Bodies for Battle by Garrett Gatzemeyer

Author:Garrett Gatzemeyer [Garrett Gatzemeyer]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
Published: 2021-09-07T00:00:00+00:00

chapter six

hard bodies for a cold war

conditioning and prehabilitation, 1945–1957

The Cold War’s advent brought with it an abundance of reasons for sustained interest in the bodies of the United States’ youth, uniformed or otherwise. At first blush, the awesome destructive power of nuclear weaponry might have implied the irrelevance of the individual soldier’s strength and endurance. Every service’s pursuit of high-tech weapons, advanced platforms, and space-age gadgets may likewise have suggested the soldier’s diminishing relevance. However, the Army’s senior leaders did not forget the flesh-and-blood sinews of warfare. Warfighting concepts, revised doctrine, and new force structures, such as the Pentomic Division, consistently emphasized the necessity of fitness on nuclear battlefields. There, success was thought to depend upon dispersion and rapid, aggressive maneuver. Actual combat experience on Korea’s battlefields also reinforced the importance of physical fitness. At the same time, the Korean War seemed to reveal the modern American man’s shortcomings once again. Other national fitness red flags, such as the Kraus-Weber report, published in 1955, also appeared to expose an emergent “muscle gap” with the Soviet Union and the pernicious effects of easy living in a mass-consumer society. Because the Army’s manpower policies relied heavily on conscription, soft citizens meant soft soldiers. Youth and soldier physical training alike thus remained subjects of public and expert interest.

Throughout this period of turbulence, the Army’s physical culture remained consistent. Cultural inertia and institutional continuity minimized change, generally restraining it to the trajectory set between 1942 and 1945. Writing in 1957, Gen. Maxwell Taylor, the Army’s chief of staff and a principal promoter of technology-centric modernization, illustrated the endurance of cultural values and beliefs: “It is a military duty for all officers and men to maintain a high level of physical fitness . . . to perform [their] duties with maximum efficiency,” he wrote, and then claimed that fitness inspired confidence in subordinates and fellow citizens alike by “presenting the model of an alert, ready fighting man.”1 Taylor conceived of fitness in physical terms and as an external manifestation of intangible inner qualities. He also prioritized the average soldier’s fitness, not the “development of muscle men or record-breaking athletes,” while emphasizing the individual before the unit.2 Taylor’s definition of fitness, valuation of exercise, and focus on the individual all aligned with the Army’s World War II–era physical culture despite a decade of technological, doctrinal, structural, and political ferment throughout the service. Institutional continuity complemented cultural endurance in minimizing change. Although responsibility for physical training research and doctrine development changed hands several times between 1945 and 1954, ongoing studies sponsored by Army Field Forces and the US Army Infantry School’s influence kept the physical culture oriented toward basic preparation for infantry combat and responsive to data-driven research. When concerns about soldier fitness arose, cultural inertia and institutional continuity encouraged a doubling-down on the existing physical culture instead of substantial revision.

Much more change occurred in the US government’s approach to prehabilitation. The military’s continuing reliance upon conscription to fill its ranks fixed attention on young, male American bodies.

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