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Mythos revisited: American Historians and German Fighting Power in WWII
by Thomas E. Nutter
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Chapter Two
S.L.A. MARSHALL, MEN AGAINST FIRE.
In the genre of works which forms the subject matter of this study, there is
general agreement that the alleged myth of German military superiority in World
War II has arisen not merely as a result of the pernicious effects of
self-serving memoirs written by former German soldiers, but most especially
from the gullibility of an influential group of historians. According to the
argument, the scholars in question have sinned grievously by uncritically
accepting the theory of the German memoirists that the Wehrmacht was
defeated not by the military skill and persistence of the western Allies, but
by the overwhelming mass of material available to them.
Several of the critics studied in the present work, namely Michael Doubler,
Peter Mansoor and John Sloan Brown, view an American general officer, S.L.A.
Marshall, as the font of error on the subject of the relative fighting
qualities of the German and United States armies. Marshall, a combat veteran of
the First World War, was a deputy chief historian for the U.S. Army in the
European Theatre of Operations during World War II. As a result of his work
during that conflict, Marshall published in 1947 a book entitled Men Against
Fire .(6) In it, he described the results of his findings about the
conduct of American troops in battle, in an effort to discover the root causes
of the willingness, or unwillingness as the case may be, of soldiers to
actively engage the enemy.
In The GI Offensive in Europe, Peter Mansoor is harshly critical of
Marshall. According to Mansoor, Marshall began "an assault on the reputation of
the American army", because his book "called into question the quality of
American infantrymen".(7) Marshall's calumny against the U.S. Army consisted of
his assertion that fewer than 25 percent of its soldiers fired their weapons at
the enemy in any given engagement. Mansoor's chief indictment of Marshall is
that, by reason of the latter's reputation, four decades of subsequent
historians were misled into accepting his thesis as fact.(8) While his language
is less strident, Michael Doubler, in Closing with the Enemy, likewise
includes Marshall among the cast of historians responsible for having fostered
the myth of German combat prowess.(9) Marshall's role as villain is also
described by John Sloan Brown in Draftee Division .(10)
Although the amount of time devoted to Marshall in the works under review is
comparatively small, relative to the time spent by his critics in dealing with
the other so-called "German lovers", appreciating exactly what he said---and
did not say---about the US and German armies is crucial to our understanding of
those critics and their motives. To begin with, the stated purpose of Men
Against Fire is not to compare the combat effectiveness of armies, but
to win the opinion of the American people in the immediate post-World War II
era "toward needed reform" in the U.S. army. While Marshall admits that he
failed in this purpose, because the popular press utterly failed to respond to
the book, nevertheless he claimed success, since within six months of its
publication the US military, as well as others abroad, had taken it seriously.
This had important results for the U.S. army. For while Marshall's evidence had
shown that during World War II less than 25% of American infantry had employed
hand weapons effectively while under fire, in the Korean War the number in
question had risen (according to Marshall's data) to above 55%.(11)
Marshall argued that what the post-World War II U.S. army needed most was more
and better fire. He advocated the position that the training methods,
discipline and personnel policies of the army should conform to the single
purpose of increasing the ratio of effective fire in combat. This could best be
achieved by a system of man-to-man control on the battlefield, a system based
on the knowledge and appreciation of why men fight, rather than upon the
weapons to be used by the men.(12)
Marshall stated his central premise in a straightforward manner:
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…the thing which enables an infantry soldier to keep going with his weapons is
the near presence or the presumed presence of a comrade…so it is far more than
a question of the soldier's need of physical support from other men. He must
have at least some feeling of spiritual unity with them if he is to do an
efficient job of moving and fighting.(13)
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The results of Marshall's investigations during World War II convinced him that
even among well-trained and combat-seasoned troops, 75% would not fire or
persist in firing on the enemy, even in the face of danger. According to
Marshall, this conclusion was based upon his post-combat interviews with
approximately 400 infantry companies in the central Pacific and European
theatres. He asserted that in all of those interviews, he had not found one
battalion, company or platoon commander who had made an effort to determine how
many of his men had actually engaged the enemy with a weapon. Marshall was at
some pains to point out that his figure of 25% did not mean that during a given
engagement, an average company maintained fire with an average of 25% of its
weapons. Rather, in any engagement, out of an average of 100 men in an
aggressive infantry company (in less aggressive units, the number was
considerably lower), only 25 men would have taken any part with weapons.
