Combat
"Combat is intrinsically indescribable; its violence and emotional power simply cannot be put into words [1]."
– Christopher Hamner
Expanding on the complexity of battle, scholar Christopher Hamner argues that combat has always been “intrinsically indescribable,” as emotional power and violence are unable to be "put into words.”
To further elaborate, he argues that tremendous confusion during war makes it hard for historians to “[capture] all of the disparate events,” challenging the way we study combat in thorough and effective ways [2]. In essence, combat is a difficult phenomenon to understand. |
The Nature of War |
The Character of War |
Wars have an everlasting nature that have unchanging patterns: a human perspective, a political dimension, a challenge of wills, and confusion. Through this lens, we acknowledge that combat involves a form of passion; one that usually lies on the hostile feelings of people [3]. By accepting the participation in the “storm of steel,” American troops were expected to accept risk and assume their roles as dispensable commodities during the middle of danger [4]. Behind the significant fact that 1.2 million Americans were engaged in this offensive, lies motivation, morale, and willingness as factors to their involvement. The nature of war provides us a bottom-up perspective of combat, inviting us to consider first-hand experience.
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Through the “introduction and refinement of automatic weapons,” the Great War showcased a dramatic shift in character from the single-shot muskets used by soldiers centuries prior [5]. In order to overcome the confusion caused by dramatic advancements in warfare, soldiers adopted a “shoot-and-scoot, git-‘er-done attitude [6].” As described by Hamner, a trio of soldiers can operate a machine gun that can fire as many bullets in one minute as an entire Napoleonic infantry a century prior [7]. With this and new artillery innovations, weapon technology affected the way ground combat was carried out and damage was inflicted. The start of the Great War would make linear military tactics obsolete, resulting in the eventual adoption of modern tactics.
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Sources
- Christopher Hamner, “Combat,” in At War: The Military and American Culture in the Twentieth Century and Beyond, eds. Stefan Aune, Susan Caruthers, Sahr Conway-Lanz, Katherine Ellison, and David Kieran (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2018), 108.
- Hamner, “Combat,” 109.
- Carl von Clausewitz, On War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 89.
- Hamner, “Combat,” 117.
- Hamner, “Combat,” 115.
- John D. Beatty, “We Can Kill Them but We Cannot Stop Them: Evaluating the Meuse-Argonne Campaign” in A Companion to the Meuse-Argonne Campaign, ed. Edward G. Lengel (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons Inc., 2014), 436.
- Hamner, “Combat,” 115.