Motivational Motivation

I just finished reading Enduring Battle: American Soldiers in Three Wars, 1776-1945 by Christopher H. Hamner, which compared United States soldiers in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries and the whys and wherefores of what got them to fight. Christopher* investigated how tactics, training, and strategy changed over time in response to the rising deadliness of warfare, differentiating between the linear battlefields of the American Revolution and the US Civil War and the dispersed battlefield of World War II.

Soldiers fought for different reasons in different wars because the type of war changed. Men who were locked into a formation for a linear battle and knew they would be killed by their own officers if they broke and ran had very different reasons for fighting than the men on a dispersed battlefield, where they were isolated from their officers and units and had to come up with reasons to fight on their own. Soldiers fought for different reasons in different wars – which seems a fairly simple statement, but it’s one with broad implications. This argument means that there is no one reason to fight, no single motivating factor to use to push soldiers. The most common reason to fight was survival – they just wanted not to die. Yet there are examples in all three of the wars covered where men declared they were fervently committed to defend their country, even to the death. Some fought for principle, some fought for their homes or their honor, some fought to get themselves and their friends through the battle.

This is only the beginning of understanding motivations. There’s a good deal of information that I can obliquely apply to my own work. I’m more concerned with why women joined the military: initial motivation rather than combat motivation. But there’s a whole body of scholarship on initial motivation. What I need to find is the words of the women themselves, where they say why they joined. I’m getting through most of the reading recommended to me last semester, as well as the reading I wanted to get done before I jumped into primary research, and it’s time to start hitting archives again. But this is a good thought to keep in mind as I delve into old documents.

*He’s my advisor, and referring to him in this informal setting by last name is just…weird.