Brains and Bullets/War Games

[John D Salt]

Some of you may be aware of my enthusiasm for a book called “Brains and Bullets”, on the topic of combat psychology, by Leo Murray (pseudonym).

It’s still a fine book, I urge you to read it if you haven’t, and even though I know one of the authors (Leo Murray is really three people), I receive no payment for my book-pimping efforts on their behalf. Until now. The other day there unexpectedly popped through the letter-box a copy of a brand-new paperback, signed by one of the authors, with the title “War Games”. Not perhaps the most original title in the world, I can find at least 11 other books and 4 films with very similar titles. It is, however, the new title of “Brains and Bullets”. So if you’ve already read “Brains and Bullets”, you don’t need to read “War Games”, and, contrapuntally, if you haven’t, then you do.

Clear?

All the best,

John.

[kyoteblue]

Have you read On Killing by David Grossman?

[John D Salt]

kyoteblue wrote:

Have you read On Killing by David Grossman?

Yup, both “On Killing” and “On Combat”.

I try to get my hands on everything I can in this area, which seems to be surprisingly poorly covered. Kellett’s “Combat Motivation” gives a pretty good picture of the avaiable literature up to the time it was written. Stouffer’s “The American Soldier” I haven’t yet seen at a price I can afford, and I still haven’t got round to some of Bartov’s stuff.

All the best,

John.

[Whirlwind]

I wonder why the change of title?  Brains & Bullets seemed very apt, War Games doesn’t really.

 

And I will second John’s recommendation of it, whatever its name is: it is superb.

[Ruarigh]

John D Salt wrote:

Yup, both “On Killing” and “On Combat”. I try to get my hands on everything I can in this area, which seems to be surprisingly poorly covered.

What did you make of Grossman’s work? Does it stand up to critique? I’m interested in anything that deals with how ready and able people might be to kill other people, especially if it might be relevant to early medieval warfare and how that might have proceeded. I recall Grossman being massively slated on another forum, but I’m not sure how expert the slaters were.

Never argue with an idiot. They'll only drag you down to their level and beat you with experience.

https://roderickdale.co.uk/
https://emidsvikings.ac.uk/

[Whirlwind]

John D Salt wrote:

Stouffer’s “The American Soldier” I haven’t yet seen at a price I can afford

It is available online here.

 

[John D Salt]

Ruarigh wrote:

What did you make of Grossman’s work? Does it stand up to critique? I’m interested in anything that deals with how ready and able people might be to kill other people, especially if it might be relevant to early medieval warfare and how that might have proceeded. I recall Grossman being massively slated on another forum, but I’m not sure how expert the slaters were.

I like Grossman’s stuff, although I found “On Combat” (with Loren Christensen) more useful than “On Killing”, simply because it contained more stuff new to me.

The criticisms I have seen of Grossman so far fall into two categories. One is that his concern about operant conditioning, and the idea that exposure to repeated casual violence through TV or video games can teach kids to kill, smacks of censorship and the bad old days of Mary Whitehouse. I am not especially interested in that branch of criticism; I remain surprised at the strain of perverse prudery that regards scenes of violent dismemberment as less offensive that pictures of people’s genitals, but I doubt either does much harm, and whatever needs to be said on the matter has for my money yet to be said better than Anthony Burgess did years ago in “A Clockwork Orange”.

The other branch of criticism is based on Grossman’s references to the work of S L A Marshall, and this is more a reaction to Marhsall than a reaction to Grossman. Some people regard Marshall as entirely discredited, and some are alarmingly prone to fits of the vapours whenever his name is mentioned. Yes, Marshall fixed his results; so did Gregor Mendel. A distressingly large amount of Marshall-knocking relies on selective quotation from Roger Spiller’s considered critique in the Winter 1988 edition of RUSI Journal. For myself, I think there is much of value in Marshall’s “Men Against Fire”, and his neglected classic “The Soldier’s Load”; the latter contains an idea which, as far as I am aware, is original to Marshall, and I shall not repeat here because I don’t want to distress Tim by saying “fungible” again so soo after the last time. “Men Against Fire”, while it was the book that made Marshall’s name (though not his fortune — that was “Pork Chop Hill”, another fine book, but enriching because it became a film — as Dory Previn sings, “Hooray for Hollywood”) was based largely on original thinking by Ardant du Picq, and one can easily trace Marshall’s headline 25% participation figure to du Picq’s chapter on “Tirs à la Carabine”. There is also independent support for Marshall’s ideas on participation from, notably, Lionel “The Forgotten Father of Battle Drill” Wigram. But everybody seems to have a go at Marshall, never at du Picq or Wigram. And there has been a lot of more constructive engagement with Marshall — not just dismissing him as a plonker for fibbing about is data, but trying to find if his reported results are applicable in other times and places. I’m thinking here of Russel W Glenn’s “Reading Athena’s Dance Card: Men Against Fire in Vietnam”, Robert Engen’s “Canadians Under Fire”, and Ernest Ashworth’s “Trench Warfare 1914-18: The Live and Let Live System”.

