Grant Proposal

Heroism in the Great War: Public Perception and Private Reality

Since high school, when I read Heroes & Cowards: the Social Face of War, I have been interested in the complex relationships between soldiers, leaders, and public opinion that have developed alongside modern war. At Swarthmore, this interest has increasingly turned from the Civil War to World War I. My interest in the ways in which war and society mirror each other was further developed in one of my professor’s seminar. In particular, reading Joshua Sanborn’s Drafting the Russian Nation focused my curiosity on how the process of military conscription can involve indoctrination in identity, including national and gender identities. I am currently enrolled in a research seminar, which will help me to develop my skills with primary sources and provide additional context for my own research on the Great War.

Research Question

Many scholars have remarked on the rift between official, public conception of World War I and the private accounts of soldiers who experienced total war firsthand. Soldiers arriving in France, Gallipoli, and Mesopotamia discovered that war was both more dull and more deadly than they had been led to imagine. Everything from government propaganda to the aggressive bayonet drills of basic training encouraged a belief in the active agency of the individual soldier. Yet the conditions they encountered in the trenches gave them a sense of powerlessness and passivity against new technologies like artillery and machine guns that subverted individual initiative. Private citizens, officials at home, and even military planners were also encouraged to continue conceiving of the war in traditional terms. Government officials, newspapers, and family members all employed a vocabulary of war that no longer corresponded with the reality encountered by the troops. The language of assaults, battles, leaders, and even bravery all corresponded to the Napoleonic Wars but not to modern, total war. Over time, soldiers in the field came to realize that there were no “battles” with clear winners or losers or even movement; no generals whose strategy could change the defensive character of trench warfare, and, above all, no heroes whose personal valor could turn the tide of a battle. Paul Fussell frames this novelty in terms of a gap that opened up between the perceptions of the combatants and those of civilians and even commanding officers in The Great War and Modern Memory:

“But even if those at home had wanted to know the realities of war, they couldn’t have without experiencing them: its conditions were too novel, its industrialized ghastliness too unprecedented. The war would have been simply unbelievable. From the very beginning a

1 fissure was opening between the Army and civilians.”1 [My italics]

The core of my thesis research will focus on the role of heroism as a cultural institution that embodied the gap between civilian and military understandings of war. The official version of World War I – available in propaganda leaflets, patriotic films, and even military syllabi – relied on the lens of heroism for its coherence. In the context of World War I, heroism indicates the possibility for effective individual action; in other words, the idea that a soldier has control of his own reality. From newspaper articles to citations for valor, the public proliferation of “heroism” rhetoric during World War I suggested that individual soldiers possessed an agency over their fate that is blatantly missing from most individual accounts of the war. Heroism acted as a moral justification for the war: once heroes have given their lives, how can the public repudiate their sacrifice by accepting less than total victory? By awarding medals such as the Victoria Cross for traditional concepts of valor, military and political officials reinforced and ritualized a popular concept of heroism that had little to do with soldiers’ experiences. And by confirming heroism as an element of this war, military and political elites along with journalists and propagandists shaped the public imagination of World War I as a traditional war which offered the possibility of individual agency, moral authority, and meaningful sacrifice. Accounts by individual soldiers, however, suggest a very different experience of war, one almost entirely alien from the moral clarity and agency implied by military citations. A major who survived Gallipoli wrote:

“So far none of the triumphs and victories that make wars so wonderful, so dramatic, so splendid. What suffering! What misery!….And the reward of great courage is in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred – death!”2 [My italics]

In a war where 60,000 men might die in a single day (as in the first assault at the Somme), the public celebration of heroes obscured the true nature of total war: in an age of heavy artillery, barbed wire, machine guns, and gas, no soldier controlled his own fate. Nevertheless, the concept of heroism lies at the center of public conceptions of war (and still does, at least in the United States).3 Heroes help us understand why we must fight, and give a certain moral and emotional justification for war. In school textbooks and literature, at least, battlefield heroics can create nations, destroy empires, and re-write history. My thesis will investigate the influence of heroism on each phase of a soldier’s journey from civilian, to trainee, to soldier, to hero returning home. By comparing official accounts of individual acts of heroism – particularly medal

1 Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, p. 87 2 Gallipoli, Peter Hart, pg. 390 3 See The New York Times, “America’s Sentimental Regard for the Military,” http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/21/opinion/sunday/americas‐sentimental‐ regard‐for‐the‐military.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

2 citations and unit diaries – to the ways that individual soldiers reported their experiences in diaries, letters, and public statements, I hope to establish the degree to which the public imagining of a heroic (and therefore fictional) war conflicted with a decidedly unheroic reality. Why is the gap between civilian perceptions and military reality worthy of further research? This “heroism gap” is not simply an unfortunate product of unexpected circumstances. Rather, it often informed and guided individual decisions about strategy taken by officers at all levels of command throughout the war. The concept of a war of heroes, who possessed agency and moral surety, also guided civilian decisions to enlist. Official propaganda too focused on the agency and heroism of soldiers. By examining diaries and other primary accounts of British soldiers, I will determine the extent to which recruits actually internalized this heroic conception of war in their choices and attitudes. Aside from investigating enlistment propaganda and medal citations, I will also examine officer and recruit training. Did British training programs prepare officers and recruits for a traditional, heroic war? How did individuals – in diaries and letters home – negotiate the gap between what training led them to expect and the conditions they actually bound on the battlefield? The final aspect of my research concerns the homecoming of heroes. How did returning soldiers either embrace or reject the rhetoric of heroism that is exemplified by national memorials and medal citations?

