Enduring danger, surviving fear: Combat experience and American infantrymen in the War for Independence, the Civil War, and the Second World War

What makes soldiers fight? How do troops manage to suppress their fears, stifle their instincts for self-preservation, and marshal the will to kill enemy soldiers amidst the terror and chaos of the battlefield? Orthodox theories of combat motivation argue that primary group cohesion---the bonds of affection and mutual interdependence that form among members of a close-knit group exposed to common stresses---can explain many of the actions that rank-and-file soldiers take in combat. But the vast technological changes on the battlefield over the past two centuries tended to undermine group cohesion, and the success of American armies in motivating troops even on the modern mechanized battlefield suggests that historians' understanding of the relationship between combat experience and motivation needs to be reconsidered.;This study examines combat motivation comparatively, reconstructing the battlefield experiences of American infantrymen in the War for Independence, the Civil War, and the Second World War to explore how both combat and the mechanisms that motivated soldiers in it changed because of technological developments in warfare. The shift from the linear tactics of pre-industrial society to the dispersed tactics of mass industrial warfare constituted the most significant watershed: that tactical evolution placed ever-increasing, and in the end extraordinary, demands on three different and widely separated generations of young Americans. A number of factors---the nature of danger and fear in battle, the character of training, interactions with officers and comrades, the evolving weaponry of the infantrymen---meant that soldiers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries drew on a profoundly different set of qualities than did their twentieth-century counterparts in withstanding the stress and disorientation of combat. The thesis details at the same time what changed and what remained constant in war for the footsoldier over time, arguing that the individual's perception of battle as a controllable environment grew more important in driving troops to do their duty and survive the rigors of combat on the fast-paced, modern battlefield.