THEO FARRELL

Review Article
and War

61

Memory, Imagination

THEO FARRELL
University College Dublin
War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century. Edited by Jay Winter
and Emmanuel Sivan. Cambridge University Press. 2000. vii + 260pp.
12.95 (pb).
Anticipating Total War: The German and American Experiences, 1871
1914. Edited by Manfred F. Boemeke, Roger Chickering and Stig Foster.
Cambridge University Press. 1999. viii + 496pp. 35.00.
The Spirit of 1914: Militarism, Myth and Mobilization in Germany.
By Jeffrey Verhey. Cambridge University Press. 2000. xiv + 268pp.
37.50.
War Land on the Eastern Front: Culture, National Identity and German
Occupation in World War I. By Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius. Cambridge
University Press. 2000. viii + 309pp. 35.00.
In the Shadow of the Garrison State: Americas Anti-Statism and Its Cold
War Grand Strategy. By Aaron L. Friedberg. Princeton University Press.
2000. xiv + 362pp. 15.95.
The Politics of Strategic Adjustment: Ideas, Institutions, and Interests.
Edited by Peter Trubowitz, Emily O. Goldman and Edward Rhodes.
Columbia University Press. 1999. viii + 331pp. 36.00 (hb), 14.00
(pb).
Fighting the Enemy: Australian Soldiers and their Adversaries in World War
II. By Mark Johnston. Cambridge University Press. 2000. xi + 206pp.
30.00.

ilitary history ended the last millennium in trouble. Writing in

1997, the prominent American military historian, John Lynn,
argued that his field faced an embattled future because it had
been left behind in the general move towards more trendy theoretical concerns by the rest of the discipline. Lynn wryly noted: Deconstruction
means one thing to our cutting edge colleagues; to us it just means
something like carpet bombing. His solution was for military historians to ally themselves with the new cultural history. Lynn noted that
new cultural history can get weird or seemingly trivial; all the same he
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62 MEMORY, IMAGINATION AND WAR

recognized that military reality is also culturally dependent.1 Lynn was

referring specifically to US academia. According to one leading British
military historian, Jeremy Black, things are not quite so bad in Britain.2
While the situation varies in particular countries, Black nevertheless
concludes that the overall picture is bleak.3
It so happens that, in recent years, historians in America and beyond
have been examining the impact of culture on war, and about time too.4
Surveying the new cultural history of war, this article examines how
memory and imagination profoundly shape the landscape of warfare. It
begins by examining how wars are remembered and imagined, and then
goes on to explore how memories and imagination shaped Germanys
purpose in fighting two world wars, and the rise of American military
power and its use in the war against Japan.
I
A good starting point is War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century,
edited by Jay Winter and Emmanuel Sivan. The editors note that warfare is no doubt a time of dramatic, unique experiences, which leave dense
memory traces, individual and social. Winter and Sivan go on to argue
that this is particularly true in the twentieth century, with mass industrial warfare of conscript armies (p. 17). This general observation on the
relationship between modern war and memory is well taken, though one
might care to note that wars of mass mobilization and industrialization
originate in the latter half of the nineteenth century, with the American
Civil War and wars of German Unification.5 In the first chapter, the
editors examine two approaches to memory, that of cognitive psychology
with its emphasis on the process of remembering, and that of sociology
and anthropology with the emphasis on the social structuring of symbolic representation. Their brief review of cognitive psychology reveals
some fascinating insights; these include, experiences as having varying
density (weight of memory) depending on their dramatic nature, the role
of rehearsal through social rituals (storytelling, ceremonies, parades, etc.)
in recalling memories, and the role of trauma in powerfully encoding
and recalling memories. These ideas have important implications for
the historical study of memory with regard to its shelf-life, the central

