Men Of War: The American Soldier In Combat At Bunker Hill, Gettysburg, And Iwo Jima, by Alexander Rose

[Note: This book was provided free of charge by the author in exchange for an honest review. After a negative review of this book in the New York Times, the author posted a response to the review which I viewed as a member of H-Net, offering to give free copies of the book to the reviewers there as long as he had copies available. Naturally, I took him up on the offer.]

In writing this moderately lengthy book, at slightly more than 350 pages of main text, the author writes that he sought to understand over many years the experience of the common soldier at war. As an acolyte of the British historian John Keegan, whose Face of Battle is a masterpiece, he wished to examine three battles fought by American soldiers as a way of grasping the experience of war for our own martial nation. The battles chosen, Bunker Hill, Gettysburg, and Iwo Jima, are well-known to even casual students of American military history, even if none was decisive in any ultimate sense. Yet what the author found was that warfare is the sort of experience that varies strongly by context, and that even if the body and mind have a small and fairly universal set of physiological responses to atmospheres of pain, suffering, torment, and fear, all of which are to be found in spades in combat, that the experience of war itself varies strongly by the experiences that one has in war, a diversity that the author shares generously from his astute reading of the primary documents of war, including military doctrine, letters, diaries, and the like. Regardless of the precise experience of war discussed for various participants in the Revolutionary War, Civil War, and World War II discussed here, the author eschews any sort of romantic interpretation of war, and has a strong and abiding interest in psychological history, looking at the effects of trauma on soldiers long after the bullets have stopped firing and the survivors of the battles have returned to their homes and families.

Even though the book is directly contrary to the romantic tendencies of the 19th centuries and implicitly also critiques the industrial war of the 20th century (and its contemporary successors), the book itself is written with an elegant prose style that is worthy of note and appreciation. A few examples will hopefully suffice to capture the flavor of the whole. When the author closes his section on Gettysburg, he lingers on the lasting torment suffered by the veterans: “The harder and more gallantly he struggled for cause, country, and comrades, then, the more likely that a soldier would be wretched with sickness and racked with pain, that he would be tormented by fears that he was neither useful nor ornamental to the world, when he attended those old men’s reunions celebrating that great fight near the town of Gettysburg (212).” Later on, when discussing the grim professional approach of the Marines at Iwo Jima, he comments: “Once a Marine grasped that war was work–unpleasant, unfair, and unwelcome work, but work nonetheless–he could begin to adapt, rather than succumb, to Iwo’s idiosyncratic battlefield conditions and accept its necessarily harsh realities (290).” And finally, when discussing his own search for personal insights in studying the experiences of men of war, the author remains unsure of his own moral courage, saying: “And here I have ended my investigation, more knowledgeable and perhaps a little wiser. But even now, I still do not know for certain whether, at the supreme moment of crisis in combat, I would stand and fight alongside the grim-serried ranks of my comrades, or if I would flee. No one does–not until that dread moment arrives. Perhaps it’s better that way (363).” Fortunately for the reader of this most excellent book, the grim commitment of the historian to the truth of the experiences of battle and their aftermath does not mean an avoidance of elegance and deep compassion in conveying those grim and unpleasant truths, for which the reader can be grateful.

In terms of its structure, this book is noteworthy in being very orderly but avoiding the usual narrative flow that of novels that battle histories often campaign. The reasons for this are sound–the orderly pattern of battles is something that can only be seen from afar, and in retrospect [1], and in examining the three battles selected case case studies, the author takes a different approach that seeks to convey the understanding of warfare as it was experienced, mostly by ordinary soldiers. In the Battle of Bunker Hill, the author divides the battle into its particular engagements, looking at how the orderly plans of Howe devolved into a series of somewhat haphazard and disorganized attacks that were ruinously costly as a result of having poorly trained soldiers incapable of sophisticated maneuvers in the face of a determined and entrenched foe. For Gettysburg, the combat is discussed in terms of the branch of service, looking at the differences between marching, skirmishing, fighting infantry, the experience of artillery versus artillery and infantry versus artillery. For Iwo Jima, the author discusses the various obstacles that the American Marines faced in seizing control of the island, including sniper pits, pillboxes, and caves. In all cases, the author discusses the steep learning curve of warfare and the way in which both adversaries in a given battle were in the process of learning from each other how to fight more effectively given the limitations they were under, and in all cases the author provides a brief discussion of the course of the battle under discussion, with helpful maps, before discussing the psychological history of soldiers in those battles in more detail.

Ultimately, a book like this must be appreciated not only for its style and its contents, both of which are admirable, but also on its intent. Anyone who reads this book with a particular interest in the experience of warfare as a common soldier will be struck at the immense callousness of behavior towards common soldiers by militaries throughout history. Whether it is the British sending raw and largely untrained troops to attack skilled militia at Bunker Hill, Union and Confederate soldiers’ fighting performance being hurt in Pennsylvania in July after intense marching while greatly dehydrated, or the immense hardship and lack of caloric value in the food supplies of both Marines and Japanese on Iwo Jima, over and over again this book reminds us that whatever glory is attached to battles when one looks at glorious leaders or the bigger picture of lines advancing on a map, the experience of battle is deeply brutal and traumatic, and all too often those who were at the tip of the spear in making victory possible were left alone to struggle with the aftereffects of the trauma they witnessed, suffered, and inflicted on others. Knowing the human cost of warfare, not only in dead and wounded but also in nightmares and anxiety and insomnia is a reminder that even when people may appear calm and collected and go about their tasks with efficiency and skill, that deep torment and suffering may lie within. In reminding us of that suffering for common soldiers, and its universality in human experience, even where there was no term for it in languages, the author lays the groundwork for a compassionate approach to soldiers and other survivors of warfare that discourages the excesses of militarism that result from warfare’s more romantic portrayals. This is a work that is painful and grim in some of its depictions of the physical and mental suffering of warfare, but it is a useful book in reminding us of why we ought to seek honorable peace in our affairs, and that is advice that is always worthwhile.

[1] A particularly poignant example of this is the Battle of the Bulge in World War II, where the same historian/officer Charles B. McDonald wrote two books, one of them from the narrow perspective of what he saw as a participant of the battle, in Company Commander, and who wrote an excellent broad narrative history from the point of view of a trying-very-hard-to-be-as-objective-as-possible historian with a more omniscient view guided also by hindsight. I examine this particular relevant case here:

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2011/04/28/the-military-historian-and-the-fog-of-war-a-case-study/