Furthermore, in such a company the men with heavier weapons, such as the
Browning Automatic Rifle (BAR), the flamethrower or the bazooka, gave a
creditable account of themselves, meaning that the majority of those who were
present and armed but would not fight were infantrymen.
It does not logically follow, however, that because his evidence directed
Marshall to these conclusions, he was motivated to or did assault the
reputation of the American army. Indeed, the record indicates precisely the
opposite to be true. First, it may be stated without fear of contravention that
nowhere in Men Against Fire does Marshall engage in a malicious and
negative comparison of the fighting performance of the U.S. army with that of
the German army, or in fact with that of any other army in the world. Second,
and perhaps more importantly from the point of view of his critics, Marshall's
comments about the U.S. army are almost uniformly favorable, rather than the
other way round.
A few references to Marshall's work will serve to amply substantiate this last
assertion. Speaking of June 6, 1944 on Omaha Beach, Marshall observes that
there were only five infantry companies that were tactically effective
throughout that day, and that in those companies only 20% of the men fired
their weapons during the day-long advance from the beach to the first tier of
French villages inland. While his critics interpret these facts as a negative
reflection on the American infantryman, Marshall's observations upon them are
wholly different. He concludes that "had not this relatively small amount of
fire been delivered by these men, the decisive companies would have made no
advance in the separate sectors, the beachhead would not have begun to take
form, and in all probability Normandy would have been lost."(14) One might
reasonably ask how these words of praise about the actions of heroic men who,
in Marshall's opinion, saved the Normandy invasion from being lost, can be
interpreted as being critical of them.
Marshall also discusses an "incident at the Bourcy roadblock to the north of
Bastogne on the morning of December 19, 1944." In this instance, twelve "very
nervous" American infantrymen, firing in the darkness at what they thought was
a reconnaissance formation, encountered instead the leading elements of the 2.
Panzer-Division, and turned it back. So fierce was the American resistance that
the German commander reported being attacked by superior forces. As a result,
the German corps commander ordered 2. Panzer-Division to alter its planned
movement and swing northward, "thereby wasting precious time and traversing
unnecessary space." The results wrought by the bravery of these few American
soldiers were profound.
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"Had the enemy made one good lunge against the Bourcy roadblock, he could have
turned southward and entered Bastogne before the American forces had assembled.
The whole body of evidence from our own and enemy sources supports the
conclusion that had this happened, the Ardennes campaign would have run a far
different course and the enemy would not have been checked short of the line of
the Meuse."(15)
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In a similar vein, Marshall describes the heroic resourcefulness of a group of
American paratroopers dropped off course during the early morning hours of June
6, 1944. Because these few parachutists engaged the enemy with fire around Le
Ham and Montebourg, the German high command concluded that the area of this
firefight delineated the northern limit of the American assault. Having done
so, the Germans held their troops north of Montebourg throughout that day.
Marshall concludes that the release of those troops for an immediate southward
attack might have broken the tenuous hold of the 82d Airborne Division on Ste.
Mere Eglise, with serious consequences for the invading force.(16)
Marshall's prolonged discussion of the valor of one battalion of the 502d
Parachute Infantry gives the lie to the contention that his book "called into
question the quality of American infantrymen." Marshall began following this
battalion during its attack along the Carentan causeway on the night of June
10, 1944. Marshall recounts the testimony of the battalion commander, Lt. Col.