John A. Lynn, The Embattled Future of Academic Military History, Journal of Military History, lxi (1997) [hereafter Lynn, Embattled Future], 782, 787. Lynn also suggested that military
historians take account of gender history. For a fine example of gender-military history see Joanna
Bourke, An Intimate History of Killing: Face-to-Face Killing in Twentieth-Century Warfare (1999).
2 Jeremy Black, War and the World, 14502000, Journal of Military History, lxiii (1999), 669.
3 Jeremy Black, War: Past, Present and Future (Stroud, 2000), p. 1.
4 There is also a growing interest among social scientists in the relationship between culture
and international security. See Theo Farrell, Culture and Military Power, Review of International
Studies, xxiv (1998), 40716.
5 Stig Foster and Jrg Nagler (eds), On the Road to Total War: The American Civil War and the
German Wars of Unification, 18611871 (Cambridge, 1997).
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importance of ritual and rehearsal in activating memories, and the extent

to which political and cultural elites can manipulate memory. Ultimately,
Winter and Sivan seek to advance an approach which recognizes the role
of agency of individuals and small groups of people recovering and
reproducing memories in physical, visual and literary monuments to war
while also appreciating the larger social forces involved in framing
collective memories and memorials.
Winter and Sivan are careful to note that collective memory is
not what everybody thinks about war. Nor should it be thought of as
the property of dominant forces in the state, or of all the survivors of
war in the privacy of their lives, or as some facet of the mental furniture
of a population (p. 9). Rather collective memory is the product of individuals and groups who come together in the act of remembrance. Defined in this way, collective memory can belong to a whole nation, but
equally, it can belong to smaller communities including organizations,
associations and families.
Certainly governments (and their cultural agents) seek to shape and
control collective memories of war. Desired are images of national glory,
determination and heroism. Unwelcome are memorials that portray the
horror and moral uncertainties of war, and which accordingly may be
rejected as unpatriotic. Thus, Sir William Owen had to modify his picture,
To the Unknown British Soldier in France, to paint out the miserable image
of two ghostly boy-soldiers before it would be accepted by the Imperial
War Museum in 1928.6 Often the state selectively sanctions memory
of suffering. Typically, wars against external enemies will enjoy statesponsored (and controlled) commemoration, while memories of violence
directed against internal enemies of the state will be suppressed. As
Catherine Merridale discusses in War and Remembrance (2001), most of
the 60 million Russians killed in the first half of the twentieth century
went unmourned by the Soviet state.7 Public remembrance of the Great
Patriotic War against Germany was permitted (and structured), but, as
Merridale shows, memories of the many more Russian deaths at Russian
hands (through civil war, repression and starvation) were only kept
privately. Newly independent states, whose nationals gave military service
to former imperial masters, faced peculiar problems in commemorating the fallen. For instance, Irish authorities (state and local) in the
1920s and 1930s were antipathetic about memorials to Irish war dead
from British wars. The Irish government even had difficulty commemorating Irish casualties of the 1916 Rising against British rule because Irish
fought on both sides as rebels and in the British forces.8

Even though the original painting was voted Picture of the Year at the Royal Academys 1923
summer exhibition; Keith Jeffrey, Ireland and the Great War (Cambridge, 2000) [hereafter Jeffrey,
Ireland and the Great War], pp. 869.
7 See also Catherine Merridale, Night of Stone: Death and Memory in Russia (2001).
8 Jeffrey, Ireland and the Great War, pp. 10731.
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However, collective memory is not at all the sole property of state

agents. Rather it is the site and product of contestation within and between state institutions and civil society. Individuals and groups seek for
personal, artistic and commercial reasons to recall, understand, explain
and represent the experience of war. This theme is central to Winters
acclaimed study on the Great War in European cultural history, Sites of
Memory, Sites of Mourning (1995). In this earlier book, Winter explored
the ways in which modernists challenged many of the patriotic certainties expressed in traditional romantic and religious images of war, and
how they stretched, explored, and reconfigured [these images] in ways
that alarmed conventional artists, writers, and the public at large.9 Collective memory is also a commercial activity, particularly with the huge
growth of the memory business in the twentieth century. In explaining
the rising popularity of battlefield tourism in inter-war Britain, David
Lloyd concludes that
the active role of individuals in the construction of memory also explains why remembrance was not just a tool which was manipulated by
the elites. In Great Britain in the 1920s and 1930s the memory of the war
was pervaded by a deeply felt individual desire to remember and mourn
the dead.10

