War Combat Research Articles

Book Review: No Man's Land: Combat and Identity in World War I

Book Review: No Man's Land: Combat and Identity in World War I

Reviews of Books

Abstract Abstract The Weapons of Terror: International terrorism at work By Christopher Dobson and Ronald Payne (Macmillan, London, 1979), £3.95, 216 pages. Reviewed by Tony Geraghty. Terrorism: International Dimensions—Answering the Challenge By Paul Wilkinson (Institute for the Study of Conflict, London, 1979), £2. Reviewed by Tony Geraghty. Regular Armies and Insurgency Edited by Ronald Haycock (Croom Helm, London, 1979), £7.95, 101 pages. Reviewed by I. F. W. Beckett. New Conventional Weapons and East-West Security Edited by Christoph Bertram (Macmillan, for the IISS, London, 1979), £8.95, 97 pages. Reviewed by Noel Falconer. The World Military Order. The Impact of Military Technology on the Third World Edited by Mary Kaldor and Asbj⊘rn Eide (Macmillan, London, 1979), £15, 306 pages. Reviewed by Keith Simpson. Dictionary of the Napoleonic Wars By David G. Chandler (Arms and Armour Press, London, 1979), £12.95, 800 pages. Reviewed by P. H. C. Hayward. The Boer War By Thomas Pakenham (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1979), £10.00, 659 pages. Reviewed by Elizabeth Saxon. No Man's Land; Combat and Identity in World War I By Eric J. Leed (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, 1979) £10.50, 257 pages. Reviewed by Theodore Bogacz. The Admiralty By N. A. M. Rodger (Terence Dalton, Suffolk, 1979), £7.95, 179 pages. Reviewed by B. B. Schofield. Battleship Barham By Geoffrey Jones (William Kimber, London, 1979), £7.95, 265 pages. Reviewed by Royer Dick. Securing The Seas: The Soviet Naval Challenge and Western Alliance Options By Paul Nitze, Leonard Sullivan, Jr and the Atlantic Council Working Group on Securing the Seas (Westview Press, Colorado, 1979), S24 hardback, S12 softback, 452 pages. Reviewed by Bryan Ranft. The Modern Soviet Navy: An Assessment of the USSR's Current Warships, Naval Capabilities and Development Edited by Norman Polmar (Arms and Armour Press, London and Melbourne, 1979), £6.95, 119 pages. Reviewed by Bryan Ranft. Modern Warship Design and Development By Norman Friedman (Conway Maritime Press, London, 1979), £9.50, 192 pages. Reviewed by Eric J. Grove. British Warships and Auxiliaries By Mike Critchley (Maritime Books, Liskeard, 1979), £1.50, 112 pages. Reviewed by Eric J. Grove. The Apostles of Mobility: The Theory and Practice of Armoured Warfare By Field Marshal Lord Carver (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1979), £6, 108 pages. Reviewed by P. H. Vigok. Dieppe 1942: The Jubilee Disaster By Ronald Atkin (Macmillan, London, 1980), £6.95, 306 pages. Reviewed by P. S. Newton. The Greatest Air Battle By Norman Franks (William Kimber, London, 1979), £6.95, 256 pages. Reviewed by R. A. Mason. The Hardest Day By Alfred Price (Macdonald and Jane's, London, 1979), £5.95, 223 pages. Reviewed by R. A. Mason. A Thousand Shall Fall By Murray Peden (Canada's Wings), £9.50, 473 pages. Reviewed by A. G. Trevenen James. First In! Parachute Pathfinder Company By Ron Kent (Batsford, London, 1979) £6.50, 181 pages. Reviewed by G. P. Burnett. The German Soldier in Russia 1941–5 By James Lucas (Jane's, London, 1979), £7.95. Reviewed by C. Bellamy. The Battle of the Box By Patrick Turnbull (Ian Allan, Middlesex, 1979), £7.50, 144 pages. Reviewed by P. H. C. Hayward. Double-edged Secrets: US Naval Intelligence Operations in the Pacific during World War II By W. J. Holmes (Patrick Stephens Ltd, Cambridge, 1979), £9.50, 240 pages. Reviewed by Ronald Lewin. The Medical Casebook of Adolf Hilter By Professor Leonard L. Heston, MD, and Renate Heston, RN (William Kimber, London, 1979), £6.95, 184 pages. Reviewed by Hugh L'Etang. The Literature of War. Five Studies in Heroic Virtue By Andrew Rutherford (Macmillan, London, 1979), £8.95, 176 pages. Reviewed by Keith Simpson.

Book Reviews

Book Reviews

Class and Disillusionment in World War I

I Diverse and often contradictory claims have been made about the nature of the social knowledge acquired by combatants in the First World War. Right-wing veterans' groups in Germany, Italy, and France asserted that in the war combatants had undergone an experience of true community; they had lived in a state of equality and classlessness, and this gave them a moral position superior to civilians. Theodore Bartram, an ex-officer who in 1919 attempted to organize a party of returning German frontsoldiers led by their former officers, insisted that the deepest experience is the front experience . . . and the front experience is first of all Gemeinschaft experience.' But others who participated in the war, particularly socialist combatants, felt that the soldier had seen his expectations of a class-unifying enterprise die in a war which expressed, even amplified, the class hatreds endemic to bourgeois society. The character of the war experience and the nature of the social knowledge it imprinted upon the identity of the frontsoldier became a central issue of the ideological battles of the 1920s and 1930s. This, more than anything else, makes it difficult to determine the actual content of the social experience men underwent from 1914 to 1918. Neutral observers, while they may disagree about the nature of the socialization process which men underwent in this war, agree that the war changed social attitudes, particularly those of upperclass combatants. These changes carried over, John Keegan maintains, into postwar Britain. the trenches young temporary gentlemen from West Country and South Coast watering places lived for the first time in their lives with Durham miners, Yorkshire furnacemen, and Clydeside shipyard workers. This encounter, though sometimes painful, worked deeply upon their sympathies for the lower orders. In this process of discovery many of the amateur officers were to conceive an affection for the disadvantaged which would eventually fuel that transformation of middle-class attitudes to the poor which has been the most important social trend in Twen-