Robert G. Cole, who reported that "not one man in twenty-five voluntarily used
his weapon", in spite of the fact that the enemy was so close and the position
so exposed that "their only protection was to continue a fire which would make
the enemy keep his head down." Nevertheless, the battalion closed with the
enemy early the next morning and drove him back from his firing positions,
inaugurating "a day-long battle marked by the closest kind of fighting, as the
enemy came on five times in counterattack along the hedgerows, trying to regain
the initial position." The sharpness of the fighting may be gauged from the
fact that it began with an American bayonet charge, resulting in six Germans
being killed with that weapon. At points of crisis during the day the two
forces were no more than 40 feet apart, and machine gunners were encountering
targets at less than 20 yards range. In this classic infantry struggle the
result was a complete American victory, in spite of losses amounting to about
40% of the force.(17)
Marshall's analysis of this battalion of the 502d Parachute Infantry
consistently supports his general conclusion that no more than 25-30% of
American infantrymen used their weapons in combat. It is a total
mischaracterization, however, to suggest that Marshall was therefore critical
of these men. His concluding remarks about the battalion are worth recounting
in detail.
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I followed this same battalion through the airborne invasion of Holland in
September 1944, and through the winter fighting in the Ardennes, and I doubt
that there has ever been a finer fighting unit in the army of the United
States. It never tasted defeat nor was it ever given an easy assignment. At
least three of its engagements are historically noteworthy examples of
heroically successful achievement against great odds. It was tested over
marshland and through hedgerow country. In Holland, west of Zon and near the
Wilhelmina canal, its hardest engagement was fought through a checkered pine
forest on flat ground; the enemy had enfiladed every forest trail with
machineguns and from the other flank and from the front his artillery kept the
woods under a point-blank fire. Perhaps the battalion's finest hour was had on
the rolling hills northwest of Bastogne during the early stage of the defense
of that town in December 1944.(18)
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Nor is the foregoing atypical of the praise heaped on the American soldier by
Marshall. He describes the story of Lt. Col. H.W.C. Kinnard, commanding first
battalion, 501st Parachute Infantry, to advocate the position that a soldier
must control his situation, rather than let the situation control him. During
Operation MARKET , Kinnard's formation had as its task the defense of
the corridor west of the town of Veghel. The Germans pressed hard against
Kinnard's men as soon as they began to touch the ground. Kinnard decided that
the best means of defending the corridor was to attack the enemy, and during a
three-day march of 360 degrees through enemy-held territory, his unit destroyed
German forces three times their strength. This caused the Germans to alert an
entire corps to meet the danger. Marshall's concluding observation about
Kinnard was that "he weighed the hazard that he would be moving at all times
with at least one flank exposed, then accepted this risk in view of the
prospect for proportionate reward. I know of no better illustration in the book
of war of the quality of mind needed in the combat officer."(19)
Marshall also recounts the story of Company M, 116th Infantry Regiment, a
weapons company that landed on Omaha Beach on June 6, 1944. It had been planned
that Company M would land in support of units already in control of the beach.
In the event, they were the first troops to land on the particular sector of
the beach in question. Under heavy German fire, officers and men dragged every
piece of the unit's equipment across the beach, making it the only force on
Omaha Beach that day, according to Marshall, to achieve this feat. Company M
moved up the steep escarpment, again under strong enemy fire, and then moved
inland, "hitting hard and traveling far." The survivors of the Company M fought
all through the Normandy campaign, through St. Lo and the siege of Brest,
"still not knowing that on D-Day they had done anything exceptional….If this
incident were unique it would scarce be worth mention. But it is typical."(20)
Finally, Marshall describes "one of the finest river crossings in our army
during World War II", namely the crossing of the Elbe near Magdebourg on April
13, 1945 by the 331st Infantry Regiment. The Germans here were resisting
fiercely, having reduced a bridgehead further upstream and forced the American
unit engaged there to retire to the west bank of the river. Col. George B.
Crabill, commanding the 331st Infantry Regiment, hit the ground running,
getting his lead battalion in the water on boats within thirty minutes of
arriving at the river. So quick were the regiment's movements that they
encountered no enemy fire, and during the following night the main body of the
regiment and a platoon of tanks were brought to the new bridgehead. In the face
of a strong German counterattack with infantry, armor and artillery, Crabill's
bridgehead held out for three days until the enemy attacks died away.(21)
It is quite evident from the foregoing that Marshall did not assault the
reputation of the U.S. army, or question the quality of American infantrymen,
as asserted by Mansoor, or suggest that American soldiers spent all their time
cowering in foxholes, as claimed by John Sloan Brown. It does not take a
particularly rigorous reading of Men Against Fire to realize that it
was written for the purpose of enhancing the future combat effectiveness of the
U.S. army, at a time when a new and powerful foe seemed to be on the horizon,
or that it contains absolutely nothing in the way of a comparison as between
the fighting power of the U.S. army and that of any other fighting force in the
world. Critics of Marshall either do not know his work, or willfully
misrepresent it. In either case, the historical profession is ill served.