At the same time, states can also benefit from the complicity of civil
society in maintaining traditional patriotic memories of war. Heroism and
glory are easier to report, record, represent and ultimately stomach, than
stories of suffering and images of horror. Patriotic narratives of war not
only serve an important function in binding nations together, they also
give comfort and meaning to the experiences of combatants and victims.
In accounting for the myth of Germanys Great and Glorious War of
187071 against France, Alfred Kelly in Anticipating Total War argues
that this was a privileged narrative. Poorly educated, and with only a
worms eye view of the action, the average soldier had to integrate his
narrow experience into the larger narrative constructed by his leaders.
Kelly notes that war reporters, with limited sight of the battlefield, also
depended on military authorities to interpret what happened. Ultimately,
however, reporters reproduced stories and pictures of heroism rather than
horror, and soldiers and public alike accepted this patriotic imagery,
because they wanted to. Veterans, in particular, needed the myth of a
glorious war with France in order to live comfortably with [their] terrible
experience; moreover, they had little interest in challenging the myth,
for to do so would have undercut their own self-esteem (pp. 3035).

Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History
(Cambridge, 1995), p. 3. This book challenges Paul Fussells notion of a neat rupture caused by the
First World War, between tradition and modernist representations of war: Fussell, The Great War
and Modern Memory (Oxford, 1975).
10 David W. Lloyd, Battlefield Tourism: Pilgrimage and the Commemoration of the Great War in
Britain, Australia and Canada, 19191939 (Oxford, 1998), p. 220.
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Traditional images of war as a glorious, heroic and patriotic activity

are essential elements of combat power in the modern age, motivating
individuals to fight and even die for their communities. Collective memories provide repositories for this traditional imagery of war, imagery that
can be recovered and re-enacted in times of national emergency. In addition, collective memories of national identity and past events can render
specific narratives within which war is given meaning and context. In a
study concentrating on the 1982 Falklands War, Kevin Foster convincingly shows that events in the Falklands, how they were experienced,
understood and described by both participants and observers, were
preceded and shaped by certain powerful myths of national identity. The
invasion of the Falklands became a metaphor for the post-war decline
of pastoral, idyllic Britain.
The endeavour to retake and so restore these people to their islands thus
signified far more than the recovery of so much nostalgic real estate: it
represented an attempt to recover for the nation as a whole a long-lost
image of itself as a community socially coherent and morally content.11

Anita Shapiras authoritative history of Zionist strategic culture also

shows how memories of the past in this case, memories of persistent
insecurity in Russia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
lay at the heart of the Zionist campaign for statehood in Palestine. This
led Zionists to imagine the need for defensive military capabilities and
eventually, from the 1930s onwards, to believe that military force could
be used offensively to secure statehood.12
Of course, not all images of war depend on memory. The mechanization of warfare in the twentieth century unleashed terrible images of
future war, images not drawn from past experience. It so happens that
the horrendous slaughter on the automated battlefields of the First World
War was pre-staged by the mass-industrialized American Civil War and
Franco-Prussian War. However, as David Trask argues in Anticipating
Total War, Americans failed to grasp the significance of the Civil War
as a military portent as a technical foretaste of a new kind of warfare
(p. 333). John Whiteclay Chambers II agrees that the Civil War was not
seen as a harbinger of the nature of the future of modern war. He suggests that pitting Americans against Americans, it seemed an aberration
(p. 245). Ironically, the reverse was true of the rise of air power: it was
accurately predicted despite the lack of precedent. As Michael Sherry has
pointed out, more than any other modern weapon, the bomber was
imagined before it was invented. H. G. Wellss 1908 book, The War in
the Air, describes a war started by German bombing of US cities, six years
before bombers would be used for the first time in war.13
11

