S.L.A. Marshall


Samuel Lyman Atwood Marshall was a chief U.S. Army combat historian during World War II and the Korean War. Known professionally as S. L. A. Marshall, and nicknamed "Slam", he wrote some 30 books about warfare, including Pork Chop Hill: The American Fighting Man in Action, which was made into a film of the same name. His legacy is mired in scandal; more recent historians have contended that much of the research he conducted for his most famous work, Men Against Fire: The Problem of Battle Command, was either biased or even completely fabricated. This doubt has extended to many of his other works as well.

Early and personal life

Marshall was born in Catskill, New York on July 18, 1900, the son of Caleb C. and Alice Medora Marshall. He was raised in Colorado, California and El Paso, Texas. He worked as a child actor for Essanay Studios while living in California. Marshall attended El Paso High School after his family relocated to Texas.
Marshall married Ruth Elstner, and they had a son before divorcing. His second wife, Edith Ives Westervelt, died in 1953. His third wife was Catherine Finnerty, with whom he had three daughters.

Career

Early military service

After he joined the US Army in 1917, Marshall was assigned to serve on the border with Mexico during the Pancho Villa Expedition and the Mexican civil war. He next was sent to serve in France during World War I. He attained the rank of sergeant while serving as a member of Company A, 315th Engineer Regiment, 90th Infantry Division. The 315th Engineers participated in the Saint-Mihiel and Meuse-Argonne Offensives.
Shortly after Saint-Mihiel, Marshall was selected to take the entrance examinations for the United States Military Academy as part of an Army initiative to replenish the officer corps with exceptional soldiers from the ranks. Marshall subsequently attended Officer Candidate School, received his commission in early 1919, and remained in France to assist with post-war demobilization.
After Marshall's discharge at the end of the war, he remained in the Reserve, and attended the Texas College of Mines. He worked at a variety of jobs, including bricklayer.
In the early 1920s, he became a newspaper reporter and editor, first with the El Paso Herald, and later The Detroit News. As a reporter, Marshall gained a national reputation for his coverage of Latin American and European military affairs, including the Spanish Civil War.
In 1940, Marshall began a career as a freelance author with the publication of Blitzkrieg: Armies on Wheels, an analysis of the tactics the Wehrmacht had developed in the years leading up to the start of World War II. These were displayed during its invasion of Poland and Czechoslovakia.

World War II combat historian

During World War II, Marshall was an official Army combat historian, and came to know many of the war's best-known Allied commanders. He conducted hundreds of interviews of both enlisted men and officers regarding their combat experiences, and was an early proponent of oral history techniques. In particular, Marshall favored the group interview, where he would gather surviving members of a front line unit together and debrief them on their combat experiences of a day or two before.
Marshall's work on infantry combat effectiveness in World War II, titled Men Against Fire, is his best-known and most controversial work. In the book, Marshall claimed that of the World War II U.S. troops in actual combat, 75% never fired at the enemy for the purpose of killing, even though they were engaged in combat and under direct threat. Marshall argued that the Army should devote significant training resources to increasing the percentage of soldiers willing to engage the enemy with direct fire. These findings were later challenged as mistaken or even fabricated. Marshall reported that far more men fired weapons during the Vietnam War.
Less well known, but perhaps more significant, was Marshall's effort to assemble German officers after the war to write histories and analyses of battles in all theatres of the European war. At the height of the project, over 200 German officers participated, including Heinz Guderian and Franz Halder. Hundreds of monographs were written based on this data project, of which three are available in commercial print.

Later military service

Marshall was recalled in late 1950 for three months' duty as a Historian/Operations Analyst for the Eighth Army during the Korean War. He collected numerous Korean combat interviews with Americans in Korea into a treatise analyzing U.S. infantry and weapons effectiveness, Commentary on Infantry and Weapons in Korea 1950–51. The U.S. Army decided to classify some of Marshall's findings as restricted information, later incorporating them as part of a plan to improve combat training, weapons, equipment, and tactics.
Following his retirement from the Army Reserve in 1960, with the rank of brigadier general, Marshall continued to serve as an unofficial adviser to the Army. As a private citizen, he spent late 1966 and early 1967 in Vietnam on an Army-sponsored tour for the official purpose of teaching his after-action interview techniques to field commanders, in order to improve data collection for both the chain of command and the future official history of the Vietnam War. The Army Chief of Military History's representative on the tour, Colonel David H. Hackworth, collected his own observations from the trip and published them as The Vietnam Primer, giving Marshall credit as co-author.

Death

Marshall died in El Paso, Texas, on December 17, 1977, and was buried at Fort Bliss National Cemetery, Section A, Grave 124.

Legacy

The University of Texas at El Paso library has a special collection built around his books.
Marshall appears as a character in , a video game released in 2005.
The series 3 Black Mirror episode, "Men Against Fire", was partly inspired by Marshall's Men Against Fire: The Problem of Battle Command and explores the same themes.

Controversy after death

Some veterans and historians have cast doubt on Marshall's research methods. Professor Roger J. Spiller argues in his 1988 article, "S. L. A. Marshall and the Ratio of Fire", that Marshall had not conducted the research upon which he based his ratio-of-fire theory. "The 'systematic collection of data' appears to have been an invention."
This revelation has called into question the authenticity of some of Marshall's other books. Questions had been raised in military circles about his integrity decades earlier.
In his 1989 memoir, About Face, David H. Hackworth described his initial elation at an assignment with Marshall, a man he idolized, and how that elation turned to disillusion after seeing the writer's character and methods firsthand. Hackworth described Marshall as a "voyeur warrior", for whom "the truth never got in the way of a good story." He also wrote, "Veterans of many of the actions he 'documented' in his books have complained bitterly over the years of his inaccuracy or blatant bias".

Veracity of World War I experience claims

A 1989 article by historian Frederic Smoler questioned Marshall's research methods as a historian, saying that Marshall had exaggerated and inflated his World War I experiences to establish a reputation for having led soldiers in combat, in order to enhance his credibility as a historian. Smoler contended that the 315th Engineers were a rear-echelon unit, and that Marshall did not participate in combat during the war.
Subsequent investigation by Marshall's grandson, John Douglas Marshall, included in his book Reconciliation Road: A Family Odyssey of War and Honor, details S. L. A. Marshall's contemporary letters to his father. Marshall wrote that he took part in both Saint-Mihiel and Meuse-Argonne, and was "slightly" gassed at Saint-Mihiel. In addition, John Marshall says that his grandfather Marshall's wrote a dedication inside the front cover of his World War I scrapbook, to a fellow 315th Engineers soldier, who was killed in action on November 8, 1918. The dedication said that the soldier was shot by Germans while the 315th Engineers were taking part in action near Bantheville during the final days of the Meuse-Argonne offensive, and that Marshall was with him when it happened. John Marshall investigated and learned that the friend was hit by artillery fire, not shot, and that his grandfather was not present; he was taking the West Point entrance exams that day. John Marshall ultimately concluded that, while his grandfather exaggerated some claims about his wartime experiences, many are valid. He believes that the body of his grandfather's later work still has value.

Medals and decorations

Partial list of books (by title)