It is particularly noteworthy that Peter Mansoor is at some pains to discredit
Marshall's work. After spending a good deal of time and energy describing the
thesis behind Men Against Fire , he moves on to point out that while
some historians, including John Keegan and Max Hastings, "quoted Marshall's
statistics as historical truth", others "have examined Marshall's evidence and
found it wanting." He alludes to The Men of Company K, written by Harold P.
Leinbaugh and John D. Campbell, both veterans of the unit in question, which
was a part of the 84th Infantry Division. The authors asserted that there was
no basis for Marshall's claims that their unit was among those in which the
majority of soldiers did not bring their weapons to bear on the enemy, opining
also that the experience of Company K was no different than that of any other
company in the European Theatre of Operations (ETO). Moreover, Leinbaugh
purportedly showed that Marshall had "lied about his own experience in the 90th
Division during World War I."(22)
After posing the question whether "Marshall had also fabricated his
statistics", Mansoor goes on to answer in the affirmative. On this point he
relies in part upon the work of Roger J. Spiller, who sought unsuccessfully for
a record of the "over four hundred company-level after-action interviews" that
Marshall claimed to have undertaken and which purportedly formed the basis for
Men Against Fire . After having interviewed at least one of Marshall's
colleagues and reviewed the General's personal papers, and in each case finding
that there was "no evidence that he [Marshall] was collecting statistics",
Spiller concluded that Marshall's "systematic collection of data" had been "an
invention." Mansoor goes on to buttress Spiller's conclusions by noting that
the National Archives "bear no traces of Marshall's quest for firing ratio
statistics in Europe" and that no such documents exist at the University of
Texas at El Paso, where the S.L.A. Marshall Military History Collection is
housed. On the basis of the foregoing, Mansoor concludes that "there is no way
[Marshall] could have determined the percentage of soldiers who fired their
rifles in a given engagement." It is but a small step for Mansoor to go from
having undermined Marshall's evidence to eviscerating the General's argument as
well. Here Mansoor relies primarily upon the evidence provided by a
questionnaire given graduates of West Point who served in the ETO between 1943
and 1945. This subjective source (which Mansoor construes to be contrary to
Marshall's thesis) counterbalances Marshall's statistically-based argument, in
Mansoor's view, since Marshall never really had any legitimate statistics to
rely on in the first place.(23)
Michael Doubler also accepts the Spiller view that "Marshall's findings
resulted from intuitive and subjective means rather than quantitative methods",
as a result of which "his conclusions can be neither proven nor disproven."