Kevin Foster, Fighting Fictions: War, Narrative and National Identity (1999), pp. 2, 27.
Anita Shapira, Land and Power: The Zionist Resort to Force, 18811948 (Stanford, 1999).
13 Michael Sherry, The Rise of American Air Power: The Creation of Armageddon (New Haven, 1987)
[hereafter Sherry, American Air Power], p. 1.
12

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II
In addition to men and material, memories and images were mobilized
when Germany went to war in 1914 and 1939. In the late nineteenth
century, militarism was actively promoted by the German government
in order to reduce internal social divisions and unite the people against
external enemies. However, as Thomas Rohkramer argues in Anticipating Total War, German militarism soon developed a dynamic of its own.
Consistent with Winter and Sivans view that collective memory is often
the property of specific groups, Rohkramer focuses on the radicalization
of the ex-servicemens association. He uses this popular mass movement
as a lens through which to examine the militarization of large parts of
German society before the First World War. Critical to Rohkramers story
is the change in social make-up of this movement, with local veterans
associations also admitting reservists from 1890 onwards. Veterans associations thus changed from being memorials to war experiences to being
forums for commemorating the German army, and this resulted in a
change of ideological orientation, away from celebrating past military
service to glorifying war in general. Also important was the relationship
between war veterans and new recruits. Because the members of the older
generation presented themselves as heroes after their participation in
the wars of unification, the members of the younger generation, who had
never participated in war, felt inferior. This spurred on the young reservists to prove their worth. Thus, they turned the backward-looking glorification of the Franco-Prussian War into a forward-looking militarism
that touted German expansion and future war in which these would-be
heroes could prove themselves to be true heroes like their fathers
(p. 199).
The imagination of the German military elite also contributed to the
outbreak of the First World War. A combination of widespread German
paranoia, social Darwinism and worst-case planning typical of military
professionals, produced a fatalism in the German General Staff. In Anticipating Total War, Stig Forster argues that German military leaders
expected the coming war to last years and they had no idea how to win
it: the Schlieffen Plan was not a foolproof recipe for a short war, but
rather a desperate operational plan for the opening campaign of a long
war ( p. 367). Nevertheless, German generals took their country to war
because they felt that war was unavoidable, and to some extent desirable,
in order to purify a nation corrupted by the social development accompanying industrialization.14
In the Spirit of 1914, Jeffrey Verhey examines the widespread myth that
war was greeted by general enthusiasm in Germany. War enjoyed most
14

In a recent critique of Fosters account, Dennis Showalter argues that the Schlieffen Plan was the
most visible manifestation of a military myth whereby the German General Staff believed that war
could be won provided everything worked as planned. In short, the army was not marching fully
conscious into catastrophe but rather into high risk (Showalter, From Deterrence to Doomsday
Machine: The German Way of War, 18901914, Journal of Military History, lxiv (2000), 679710).
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support amongst young, middle-class, city-dwellers. However, Verhey

