American soldier studies of WWII: A 50th anniversary commemorative, The

Journal of Political and Military Sociology, Summer 1999 by Schwartz, T P, Marsh, Robert M

1999 marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of The American Soldier, a book in four volumes that has been called one of the most influential social science studies during this century and the beginning of empirical studies in military sociology. And yet, its actual empirical findings, about social relations between officers and enlisted personnel, Blacks and Whites, combat veterans and raw recruits, and many other topics, seem to be neglected in contemporary social science.

We seek to celebrate its 50th anniversary by calling attention to more than twenty of its most influential, varied and provocative findings in hopes of encouraging more social scientists, in the US. and abroad, to build upon its monumental achievements.

In the summer of 1941, there was established within the War Department a Special Services Division, and within the Special Services Division a Research Branch charged with carrying out research on the attitudes of enlisted men in the Army. The Research Branch was not established to advance social science research. As Samuel Stouffer noted in the introductory chapter of Volume I of The American Soldier, "The Research Branch existed to do a practical engineering job, not a scientific job. Its purpose was to provide the Army command, quickly and accurately, with facts about the attitudes of soldiers which, along with other facts and inferences, might be helpful in policy formulation."

-- John Clausen, 1984:184

(An original participant in the study.)

Many of the ideas and the analyses of The American Soldier seem now to have diffused into the general culture of social science. In the process, the shipping tags often are lost. But the important fact is that permanent additions to our knowledge have remained.

-- Robin M. Williams, Jr., 1989:168

(An original participant in the study.)

We are fast approaching the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of The American Soldier (hereafter referred to as TAS), arguably one of the most influential social science books published in the U.S. during this century and certainly a hallmark study of the attitudes and behaviors of military personnel before, during, and after combat (Lang, 1972: 19). In the previous quotation, Robin Williams, Jr. states that the "shipping tags often are lost" but that its additions to our knowledge have remained.

What are its additions to our knowledge that remain? Can any of its many findings still inform contemporary thinking and research about human social behavior, especially in military organizations?

Our experience suggests to us that, especially during the last decade, a lot of the most enlightening empirical findings that TAS added to our knowledge have been "lost" or forgotten, along with "the shipping tags." We have found that, except for a small number of rather senior military sociologists in the U.S., very few social scientists in the U.S. and even fewer social scientists outside the U.S. can specify even one substantive finding in TAS. This is even more true of social scientists under the age of forty, many of whom admit that they have no knowledge of the studies or that they only know that the studies involved social surveys or American soldiers many years ago.

But then, it always has been challenging to know more than a few of the findings of TAS, despite its simple and clear language. Its many empirical findings often are mired deep within long descriptive paragraphs that are dispersed throughout the four large and weighty volumes that constitute TAS, and they are not codified or summarized according to an over-arching theoretical framework.'

Locating the findings is so time consuming that we should not be surprised to learn that, even in its heyday, very few people actually read the four volumes in their entirety. A brief biography of Samuel Stouffer, the first-named co-author of TAS, appeared thirty years ago in the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (Sills, 1968, vol. 15:277-80) and made reference to a few of the empirical findings in TAS. But TAS no longer receives much attention in contemporary encyclopedias and textbooks in U.S. sociology or in many books on military sociology. Often, when it is mentioned, reference is made only to the fact that it involved impressive survey research and that it demonstrated the importance of relative deprivation, informal group pressures, and the influence social cohesion on the attitudes and behaviors of soldiers. There seems to be little or no awareness that TAS reported major new findings on topics that include: mass media and political ideology influences on personnel indoctrination, "the race factor," the influences of urban versus rural background, educational attainment, age, officer training, and combat experience on a host of attitudes and behaviors including hostility, fear, aggressiveness, noncombat casualty status, eagerness to return to the U.S., and changes in religiosity, to list but a few.

For example, a well regarded reference book, The Blackwell Dictionary of Sociology, by Allan G. Johnson, only mentions TAS once, and that is as part of a biographical sketch of the late sociologist Samuel Stouffer.