Enduring Battle by Christopher H. Hamner

Author:Christopher H. Hamner [Christopher H. Hamner]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
Published: 2018-04-17T00:00:00+00:00

5

Weaponry

Robert Walker formed part of the first waves of American infantrymen who assaulted the beaches in northern France the morning of D-Day in June 1944. Walker’s arrival on the continent was somewhat inauspicious; his landing craft capsized during the journey to shore, and he lost his rifle in the confusion. Waterlogged and weaponless, he waded to the beach. Despite all his training had done to solidify his faith in his skills as a warrior, Walker had difficulty even picturing himself as a soldier: “Instead of being a fierce, well-trained, fighting infantryman,” he recalled, “I was an exhausted, almost helpless unarmed survivor of a shipwreck.” American paratrooper Tommy Horne was also part of the massive Allied invasion, dropped into France hours before the armada crossed the channel to help prepare the way for the infantry arriving at daybreak. In the confusion of the jump, Horne, too, lost his rifle. Landing in a field covered with dead bodies, he scavenged and discarded two rifles with deformed barrels before locating a usable weapon: “I finally found a rifle that wasn’t bent or had a broken stock, and I got two bandoliers of ammunition off of one of the dead fellows.” Newly rearmed, he remembered, the battlefield he surveyed suddenly became more manageable to him: “I felt pretty good. I had a weapon.”1

The difference in the two soldiers’ responses is instructive. Human elements—training, leadership, discipline, willpower—constituted critical factors that shaped the ways battles unfolded. As earlier chapters suggested, the internal struggle, mastering fear long enough to stay and fight, affected soldiers no matter when or where they fought. But merely enduring the trauma of combat was hardly sufficient by itself; to be effective, soldiers needed to act in constructive ways. Pairing soldiers with weapons was instrumental, since those weapons constituted the tools with which to respond to the various threats of combat. It is of little surprise, then, that individual soldiers’ willingness to fight frequently was linked so closely to the weaponry itself. One paratrooper’s comment on the unit’s tense preparation revealed his persistent belief that his actions would bolster his chances in combat: “Our lives depended on our weapons functioning properly when needed—and on our ability and willingness to use them.”2

Fear, and the desperate desire to stay alive, connected a soldier’s arms with the willingness to stay and fight. Foot soldiers of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries experienced terror in no small part because they were so vulnerable to enemy fire. By balancing their feelings of vulnerability with the perception that they possessed ways to respond to the threats directed against them, weaponry provided a crucial way to answer the terror of combat—and, by offering the soldier some response, created another opportunity to cast the battlefield as controllable in some ways, filled with important choices for individual combatants to make. Taking concrete action to answer those threats formed a powerful spur to a soldier’s willingness to endure combat. A World War II GI remembered his weaponry as a potent salve to the

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