argues that it generated anxiety and fear amongst older and poorer
Germans, and those living in the countryside. Moreover, many people
had mixed emotions: feelings of excitement, exhilaration, trepidation and
concern. Nevertheless, the myth of universal war enthusiasm rapidly
established itself in German political culture. In part, this was because
political groups in opposition also tried to take advantage of the spirit
of 1914 narrative instead of debunking it. But Verhey argues that this
narrative also had such power because it served two vital purposes. It was
employed as a social myth to provide the most poignant representation of the German collective identity. It was also used as a transcendent myth to persuade Germans that, though outnumbered by enemies,
through faith one could overcome difficulties that could not be overcome
through a more rational approach. Both forms of myth were essential
in generating German public support for the war effort: the social myth
spoke to the need to represent to the German people the nation that they
were fighting and dying for; the transcendent myth spoke to the need to
find a way out of the crisis ( pp. 911).15 Verheys book provides a fascinating insight into how collective memories are manipulated and mobilized for war. In this case, cultural and political leaders collectively
constructed the spirit of 1914: the myth was promoted not only in
government propaganda, but also by a compliant conservative press and
in popular literature and theatre. Verhey also describes how the spirit of
1914 narrative underwent subtle modifications as the transcendent myth
overtook the social myth in importance. As the war dragged on, maintaining public faith became more important than legitimating national
identity, and so the spirit of 1914 was portrayed as one of grim determination rather than enthusiasm ( pp. 13655, 192202).
Collective memory of defeat was also manufactured by military and
conservative political elites, with disastrous consequences. Verhey argues
that the transcendent myth of grim determination formed the basis for
the militarys explanation for Germanys defeat: if willpower was the key
to victory, then it was also central to defeat. German military leaders
argued that the decline in public morale, rather than the increase in
the enemys material superiority, had lost the war. In short, the civilian
population, under the influence of left-wing and enemy propaganda,
had stabbed the army in the back. The stab-in-the-back legend was
ridiculed by the left; nevertheless, it was believed by the public because
people wanted to believe in it. Germans concluded from this that
the way to undo the defeat of the First World War was to strengthen
ones own will. The appeal of this mythological epistemology was given
political force in the 1930s under the Nazis. While fatalism took Germany
to war in 1914, Verhey shows that fanatical will did so in 1939 ( pp. 206
38).
15

The historical myth of war enthusiasm in Britain is discussed in Niall Ferguson, The Pity of War
(1999), pp. 174211.

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Memory and imagination also shaped the character of German warfare, particularly the intensely savage war pursued by German forces on
the eastern front during the Second World War. Where Omer Bartov
explains German barbarism in the context of the brutalizing influence
of appalling battlefield conditions and Nazi racial ideology,16 in War Land
on the Eastern Front Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius locates German army
action in the collective memory of Germanys previous invasion of Russia. In 1914, the east was totally alien territory to invading Germans, who
had no idea what to expect. As they pushed into the Russian empire,
German soldiers encountered a land left barren by retreating Russian
forces. Germans associated conditions created by war dirt, disease,
disorder and human misery with the normal conditions of the region.
In response, the German army sought to structure and bring Kultur to
the east by building a monolithic military state, named Ober Ost. The
scale of the project was impressive: Ober Ost covered over 100,000 square
kilometres (roughly half the size of the United Kingdom today) and
contained around 3 million inhabitants. However, vaunting, overreaching
ambition led to constant conflict between the utopian ends and brutal
means of the states policies, which sped towards immobilization. Even
though Germany defeated Russia in 1917, Ober Ost failed a year later
because instead of successfully manipulating native peoples, yoking them
to the program of German work, the regime called forth a desperate
native resistance, as subject peoples articulated national identities in a
struggle for survival (p. 9).
A variant of the stab-in-the-back legend was employed to explain this
failure: namely, that German soldiers who had mutinied in the November 1918 revolution were influenced by natives (especially Jews) and infected with Bolshevik ideas. The collapse of Ober Ost led Germans to
reject all they had learned about the east. Previous recognition of it as
a region of lands and peoples, to be ordered and cultivated, gave way
to a new concept of it as containing races and spaces to be exterminated
and exploited. Liulevicius notes that the imperative of the future had to
be: leave out the people and take the spaces (p. 252). The need for space
and opportunities for expansion eastwards captured public imagination
with the development and popularization of the science of geopolitics,
and through a Nazi campaign of propaganda and education. When the
Nazis unleashed war in the east, the purpose was not to defeat the Russians but clearing and cleaning the space for a new order and settlement.
The Nazis General Plan for the East envisaged removing and murdering
31 million people, and using the remaining 14 million natives as slave
labour for German settlers. Liulevicius concludes that the line of continuity between the military utopia and Nazi plans can be traced in the
way in which Ober Osts practices and assumptions were radicalised and
then put into action in a renewed war in the East ( p. 272). In this way,
16

Omer Bartov, Hitlers Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich (Oxford, 1992).