Primary Sources

A research grant would allow me to travel to London to conduct primary source research at the Imperial War Museum, which has thousands of diaries from civilians and soldiers. Although some museum resources – including films and photographs – are digitized, the vast majority of war diaries are unpublished and un-digitized. This primary source research is vital to my completion of an honors thesis in history. In particular, I hope to compare official citations of Victoria Cross winners and newspaper reports of their heroism with soldiers’ actual accounts of their combat experience. Ideally, I would find diaries at the Imperial War Museum that were written by Victoria Cross winners reflecting on their experience. In practice, even diaries with more general descriptions of combat and agency will be valuable in understanding how everyday soldiers viewed war. Prior to my arrival in London, I will get in contact with Peter Hart, the Oral Historian of the Imperial War Museum and writer of Gallipoli, in order to help guide my research there. Additionally, I hope to visit the National Archives at Kew, which contain official records, medal citations, and unit war diaries. Prior to my departure for London, I will review Victoria Cross citations available online via the London Gazette, as well as other published sources, including the work of war poets, and the government’s propaganda films, many of which are available online (some on the IWM Research and Collections web page). I have divided my research into sections that roughly correspond to those in the table below.

3 Topic Primary Sources Propaganda Newspapers, films, diaries (on enlistment) Training Training manuals, military syllabi, memoirs and diaries Heroes in Battle* VC Citations, military diaries, unit diaries (raids, etc) Remembering Heroes War Memorials, the “War Poets”, Memoirs

*Please note that all topics are not equal: propaganda, training, and memory all aim to give further context to my primary area of focus, the hero on the battlefield.

Budget and Logistics

Travel (Airfare) ~$1,150 Currently, cheapest flight is $1,077 on IcelandAir (not including taxes).

Housing ~$100/ night x 20 nights = $2,000 Hotels that are relatively central in London seem to start in the $90-$100 range (e.g. the Clapham Guest House in ~$93 a night in June, plus tax)

Food and other Living Expenses ~$40 a day in London x 20 days = $800

Travel within London: ~$400 A “Monthly Travelcard” is about 144 pounds, plus a taxi to and from Heathrow Airport.

Total Grant Request: $4,350

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Bibliography

Primary

Australian War Museum. Australian Imperial Force War Diaries, 1914-1918 War, 23/18/8, 1st Battalion, June 1916. http://www.awm.gov.au/collection/records/awm4/23/18/awm4-23-18-8.pdf (Accessed 2/10/13)

Australian War Museum. Australian Imperial Force War Diaries, 1914-1918 War, 23/1/5 Part 1, 1st Infantry Brigade, May 1915. http://www.awm.gov.au/collection/records/awm4/23/1/awm4-23-1-5part1.pdf (Accessed 2/10/13)

Green, H. Private Papers of 2nd Lieutenant H Green. IWM Document #2739, catalogued 1986. Available online at: http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/1030000153 (Accessed 2/10/13)

Imperial War Museum. Liveliness on the British Front. Directed by British Topical Committee for War Films. London: 1916. IWM Catalogue Number 208, available online at: http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/1060022706 (Accessed 2/10/13)

Junger, Ernst. Storm of Steel. London: Penguin Press, 2007.

London Gazette Online. Gazette Issue 21846 published on the 5 February 1856. http://www.london-gazette.co.uk/issues/21846/pages/410 (Accessed 2/10/13)

National Archives (UK). War Office 95: First World War and Army of Occupation War Diaries, 1 Division, 1 Infantry Brigade, 1 Battalion Coldstream Guards, 1914 August – 1915 July Unit Diary. http://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/SearchUI/Details?uri=C4554414 (Accessed 2/10/13)

Osborn, E.B. (ed). The Muse in Arms. http://www.archive.org/stream/museinarmscollec00osbouoft#page/n3/mode/2up (Accessed 2/10/13)

Pollard, A.O. Fire-Eater: Memoirs of a V.C. London: Naval and Military Press, 2009.

Sassoon, Siegfried. Memoirs of an Infantry Officer. New York: Coward, McCann, Inc., 1930.

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Secondary

Doughty, Robert A. Pyrrhic Victory: French Strategy and Operations in the Great War. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008.

Fuller, J.F.C. The Conduct of War: 1789-1961. New York: Da Capo Press, 1992.

Hart, Peter. Gallipoli. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.

Hart, Peter. The Somme: The Darkest Hour on the Western Front. New York: Pegasus Press, 2010.

Keegan, John. The Face of Battle: A Study of Agincourt, Waterloo, and the Somme. London: Penguin, 1983.

Keegan, John. The First World War. London: Vintage, 2000.

Leed, Eric J. No Man’s Land: Combat and Identity in World War I. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981.

Liddell Hart, B.H. Real War 1914-1918. New York: Little, Brown, and Company, 1963.

Macmillan, Margaret. Paris 1919: Six Months that Changed the World. New York: Random House, 2003.

Parker, Geoffrey, Ed. The Cambridge History of Warfare. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Philpott, William. Three Armies on the Somme: The First Battle of the Twentieth Century. New York: Vintage, 2011.

Priori, Robin. Gallipoli: The End of the Myth. New York: Yale University Press, 2010.

Tuchman, Barbara. The Guns of August. New York: Presidio Press, 2004.

Winter, Denis. Death’s Men: Soldiers of the Great War. London: Penguin Books, 1985.

Winter, Jay. Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

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