind to both books; he thought that the French
would collapse and that the Russians wouldn't, and both peoples obliged.
When the United States entered the war. Marshall received a direct commission
as a major and eventually wound up in the fledgling Army Historical Section.
He first investigated combat in the Pacific theater, covering the landings
on Makin Island and Kwajalein, where he accumulated the experiences he
would write up in Island Victory, and he emerged with the Combat Infantry
Badge. When he boarded the cargo plane that would take him back from the
front to Oahu in the summer of 1943, Samuel Lyman Marshall was a short,
stocky man with a career as a newspaperman behind him and a few books
on the early days of World War II to his name. When he sat down to write
Men Against Fire three years later, he was dearly convinced that
he knew more about combat than anyone in the world. He had pioneered a
new investigative technique: the after-action interview.
On the field at Waterloo in Stendhal's
novel The Charterhouse of Parma, the hero is frustrated because
while he knows that he is present at some kind of stupendous battle, he
can't make any sense of the course of events, even who is winning or losing.
History rarely does cooperate in making its salient moments dramatically
coherent to anyone present at the time. At Makin Island the chaos seemed
impenetrable; after one climactic fight Marshall said, There was a general
doubt that the tactical confusions of that strange night of combat would
ever be clarified. Few of those who were closest to it, including the
it including the actual commanders in the battle, knew much more about
it than that our men had behaved well in a difficult situation. None knew
the relationship of any one combat episode to another. Even in these first
hours after the fight we weeere already mixing up parts of the story,
and as rumor got about over the island, fable was rapidly being substituted
for fact."
Nevertheless, Marshall was not as pessimistic about the possibility of
sorting it out as other were: "All of the actors were present, except
the killed or badly wounded, and there had not been many of those. The
one way to try for the full, detailed truth of battle was to muster the
witnesses and see for once whether the small tactical fogs of war were
as impenetrable as we had always imagined they were."
After the commanders had assembled everyone at Makin who had survived
the night combat, Marshall questioned then, together. It worked like a
charm, he reported: "By the end of those four days, working several
hours every day, we had discovered to our amazement that every fact of
the fight was procurable--that the facts lay dormant in the minds of men
and officers, waiting to be developed. It was like fitting together a
jigsaw puzzle, a puzzle with no missing pieces but with so many curious
and difficult twists and turns that only with care and patience could
we make it into a single picture of combat."
Marshall was not alone in the estimate of his achievement. When the Infantry
Journal published Island Victory in 1945, its editors wrote
a glowing foreword: "Past books about combat have been chiefly persona)
narratives, the batte stories of individuals. . . . For the first time
in its history he Infantry Journal publishes in Island Victory a book
that is a story of combat written by all the men who fought-and therefore
a highly accurate account of exactly what happened. . . . "
From Makin on, Marshall devoted himself to the group interview after combat
The early experiences in the Pacific sot the pattern for what was to come.
Lieutenant Colonel Marshall arriived in Britain in late June 1944 He interviewed
members of the airborne divisions that had returned to England after landing
in Normandy (the makings of his book Night Drop), then went to
the Continent and during the months tat followed Interviewed units mat
had defended Bastogne during the Raffle of the Bulge and taken part in
the fighting at Arnheim. At war's end he was named chief historian of
the European theater of operations. When in 1947 Men Against Fire made
its striking assertions about soldiers' behavior in battle, it had the
weight it did-and would make its author as famous as it did-because of
the range and quality of evidence Marshall drew upon.