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manipulated memory of the past combined with terrible vision for the
future to produce German barbarism on the eastern front in the Second
World War.
III
Americas war in the Pacific in 19415 occurred in the context of the rise
of the American military and the global expansion of American trade
and capital. American hegemony in the twentieth century is curious given
that the United States was a republic founded on the suspicion of state
power. Aaron L. Friedbergs In the Shadow of the Garrison State describes
how American ideology combining economic liberalism with an antipower ethic served as a major brake on the enlargement of state institutions. Ideology here expressed the collective memory of Americas past
and aspirations for Americas future; ideas and images expressed in the
popular media, and reflected in business and political opinion. As a
consequence, expansion of the warfare and welfare state only occurred
gradually in response to major crises (e.g. war and depression), with each
spurt of state growth followed by a Congress-enforced roll-back of state
power. Friedberg focuses on the cold-war period in seeking to explain
why the United States did not turn into a latter-day Sparta a garrison
state in response to the Soviet threat. His explanation centres on a
strategic synthesis which had developed in America by 1960: ideologically rooted, interest-driven, and institutionally amplified anti-statist
influences thus acted to constrict, constrain, and mold the federal governments efforts at power creation. In the process they also eased the
United States away from the more ambitious military strategies and
peacetime force structures and towards those that were less demanding
(p. 74).
Ironically, Friedbergs argument is more persuasive when applied to
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the rapidly
expanded US armies and navies of the Civil War and First World War
were demobilized with equal haste. Anti-statist influences were less
evident in Americas steady cold-war build-up. According to Friedberg,
countervailing [anti-statist] tendencies made it easier for the United States
to preserve its economic vitality and technological dynamism and thereby
out-perform and outpace its supremely statist rival, the Soviet Union
(p. 4). Decentralization and privatization of arms manufacturing were
indeed central to Americas success in producing a more technologically
advanced arsenal; by comparison, the Soviet Unions centrally controlled
arms industry was slow to innovate.17 However, the US government was
faced with virtual bankruptcy by Ronald Reagans excessive defence
budgets. Moreover, poor quality control by public agencies meant that

17 Matthew Evagelista, Innovation and the Arms Race: How the United States and Soviet Union
Develop New Military Technologies (Ithaca, NY, 1988).

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the US defence industries often failed to deliver on their extravagant