So, on the whole, I reckon Grossman is a good kiddy, and if there’s a sound argument that he’s talking eyewash I’ve yet to hear it.

Not sure how applicable this is to early medieval warfare, though — it’s one of my large collection of unpopular opinions that combat morale worked quite differently before the advent of pointy bullets, nitrocellulose propellants, high explosives, and the empty battlefield.

All the best,

John.

[Ruarigh]

John D Salt wrote:

I like Grossman’s stuff, although I found “On Combat” (with Loren Christensen) more useful than “On Killing”, simply because it contained more stuff new to me. … The other branch of criticism is based on Grossman’s references to the work of S L A Marshall, and this is more a reaction to Marhsall than a reaction to Grossman. Some people regard Marshall as entirely discredited, and some are alarmingly prone to fits of the vapours whenever his name is mentioned.

Thanks, John, for that precis. ‘Fit of the vapours’ sounds about right for the discussion I referenced, and it is good to get a more measured response.

For myself, I think there is much of value in Marshall’s “Men Against Fire”, and his neglected classic “The Soldier’s Load”; the latter contains an idea which, as far as I am aware, is original to Marshall, and I shall not repeat here because I don’t want to distress Tim by saying “fungible” again so soo after the last time.

Heh, and yet you still managed to write fungible while stating that you would not mention fungible again! 🙂 I’m now very intrigued by what this idea is.

Not sure how applicable this is to early medieval warfare, though — it’s one of my large collection of unpopular opinions that combat morale worked quite differently before the advent of pointy bullets, nitrocellulose propellants, high explosives, and the empty battlefield.

You’ll not find that opinion unpopular in this quarter. I’m firmly in the camp that holds that people thought very differently back then. That extends to how and why they waged war, and perhaps also to their willingness to put themselves in harm’s way, although it’s all a very complicated topic.

Never argue with an idiot. They'll only drag you down to their level and beat you with experience.

https://roderickdale.co.uk/
https://emidsvikings.ac.uk/

[Chris Pringle]

Ruarigh wrote:

Not sure how applicable this is to early medieval warfare, though — it’s one of my large collection of unpopular opinions that combat morale worked quite differently before the advent of pointy bullets, nitrocellulose propellants, high explosives, and the empty battlefield.

You’ll not find that opinion unpopular in this quarter. I’m firmly in the camp that holds that people thought very differently back then. That extends to how and why they waged war, and perhaps also to their willingness to put themselves in harm’s way, although it’s all a very complicated topic.

The shock effect of seeing/hearing something dramatic and outside one’s previous experience is surely not to be underestimated. Think of people in primitive societies, whether medieval or in C19 colonial conflicts, who may never have left their quiet village and never heard anything louder than a church bell/gong or a cow in labour – and confront them with explosions, rockets, massed drums or trumpets, disciplined ranks of redcoats … I reckon that would affect my morale.

[John D Salt]

Ruarigh wrote:

[snips]
Heh, and yet you still managed to write fungible while stating that you would not mention fungible again! I’m now very intrigued by what this idea is.

The interchangeability of fear and fatigue — see the thread in the Modern forum about the soldier’s load, where I drone on at length on the matter.

Ruarigh wrote:

Not sure how applicable this is to early medieval warfare, though — it’s one of my large collection of unpopular opinions that combat morale worked quite differently before the advent of pointy bullets, nitrocellulose propellants, high explosives, and the empty battlefield.

You’ll not find that opinion unpopular in this quarter. I’m firmly in the camp that holds that people thought very differently back then. That extends to how and why they waged war, and perhaps also to their willingness to put themselves in harm’s way, although it’s all a very complicated topic.

