S.L.A. Marshall

S.L.A. Marshall (full name, Samuel Lyman Atwood Marshall) (July 18, 1900 – December 17, 1977) was a chief U.S. Army combat historian during World War II and the Korean War. He authored some 30 books about warfare, including "Pork Chop Hill: The American Fighting Man in Action," which was made into a movie of the same name.

Early life

Marshall was born in Catskill, New York and first served in the Army as an enlisted man in World War I with the U.S. 90th Infantry Division. While his writings implied that he was an officer who led troops in combat, Marshall did not fight and was commissioned an officer in April 1919 to assist in demobilization. After that he worked as a newspaper reporter. During WWII he became an official Army historian, and was a proponent of oral history techniques. Marshall favored the group interview. He would gather survivors of a unit together and question them about the previous battle's details.

Body of work

Marshall's work on infantry combat effectiveness in World War II, titled "Men Against Fire", is his most well-known and controversial work. In the book, Marshall claimed that of the World War II U.S. troops in actual combat, 75% never fired their personal weapons at the enemy for the purpose of killing, even though they were engaged in combat and under direct threat. (Later research has cast doubts on his methods, but research into killing ratios of other wars, including the U.S. Civil War, has supported this claim; see below.) Marshall argued that the United States Army should devote significant training resources to increase the percentage of soldiers willing to engage the enemy with direct fire.

Less well known, but perhaps more significant was Marshall's effort to assemble German officers after the war to write histories and analyses of battles in all theatres of the European war. At the height of the project over 200 Germans officers participated in the project, including Heinz Guderian and Franz Halder. Hundreds of monographs came out of the project, of which three are available in commercial print (see "" edited by Peter G. Tsouras, 1994, ISBN 1-85367-282-9)

He was recalled from the Reserves in late 1950 for three months' duty as a Historian/Operations Analyst for the Eighth Army during the Korean War.

Retirement, Vietnam tour and death

Following his retirement from the Army Reserve in 1960, with the rank of brigadier general, Marshall continued to serve as an unofficial adviser to the Army. As a private citizen, he spent late 1966 and early 1967 in Vietnam on an Army-sponsored tour for the official purpose of teaching his after-action interview techniques to field commanders, in order to improve data collection for both the chain of command and the future official history of the Vietnam War.

The Army Chief of Military History's representative on the tour, Colonel David H. Hackworth, collected his own observations from the trip and published them as "The Vietnam Primer," giving Marshall credit as co-author.

S. L. A. Marshall died in 1977 in El Paso, Texas. The University of Texas at El Paso library has a special collection built around his books.

Marshall is used as a character in "", a video game released in 2005.

Controversy after death

Despite the surprising nature of Marshall's statistics about soldiers being unwilling to kill, the conclusion has been mostly accepted by the U.S. Army, as evidenced by the profound change in the standard training for U.S. soldiers. Nonetheless, certain professional soldiers have publically cast doubt on Marshall's research methodology.

Professor Roger J. Spiller (Deputy Director of the Combat Studies Institute, US Army Command and General Staff College) demonstrated in his 1988 article "S.L.A. Marshall and the Ratio of Fire" ("RUSI Journal", Winter 1988, pages 63–71) that Marshall had not actually conducted the research upon which he based his ratio of fire theory. "The 'systematic collection of data' that made Marshall's ratio of fire so authoritative appears to have been an invention." [citation
title=S.L.A. Marshall and the Ratio of Fire
first=Roger J. |last=Spiller |authorlink=Roger J. Spiller
periodical=RUSI Journal
date=Winter 1988 |year=1988 |pages=63–71. (Extracts are available on-line in an [http://www.warchronicle.com/us/combat_historians_wwii/marshallfire.htm article criticizing Marshall] )] This revelation called into question the authenticity of some of Marshall's other books, and lent academic weight to doubts about his integrity that had been raised in military circles even decades earlier. [cite news
title=Fire Away |url=http://www.newsweek.com/id/76997
first=Evan |last=Hunter |authorlink=Evan Hunter
publisher=Newsweek |date=December 12, 2007]

Col. David Hackworth's 1989 memoir, "About Face", described at length his initial elation at an assignment with a man he idolized, and how that elation turned to bitter disillusionment after seeing Marshall's character and methods firsthand. Hackworth described Marshall as a "voyeur warrior" for whom "the truth never got in the way of a good story," and went so far as to say "Veterans of many of the actions he 'documented' in his books have complained bitterly over the years of his inaccuracy or blatant bias". [cite book
title=About Face
first=David |last=Hackworth |authorlink=David Hackworth
publisher=Simon & Schuster | year=1989 |isbn=0671526928 (See chapter 16.)]

Those who defend Marshall's conclusions, such as Retired Lt. Col. Dave Grossman in his book "On Killing", have found substantial evidence across military history supporting Marshall's observation about the individual soldier having an inherent unwillingness to kill.

Bibliography

A partial list of books (by title):
* "Blitzkrieg: Armies on Wheels" 1940
* "Men Against Fire: The Problem of Battle Command" 1947
* "The Soldier's Load and The Mobility of a Nation" 1950
* "The River and the Gauntlet" 1951
* "Pork Chop Hill: The American Fighting Man in Action, Korea, Spring, 1953" 1956
* "Night Drop: The American Airborne Invasion of Normandy " 1962
* "The Vietnam Primer" 1967 (with David H. Hackworth)
* "Bringing Up the Rear: A Memoir" 1979 (posthumous autobiography)

References