promises.18
The rise of the US Navy at the turn of the twentieth century is examined in several chapters in The Politics of Strategic Adjustment. In 1890,
America committed itself to acquiring a blue-water naval fleet that within
a few decades would be second only to Britains. Previously, US naval
ambitions had been modest, so much so that the navy was allowed to
slip into technological and material obsolescence in 186583. Consistent with Friedbergs theory of crisis-induced state growth, Peter Trubowitz presents naval expansion as a strategy pursued by Republican Party
leaders to stimulate industrial development in the hard-pressed Northwest, and to neutralize agrarian discontent in the trans-Mississippi West.
Imagination also played a part in the creation of naval power. According
to Mark Shulman, the navalists were part of a larger movement in latenineteenth-century American political culture an elite rebellion against
the long-standing commercial and agrarian national ethos ( p. 81). Essentially, progressive thinkers sought to replace the Jeffersonian image of a
minimalist, agrarian-commercial democracy with the Hamiltonian vision
of a stronger, more interventionist republic. Edward Rhodes also emphasizes broader social forces in America, specifically the need to construct
a new American national identity in the late nineteenth century that
would lock in the newly integrated South, and respond to the increasing
irrelevance of the frontier image in the face of industrialization. This
too required the construction of a muscular outward-looking identity to
replace that of a modest inward-looking America: the self would be
defined by encountering the other (foreigners). Commercial forces were
also important in the reconstruction of American identity. This new vision
of American greatness fuelled the pro-navy lobby: as a great nation
America needed a great navy to protect its trade interests. The logic of
this argument enabled the pro-navy lobby to attach its cause to the rise
of American greatness, and thereby build domestic support for naval
expansion.
Sherrys award-winning history of The Rise of American Air Power
(1987) also examines how visions of military growth gained material
expression. These were visions of air power proposed by cultural elites
and promoted by commercial, military and political elites.19 Ultimately,
however, elite ideas were only realized because they captured the public
imagination. Air power enthusiasts like Alexander de Seversky war hero,
fighter ace and aircraft designer preached directly to the American
people: 20 million Americans knew of Seversky and his message in the
early 1940s.20 The American public identified the aeroplane as both a
18 Theo Farrell, Weapons without a Cause: The Politics of US Weapons Acquisition (Basingstoke,
1997).
19 See Sherry, American Air Power.
20 Phillip S. Meilinger, Proselytiser and Prophet: Alexander P. de Seversky and American Airpower,
Journal of Strategic Studies, xviii (1995), 735.

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symbol of industrial creativity and a fearful instrument of destruction.

The former image hinted at the peacetime benefits of air travel, while the
latter image was still welcome, for it was better to be raining bombs on
the enemy than to suffer Wellss nightmare.21
Imagination not only shaped the rise of American military power, but
also how that power was used in the war against Japan. John Dower has
noted the central role played by graphic racial imagery in shaping the
war for both the Allies and the Japanese: each side considered the other
to be somehow sub-human. Dower concluded that
war words and race words came together in a manner which did not just
reflect the savagery of the war, but contributed to it by reinforcing the
impression of a truly Manichaean struggle between completely incompatible antagonists. The natural response to such a vision was an obsession
with extermination on both sides a war without mercy.22

Dowers thesis is supported by Mark Johnstons Fighting the Enemy, a

study of how Australian soldiers interacted with Italian, German, French
and Japanese enemies. Australians carried preconceived images of the
enemy into the battlefield: their images of the Japanese combined feelings
of repulsion and racial superiority with fear of the Yellow Peril. By
comparison, Johnston reveals the Australians having a far higher regard
for the German enemy, as did the Americans according to Dower. Where
compassion was often shown towards German, Italian and French enemies, the Japanese were treated with hatred and contempt. Australian
racism was reinforced by the dirt and discomfort of their jungle environment (which they associated with the Japanese), and by the dishevelled
condition and dishonourable behaviour of the Japanese they encountered.
The overall result was to fuel a savage war intended to annihilate an alien
foe rather than trying to bring an essentially liked-minded foe to accept
defeat by the rules of war ( p. 79).
Ultimately, Japan was bombed into submission with an air campaign
that destroyed most of its urban centres and killed somewhere between
400,000 and 900,000 civilians. Racism and revenge (for Pearl Harbor and
treatment of American POWs) facilitated American warfare on such a
savage scale. Sherry also located this military action in the institutional
structures and technological means to realize terrible visions of air war.
For Sherry the leaders and technicians of the American air force were
driven by technological fanaticism a pursuit of destructive ends expressed, sanctioned, and disguised by the organization and application
of technological means.23 Sherry concluded that Americas apocalyptic
air war against Japan was made possible by the attraction and ease of
21

