As a riposte to @warmatters' S.L.A. Marshall shenanigans, I'll highlight work from our new @McGillQueensUP volume "Why We Fight: New Approaches to the Human Dimension of Warfare" by discussing Chapter 2, a posthumous essay by Roger Spiller, prepared by myself and Allan English.

Prof Roger Spiller, the original critic of S.L.A. Marshall, attended our @QueensCIDP combat motivation workshop in 2016 and presented a paper on Marshall. He knew he didn't have a lot of time left at that point but graciously gave us some of it. He passed away a few months later.

Roger didn't have time at the end to write a full chapter for our volume, but allowed editors Allan English and I to take his presentation notes, expand them, and turn them into an essay. This chapter is the result. It is the one in the book that's closest to my heart.

Plus I get to return to writing about S.L.A. Marshall. No matter where I go in my academic writing I seem to wind up back here. My first book, in 2009, was a critique of Marshall using evidence from Canada's experience of the Second World War.

My point was that Marshall's claimed universal observations about human behaviour in combat didn't even extend to another Allied army fighting alongside the Americans, so we should stop treating him as some great revelatory source on battlefield psychology.

I published a couple of articles on this since and sparred with a Marshall supporter in print. I'm conscious that obsessive refutation is a sign of intellectual subordination, but I can't help that Marshall keeps being a fraud and that people keep citing him approvingly.

Roger Spiller was firmly in my camp. He told me that he had once started working on a biography of S.L.A. Marshall but that the man was such a turd that the thought of devoting years of his academic life to such a project was too depressing.

Roger's essay for our book was informed by his own deep knowledge of the subject, and also by his recently-published new translation of Ardant du Picq's "Etudes sur les combat: Combat antique et moderne," which I highly recommend. https://kansaspress.ku.edu/subjects/history-military/978-0-7006-2391-4.html

If you aren't familiar and don't want to check Wikipedia, Marshall's most famous claim was his "ratio of fire": that in war only 15-25% of trained infanteers do so much as fire their weapons in combat. He reached this conclusion based on post-combat interviews with American GIs.

From our chapter: "Except that it was not true. Marshall collected no such data. Neither his papers, letters, notebooks, nor his wartime colleagues record him ever addressing such an issue in his post-combat interviews with rifle companies."

"In fact, no one, including Marshall, knew what the 'ratio of fire' really was. That is because there was no such thing." But the fact that he made the ratio of fire up without evidence is no new revelation. Roger's been saying that for 30 years.

What Roger wanted to look at for our workshop was another dimension of the question: *why* did Marshall's assertion seem so plausible when he first made it?

The answer is complicated. Marshall was widely accepted because his "ratio of fire" fraud was commonly held in the 1940s: "modern man, educated, cosseted, and dissipated by the ease of urban life, never tested physically, was unequal to the demands of modern war."

Echoes of this criticism were heard from most industrialized nations since the mid-nineteenth century. Michael Howard observed that it's been centuries since professional soldiers thought that the raw human material used to build their armies was any good.

The idea that "shell shock" had been an epidemic of weakness during the First World War was still fresh in the minds of senior officers. In both Canada and the US, more than 50% of veterans drawing pensions from 1914-18 service in 1940 were for neuropsychiatric injuries.

The US Army was so concerned about an epidemic of "weakness" among its troops that a harsh Selective Service regime tried to weed out "the physical or mental weakling." Of 15 million men examined, 4.6 million were rejected, half of them on psychiatric grounds.

And sure, not everyone is cut out for combat. But one of the Selective Service examiners' favourite questions to establish mental fitness was "Do you like girls?" So that tells you a lot about the ripe bullshit that passed as psychological screening for combat.

Allan English and I found that the scale of the problem was different in Canada but no less acute -- the Canadian Army rejected about 32% on psychiatric grounds.

Yet despite a Selective Service rejection rate fifteen times higher than in WWI, "neuropsychiatric" admissions to military hospitals were twice the 1918 rate. Psychiatric casualties were the largest single category of disability discharges between 1939 and 1945.

The war challenged many assumptions about the behaviour of soldiers in combat, but did nothing to dispel notions of a widespread, creeping "weakness" in society. That was the milieu in which Marshall was writing. His audience was predisposed to believe soldiers were inadequate.

Marshall himself appears to have missed all of these developments. As Roger says: "In Men Against Fire, Marshall's soldier was, above all else, a CONSTANT soldier. The trials of combat challenged him only once: the moment when he was first required to fire his weapon."

So Marshall's weak speculation about an innate resistance to killing being behind the ratio of fire ("killing" is not a behaviour, SLAM...) found fertile ground in existing discourse about what was wrong with kids those days.

Roger goes on to discuss the coincidences between Marshall and Colonel Charles Ardant du Picq, whose work was the obvious inspiration for the ratio of fire but whom SLAM would later deny having ever read, despite citing him.

Roger's final remark: "Marshall went about his work oblivious to the responsibility that the discipline of military history imposes on those who practice it. In this discipline, the connection between evidence, thought, and action can be direct and mortal."

"There is the chance that someone may risk their life, or that of another, because of something we have written or said, some insight they have taken that can be applied to battle. Marshall, with his penchant for self-promotion, never took this responsibility seriously."

Had to take a break to feed my daughter. Geez, tweet threads will take up your whole life if you let them.

Anyway I bumped highlighting this chapter up the queue because @warmatters made SLAM current again. I really liked the idea that SLAM usefully contributed to engineering questions of weapons' usage, though I'll submit that here SLAM doesn't deserve much personal credit.

The Canadian Army had a weapons' technical field force running around studying how soldiers were using weapons in combat throughout 1944 and 1945 and I'm sure this was paralleled elsewhere. So the fact that we can't take for granted how soldiers use their weapons was in the air.

In conclusion, Roger and I both think that SLA Marshall was primarily a self-promoting and unpleasant journalist. His ideas struck a chord because they sounded like du Picq and seemed to provide answers for unresolved questions about why soldiers were too "weak."

In my opinion Marshall is a very poor source of revelation for battlefield behaviour. If good questions about soldiers' behaviour have been raised because of him (and they have), that credit belongs to the subsequent inquirers and not to Marshall.