In part two of my analysis of Joanna Bourke’s An Intimate History of Killing, I delve deeper into her argument that modern military psychology eroded the classical ideals of heroism.

In my previous examination of Joanna Bourke's research, I documented how twentieth-century militaries developed increasingly brutal and sophisticated methods to overcome soldiers' profound resistance to killing. Yet that analysis left a crucial question unanswered: once you've manufactured men capable of killing efficiently, what have you, in the end, actually created? And what happens to the very concept of the military hero when killing becomes a matter of psychological engineering rather than martial virtue?

In essence, the very same institutions that spent decades perfecting techniques to create effective killers simultaneously destroyed the traditional concept of military heroism. The hero died not on the battlefield but in the laboratory of military psychology, killed by the very sciences that promised to manufacture him. There, on the cusp of modernity, a figure so alien to traditional martial ideals emerged that soldiers themselves began to regard decorated heroes as dangerous, unreliable, and even monstrous.

In this, heroism was systematically pathologized, reduced to diagnostic criteria, and ultimately inverted into its opposite. The soldier who once embodied courage and sacrifice became the man whose psychological conditioning had worked so completely that he no longer functioned according to normal human constraints. With this transfiguration of old military masculine ideals came a profound change in the way of war.

The quack science of natural warriors

Before military psychology could kill the hero, it first had to locate him. Throughout the early twentieth century, military institutions became obsessed with identifying which types of men possessed innate martial superiority. The search took on an almost desperate quality, as if finding the right selection criteria could solve the intractable problem of soldiers who simply wouldn't kill. What emerged was a bizarre mixture of genuine psychological insight and spectacular pseudoscience in theories that revealed more about the prejudices of military psychologists than about combat effectiveness in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Some believed red-haired men made superior soldiers. Others insisted men with mustaches were better officers. Phrenology, the long-discredited yet pernicious practice of reading character from skull shape, enjoyed an unexpected renaissance in military recruitment offices. Professional background supposedly indicated combat aptitude: miners excelled at "hand-to-hand killing," while artists and musicians were definitely unlikely to become heroes, despite exemplary performances in the trenches that should have disproven such nonsense.

But the real obsession centered on race, sexuality, and marital status. Here, military psychology descended fully into quackery, developing elaborate theories about which types of bodies and desires produced natural killers. The logic was circular, self-serving, and ultimately deeply revealing about what military institutions actually sought in men whose marginalization or dysfunction made them ideal instruments of violence.

One pertinent example is that of the treatment of Irish soldiers in Imperial British service in the 1800s and early 1900s. According to prevailing theory, Irishmen were fit only to be soldiers or monks, as their supposed martial prowess was used simultaneously to celebrate their fighting ability and justify their exclusion from positions requiring judgment or restraint. They were "missile troops," to be hurled at the enemy with maximum force and minimum autonomy. The reputation for innate combativeness meant they could be praised as warriors while being denied the political recognition that might follow from such praise. As one writer put it, the Irish were "the best in the trenches, the first in a charge," yet this very bellicosity made them profoundly unsuited for self-government. And so the logic of subservience to imperial rule was continued.

The contradiction was stark and deliberate. When recruitment rates in Ireland fell, raising accusations that the Irish lacked physical vigor, commentators pivoted seamlessly. The martial spirit was still inherent in the Irishman's "soul," they insisted, and people who denied this fact were likely to be "warned off the hunting fields" and made targets of abuse. The martial reputation had to be maintained precisely because it justified subordination. You celebrate a people's capacity for violence while using that same capacity as evidence that they cannot be trusted with power.

Black American soldiers faced even more systematic and pernicious discrimination. Throughout both World Wars, they were relegated overwhelmingly to non-combatant roles through theories that positioned them as simultaneously dangerous and incompetent. In the US Air Force, it was initially argued that Black Americans were totally incapable of flying (the same claim made about the Japanese), and when this was proved spectacularly wrong, the theory shifted. Now, they lacked the aggressive spirit in flight and were excessively fearful, even of "light and inaccurate" anti-aircraft fire.

The statistics reveal the scale of this exclusion. During the First World War, three-quarters of BlackJapanese soldiers served in non-combatant units. During the Second World War, while Black soldiers constituted ten percent of the US Army, they represented twenty percent of men in service units and less than five percent of men in combat units. The Quartermaster Corps, Corps of Engineers, and Transportation Corps accounted for three-quarters of Blacks in the army. A First World War ballad captured the racist logic with brutal clarity: "Black man fight wid de shovel and de pick—/Lordy, don't you turn your face on me."

The theories justifying this discrimination were elaborate and contradictory. John Richards, who commanded a Black unit during the First World War, regarded the Black soldier as a "splendid physical specimen”. He would "follow like a dog through artillery barrage and the swirl of machine-gun bullets." Yet Richards concluded that Black soldiers were of very limited usefulness because they were afraid of the dark, lacked initiative, and were liable to panic during attacks. The same men who were "splendid physical specimens" somehow lacked the psychological qualities for actual combat. Such a contradiction revealed more about Richards' racism than about military effectiveness.

