Lit Review

The study of what makes men fight, and in particular, the American experience of combat in World War II has created an enormous body of work. In fact, the US Army’s experience in World War II is perhaps the most highly researched effort to have ever been undergone. During the war, the US Army Research Branch and others gathered data on the combatants involved. This data, published in various works, provides the bulk of the information available on combat motivation and cohesion during the war. Looking more broadly, the forces that coalesce to form units and keep soldiers in line seem to be pretty universal and can be generalized across three of the major combatants during World War II: American, Germans and Soviets. Martin Stouffer et al, in his seminal work, The American Soldier, bases the root of the American Soldiers willingness to fight as the “primary group”. Stouffer et al provide not just a glimpse into the motivations of combat soldiers to continue fighting – their work provides the comprehensive research and data that many others start from. Their work identified the primacy of the small group, and described its importance: “The group in its informal character, with its close interpersonal ties, served two principal functions in combat motivation: it set and enforced group standards of behavior, and it supported and sustained the individual in stresses he would otherwise not have been able to withstand.”[1] Stouffer and others have posited from their research that Americans weren’t motivated to fight out of a sense of ideology, or symbolic patriotism. However, a reinterpretation of the data by Stephen D. Wesbrook seems to indicate that “latent ideology” played a significant part in both the initial, and enlistment, motivation as well as in sustaining motivation. Wesbrook argues that the American ideal of military discipline is that of normative compliance, or abiding by the norms and values of the American system.[2] When reinterpreting the data in this...