Dissenting Attitudes to Foreign Relations, Peace and War, 1840–1890

It may confidently be surmised that at all times in history many men and women have sighed for the abatement of systematic and organised violence between or within tribes, empires and states, particularly when personal involvement has seemed likely. Such sentiments must have been common in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, even though the combatants in war were relatively few; famine and pestilence, the indirect consequences of conflict, were severe enough to guarantee that. It has been estimated that in the seventeenth century, there were only seven years in which wars were not being fought somewhere in Europe. Calculations for the eighteenth century could be expected to yield similar results. Yet it was only towards the end of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (known to contemporary Englishmen as the Great War) that determined action was taken to establish organised movements for peace. The result was the establishment in 1815 and 1816 of two peace societies in the United States, and of the Society for the Promotion of Permanent and Universal Peace (commonly described as the Peace Society) in Great Britain. These remained virtually alone until other bodies were formed in Britain and on the Continent in the period after 1867. These in turn contributed to the movements which led to inter-governmental conferences for peace and disarmament in the first decade of the twentieth century and to the formation of the League of Nations after the First World War.

Stress experiences and combat fatigue during the Yom Kippur war (1973).

As a result of steadily improving psychological and psychiatric activities during wartime, there is a growing professional literature on adjustment problems related to combat reactions in soldiers. A description is given of some specific war conditions and related combat reactions observed during the Yom Kippur war of October 1973 in Israel. Typical reactions of combat fatigue, for instance, superstitions and fatalistic thoughts and certain psychosomatic reactions, should be interpreted as basically adjustive reactions and viewed as vital coping patterns. There are, of course, a number of similarities between stress conditions in the Yom Kippur war and those found for World War I and II and the Korean and Viet Nam wars. However, during the October war Israeli soldiers experienced a very strong identification with and commitment to their army and their country, whereas the attitudinal and motivational structure of battle adjustment in American soldiers in countries like Korea and Viet Nam was probably quite different. In interpreting battle reactions in combat soldiers due weight should be given to variables like ego-involvement and commitment to one's country beyond more general variables, which are related to the unavoidable stress and strain of combat conditions and war.

Steps to War: the Scots and Parliament, 1642–1643

The Scottish role in the English Civil War, although generally recognized by historians to be a major one, has never been investigated in depth. Every student of the period knows how the resistance in Scotland to the English prayer book impelled Charles to summon first the Short and then the Long Parliament, thereby setting in motion the events leading to the Great Rebellion. Yet the Scots did more than help to precipitate the conflict: just a year after the actual fighting between the King and his Parliament began, they entered the fray as allies of the latter and remained active combatants in the first Civil War until its conclusion. Military aid was just one facet of this alliance. Scottish commissioners in London became embroiled in parliamentary politics, influencing positions taken by the two houses, while Scottish ministers stimulated the religious debate which characterized these years and assisted (despite their annoyance with the outcome) in the establishment of a new church government in England. Quite obviously the English Civil War was never exclusively an English matter.The Scots' intervention in their neighbors' affairs is also recognized to have resulted in disaster. Not only did they fail to realize their original ambitions; they were eventually forced to endure the humiliation of a military occupation. How then did Scotland manage to become involved in the upheaval taking place in England? The answer usually given by historians is a simple one: the Scottish Kirk, desiring to export Presbyterianism, worked successfully for an alliance with Parliament as a first step toward making England a Presbyterian nation.

Arteriography in Cold Injury

The injurious effects of cold injury to a limb vary according to the temperature of the environment and the presence of moisture. Moist cold causes injury at higher temperatures than dry cold. Immersion foot, for example, results from prolonged exposure to cold and damp at temperatures just above freezing, especially with immobilisation and dependency of the extremities. Frostbite is a result of actual freezing of the tissues and occurs after exposure to freezing temperatures. The time necessary to produce the injury is related to the temperature of the environment. Although the mechanism producing the pathological changes is not clearly understood (Abramson, 1956), the general view is that cold produces vasoconstriction with anoxia and damage to the capillaries. If the low temperature is severe enough intravascular thrombosis and crystallisation may occur. The presence of vasoconstriction is deduced from the colour and temperature changes present in the feet. Despite the numerous reports of cold injury to members of the armed forces of the different combatants in World War II and the Korean War we have been unable to trace any record of the arteriographic changes present in the acute stage of the injury. We have recently observed such changes in one case of bilateral cold injury to the feet. A 43-year-old vagrant was admitted in January with marked discoloration of both feet following exposure to cold.

ARE POSTOPERATIVE NARCOTICS NECESSARY?

The routine liberal administration of narcotics to the postoperative patient is a deeply rooted surgical tradition based on the erroneous impression that devastating pain is the inevitable consequence of a major surgical procedure. It is the purpose of this paper to assess the factors relating to pain in the postoperative period and to report an experience with a large consecutive series of surgical patients who have received (and required) either very small doses of narcotics or none at all. From observations on laboratory animals and human infants (whose pain threshold has been demonstrated to be lower than that of adults 1 ), it is notable that major pain and discomfort are rarely evident after surgical procedures. It is also well known that a person can sustain major tissue damage in war combat or in an athletic contest and yet continue in active motion with minimal discomfort, sometimes being completely unaware of

Infantry Combat in the Russo-Japanese War

Infantry Combat in the Russo-Japanese War