Sherry, American Air Power, pp. 2275. In general, the industrialization and mechanization of
war in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries alluded to both creative and destructive forces
in modern society. See Daniel Pick, War Machine: The Rationalisation of Slaughter in the Modern
Age (New Haven, 1993).
22 John W. Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York, 1986), p. 11.
23 Sherry, American Air Power, pp. 2512.
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exercising technological superiority, and by the distance from the killing

created by the technical demands of bombing, Americas geographic
location and Americas self-image.
In American Samurai (1994), a history of the American marines campaign in the Pacific War and another prize-winning book, Craig Cameron
also found that racism, self-image and technological fanaticism interacted
to produce the most brutal form of warfare. Conscious of the need to
locate collective memories and images in particular groups, Cameron
focuses on just the First Division of the US Marine Corps. Popular racist imagery combined with military indoctrination, and reinforced by
sanctioned ruthless tactics, led marines to view their enemies as termites
to be wiped out. Brutality on the battlefield was also shaped by a tough
elite warrior self-image, carefully cultivated by the Marine Corps
in public relations and recruitment campaigns, represented in popular
media and film, and inculcated in military training. This self-image produced a gung-ho, go-it-alone style of operations, which inhibited effective co-operation between the Marines and the Army. In the closing
months of the Pacific campaign, the marines achieved a sufficient level
of technological domination to realize the extremist logic of their style
of warfare. Cameron argued that identity and technology operated in
synergy. In land warfare the marines on Okinawa established a close
reciprocal relationship whereby they harnessed their warrior image to the
military machine, and in return that technology empowered their own
specific exterminationist ideology.24 Where Germanys wars were fuelled
by ideological fanaticism, Americas expressed the triumph of technological fanaticism.
IV
Operational military history reveals what happened in past wars, but
cultural military history is better equipped to explain why. Collective
memories and imagination shape the way communities prepare for, conduct and experience war. In this sense, Lynn is right to assert that battle
is to a very real degree a cultural construction.25 Not unreasonably,
Cameron has argued that cultural constructs supply the best means available for understanding national distinctions between armies.26 Cameron
uses the example of the American way of war, but equally his study shows
that cultural history explains organizational distinctions within national
military forces for example between the US Army and US Marine
Corps. This echoes the view advanced in the Winter and Sivan volume
that collective memories must be located within the particular communities that recall and represent their war experiences.
24 Craig M. Cameron, American Samurai: Myth, Imagination and the Conduct of Battle in the First
Marine Division, 19411951 (Cambridge, 1994) [hereafter Cameron, American Samurai], p. 167.
25 Lynn, Embattled Future, p. 789.
26 Cameron, American Samurai, p. 270.

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However, the cultural approach to military history also reveals much

about the similarities in why and how states go to war.27 Some of these
similarities are perhaps obvious: the interaction of political, cultural and
commercial elites in promoting traditional war imagery; racism producing brutality on the battlefield; and soldiers projecting disgust with their
battlefield environment onto their enemies. Other similarities are not so
obvious: e.g. military manipulation of collective memories of defeat so
as to shift the blame onto civilian leaders, which occurred with Germanys
post-First World War stab-in-the-back legend and Americas postVietnam hands-tied-behind-the-back myth.28 Also revealing are subtle
differences between apparent similarities: fanaticism of one kind (ideological) supporting Germanys war effort, fanaticism of another kind
(technological) shaping Americas.
For Lynn, cultural history promised to revitalize academic military
history. The literature reviewed above shows how right he was.

27

Some similarities arise from military emulation, not to mention the worldwide diffusion of military forms and technologies. See chapters by Chris Demchak, Theo Farrell, Emily Goldman and
Terry Terriff in Farrell and Terriff (eds), The Sources of Military Change: Culture, Politics, Technology (Boulder, forthcoming 2002) [hereafter Farrell and Terriff, Sources of Military Change].
28 On the US militarys role in constructing the myth that they could have won the Vietnam War
had their hands not been tied behind their backs by political leaders, see Robert Buzzanco, Masters of War: Military Dissent and Politics in the Vietnam Era (Cambridge, 1996), and Craig M.
Cameron, The American Militarys Two Front War, 19631988, in Farrell and Terriff, Sources
of Military Change.
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