Ah, see, I think (on the basis of no particularly good evidence) that people thought, and perhaps more importantly felt, in much the same way as they do now; the way the brain and the endocrine system function is the same as it ever was (unless you buy that “breakdown of the bicameral mind” shtick, and that places its claims well before the medieval). However modern (last 100 years or so) combat has, under the influence of industrial-age technology, become a different thing, which pushes its participants to extremes of psychological endurance never previously required. That’s why psychological casuaties aren’t really a thing until the arrival of “shell shock” in WW1 (although “soldier’s heart” from the ACW may have been a precursor).

Chris Pringle wrote:

The shock effect of seeing/hearing something dramatic and outside one’s previous experience is surely not to be underestimated. Think of people in primitive societies, whether medieval or in C19 colonial conflicts, who may never have left their quiet village and never heard anything louder than a church bell/gong or a cow in labour – and confront them with explosions, rockets, massed drums or trumpets, disciplined ranks of redcoats … I reckon that would affect my morale.

I would have thought that for most of history, the experience of warfare was much closer to the experience of civil life than it has been recently. People woud have been much more accustomed to death, and to killing their own food, and sports would have been considerably more violent. Nor would they have had Hollywood presenting them with a sanitised, glamourised, and wildly misleading version of warfare — the complaint that war is nothing like the films is, I think, one that has been voiced almost since there have been films.

All the best,

John.

[Chris Pringle]

John D Salt wrote:

I would have thought that for most of history, the experience of warfare was much closer to the experience of civil life than it has been recently. People woud have been much more accustomed to death, and to killing their own food, and sports would have been considerably more violent. Nor would they have had Hollywood presenting them with a sanitised, glamourised, and wildly misleading version of warfare — the complaint that war is nothing like the films is, I think, one that has been voiced almost since there have been films. All the best, John.

I absolutely agree. When life is nasty, brutish and short anyway, the contrast between civilian life and warfare is less, and in some respects I suppose that makes it easier to cope with than it may have been for, say, US Vietnam War veterans dealing with the dissonance between the war and the home front.

I don’t know that that negates my suggestion about the morale effect of rockets etc. But maybe it does. I was just idly lobbing the idea out there anyway, I’m not especially attached to it, and certainly have no references to cite.

Chris

[Ruarigh]

John D Salt wrote:

Ah, see, I think (on the basis of no particularly good evidence) that people thought, and perhaps more importantly felt, in much the same way as they do now; the way the brain and the endocrine system function is the same as it ever was (unless you buy that “breakdown of the bicameral mind” shtick, and that places its claims well before the medieval).

I was thinking more about world-view, about how people approached life generally and warfare specifically. Certainly on a physical level people are much as they were, but the basic assumptions of everyday life in the past are not those of the present, and that probably shaped how they approached and experienced warfare. Then again, if you are part of the warrior class and brought up to warfare from childhood, no doubt you will deal with warfare differently from someone who is a farmer primarily but has/chooses to go to war for whatever reason. The stress of industrialised warfare is something else again.

Never argue with an idiot. They'll only drag you down to their level and beat you with experience.

https://roderickdale.co.uk/
https://emidsvikings.ac.uk/

[Guy Farrish]

Of course wishy washy arty types might argue that the ‘invention’ of the individual vice membership of the family, tribe, caste or trade (dating from the late middle ages/renaissance) which (so they say) gave rise to liberal democracy in the west (wherever that is) helped divorce that individual from a more brutish (robust/realistic?) experience of and approach to violence and death.

Coupled with the beginning/growth of killing at a distance with gunpowder weapons could this have changed the ‘western way of war’ (does anyone still believe in that?) from killing up close and personal in a tight knit organised group to a reluctance to actually do the deed in most?

Morale changes from the will needed to drive a blade  into your opponent face to face to the stress of acting in a coordinated manner on the empty battlefield with few mates around you to help you overcome fear, exhaustion and confusion.

Possible?

I dunno guv – but I put the idea out there to be utterly sneered at.

(I suspect the endocrine system and brain work in much the same way as they did a few thousand years ago, but I wonder what the social constructs around the inputs/actions may have had on the processing of them? Just an idle thought. There is a mother, friend of my wife, and baby downstairs and I am hiding lest I terrify the child – too much time on my hands.)

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