Doubler's criticisms of Marshall, however, are more guarded than those of
Mansoor. For example, while Doubler disagrees with Marshall's suggestion that
only 15-25% of American infantrymen fired their weapons at the enemy, he
nevertheless admits that "[A] close survey of after-action reports and training
memoranda from the ETO does reveal that volume of fire was a problem in many
units." Interestingly, however, Doubler opines that "[W]hile many soldiers
probably never did fire their weapons, the problem was perhaps not as great as
Marshall believed." Indeed, Doubler suggests that "[I]f Americans did not fire
their weapons, it was because of training inadequacies rather than some innate
inability or lack of courage." Doubler therefore blames these inadequate
training methods, as well as "the impersonal replacement system", for the
problems that manifested themselves in the form of a reluctance to fire on the
enemy. Doubler concludes his remarks on the subject of Men Against Fire
by admonishing those who have sought to discredit Marshall's integrity as well
as his arguments against throwing "the baby out with the bath water." In fact,
Doubler finishes by stating that "[O]n balance, it appears as though Marshall's
writings about the broad experience of men under fire are much more often right
than wrong."(24)
Thus is Marshall's Men Against Fire dispensed with. The question
remains, why do the authors of this genre insist that Men Against Fire
be held up to the general gaze, to be recognized for the tissue of lies that it
purportedly represents? It will be recalled that Doubler, Mansoor, Brown and
Bonn all have as their stated purpose the destruction of the "myth of German
superiority". As has been pointed out numerous times above, there is nowhere in
Men Against Fire a comparison between the U.S. Army and the German army
of World War II, and indeed there is no comparison as between the U.S. Army and
any of the forces engaged in that conflict. And contrary to what Doubler
implies, there is not a shred of evidence in Men Against Fire that
Marshall believed that American infantrymen suffered from a lack of courage. In
addition, as far as is known, none of the other authors excoriated by Bonn, et
al relies upon Marshall as an authority upon the issue of the combat
effectiveness of the U.S. Army. Some of the arguments against Marshall are
entirely ad hominem in nature---what possible relevance, for example,
does Marshall's alleged disingenuousness about his own career in the First
World War have to do with his thesis on the aggressiveness of the American
infantryman in the Second World War? Marshall's argument should stand or fall
on its own merits; his personal life should not come into the question. The
fact that Marshall's critics see fit to indict his character suggests that they
consider their own case on the merits against him to be a weak one. It is
perhaps for this reason that Mansoor treats the issue as though it is settled,
when obviously it is not. Much more important than the tawdry treatment of
Marshall by some authors, however, is the simple fact that there is no nexus
whatever between Men Against Fire and the relative combat
effectiveness of the German and American armies in World War II. In short, in
the genre in question, S.L.A. Marshall is nothing more than a straw man whose
specter is raised in order to provide its conjurers with something to knock
down.
There is, finally, a point made by Marshall that is of particular relevance to
the arguments made by both Mansoor and Doubler about the prolonged failure of
the Allies to adequately deal with German resistance in the bocage country
of Normandy. Both of these authors assert that a fundamental failure of Allied
generalship was its deplorable lack of preparation, for themselves as well as
for their men, with respect to the peculiar problems they would encounter in
this terrain. The argument advanced by Mansoor and Doubler is that the Allies
took three months to drive the Germans out of the bocage at least in part
because of the nearly criminal failure of the Allied leadership to prepare
their troops to fight in it. Marshall's revelation on this issue is telling:
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"Once in discussing with Lt. Gen. Walter Bedell Smith (Eisenhower's chief of
staff) certain of the tactical difficulties of the Normandy campaign, I asked
whether some of our faults there could be traced to lack of advance information
about the bocage country and a consequent pinching of the tactical
preparation….He answered: ‘Not at all! That wasn't the source of the trouble.
The information which we had from the French was more than adequate. Moreover,
Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke and Gen. Sir Frederick Morgan had both come out
that way in 1940. They told us about the country, describing it quite
accurately. They were very pessimistic about our chances of coping with it. But
we couldn't believe what we heard. It was beyond our imagination. The fact was
that we had to get into the country and be bruised by it before we could really
take a measure of it.'"(25)
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Footnotes
(6) Marshall, S.L.A., Men Against Fire (Peter Smith,
1978).
(7) Mansoor, p.6.
(8) Ibid.
(9) Doubler, p.7.
(10) Brown, pp.168-169.
(11) Marshall, pp. 8-9.
(12) Ibid., pp. 23, 39.
(13) Ibid., p. 42
(14) Ibid., p.68-69.
(15) Ibid., p.69-70.
(16) Ibid., p.70.
(17) Ibid. pp.72-73.
(18) Ibid., pp. 73-74.
(19) Ibid., pp.116-117.
(20) Ibid., pp.120-121.
(21) Ibid., pp.139-140.
(22) Mansoor, p. 259; Harold P. Leinbaugh and John D. Campbell, The Men of
Company K (New York: Quill, (1985).
(23) Mansoor, pp. 259-260.
(24) Doubler, pp. 289-291.
(25) Marshall, p.108.
Copyright © 2004 by Thomas E. Nutter.
Please send comments to Thomas E. Nutter at: tenutter@gmail.com.
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