But perhaps the most disturbing pseudoscience concerned sexuality. Some military psychologists dared to claim that the best combat soldiers were homosexuals. Within institutions where it was agreed that all homosexuals, irrespective of combat record, should be expelled, the idea that they could be encouraged to act heroically caused considerable anxiety. In 1915, Sigmund Freud's disciple Ernest Jones drew public attention to the importance of sexual desire in "darkly impelling" men to enlist, with motives ranging from "the fascinating attraction of horrors" to "the homosexual desire to be in close relation with masses of men."

By the Second World War, the supposed connection between homosexual desire and combat effectiveness continued to be explored and celebrated. R.E. Money-Kyrle argued in 1936 that unconscious homosexuality had two effects: unconscious inverts who turned their aggression inwards showed self-sacrificing devotion to their comrades, and their darker cousins were unconscious inverts who turned their aggression outwards, thus rendering them killers. Charles Berg went as far as to speculate in 1942 whether war itself was "a dramatization of such unconscious fantasies—a homosexual substitution... an emotionally all-powerful (an orgastic) dealing with rather than 'away with' other men."

One gay Marine Corps member, known for their extreme aggression in combat, in December 1942, articulated this logic with devastating clarity: "If you can't love, you have to hate. If you can't show affection, show aggression." The theorizing reached absurd heights by 1945, when psychiatrist Charles Anderson published his distinction between what he termed "active" and "passive" inverts. His logic was perverse but internally consistent: the active homosexual, Anderson argued, was already predisposed to outward aggression. Military service merely required redirecting that aggression, rather than transforming its nature. By simply changing its object, the comrade became off-limits; the enemy became the new target. No fundamental psychological reconstruction was necessary—just a shift in aim.

Running through all these theories was Social Darwinism's ugly logic: martial prowess supposedly correlated with biological and political underdevelopment. "Primitive" peoples made natural warriors precisely because they lacked civilization's restraining influences. This framework allowed military psychologists to simultaneously celebrate certain groups' fighting abilities while justifying their subordination. The Irishman's bellicosity proved his unsuitability for self-government. The Black soldier's physical prowess was offset by psychological weakness. The homosexual's aggression made him useful but ultimately dispensable.

Married men, by contrast, were considered poor soldiers. They had too much to lose, too many connections to the civilian world that might make them hesitate. The ideal warrior, according to this pseudoscience, was the marginalized man: the racial minority, the sexual deviant, the unmarried loner whose lack of social integration made him perfect for violence but unsuitable for anything else.

The sheer absurdity of these theories mattered less than their function. They provided scientific-seeming justification for a disturbing conclusion that military institutions couldn't openly acknowledge: that the men most effective at killing were precisely those who civilian society would classify as dangerous, dysfunctional, or damaged. The "natural warrior" wasn't the epitome of martial virtue, for he was the psychopath, the sociopath, the man whose marginalization or pathology made him capable of violence that would horrify normal people.

The group subsumes the individual

Yet even as military psychologists developed these elaborate theories about individual warriors, combat research was revealing something that contradicted the entire enterprise: effectiveness wasn't primarily individual at all. It was collective, social, and environmental. The best soldier was the man who felt strongly attached to an effective group.

This discovery demolished the entire edifice of warrior-hunting. Marshall's work, fraudulent in its specifics but useful in its implications, gestured towards how killing wasn't an individual talent but a social phenomenon. Samuel A. Stouffer's more credible research during the Second World War bore this out. Across samples exceeding twelve thousand men, Stouffer identified two crucial factors in the cohesion of small units and, more disturbingly, the pleasure soldiers anticipated from violence.

The data was stark. Nearly half of those who would prove effective in combat admitted beforehand that killing Japanese soldiers would be enjoyable. Among adequate performers, the figure dropped to forty-four percent. Among those who failed to fight effectively, only thirty-eight percent expressed such a desire. The best killers were those who wanted to kill.

But personality mattered less than group cohesion. By 1942, heroism in battle films was no longer the attribute of a single individual but arose from actions performed by a unified group. There was still a role for the warrior-hero, but he was now a product of the group rather than a "natural" hero who embodied the military ideal in his very blood or guts.

This created a fundamental tension. The traditional hero, the autonomous warrior whose individual courage and judgment won battles, was incompatible with the new understanding of combat effectiveness. You couldn't simultaneously celebrate individual martial prowess and insist that success is derived from group dynamics. The hero had to be redefined or abandoned entirely.

Military institutions chose redefinition. The hero became the man who best embodied group cohesion, whose individual actions served a collective purpose, and whose violence was reliable rather than spectacular. This represented a complete inversion of traditional martial virtue. Where once the hero was distinguished by exceeding normal limits, now he was distinguished by perfectly embodying group norms, by killing efficiently and reliably according to institutional specifications.

The consequence of this? If heroism derived from group integration rather than individual excellence, then the decorated warrior wasn't exceptional, for he was simply the most successfully conditioned. The man whose training had worked completely. The soldier whose psychological reconstruction was so thorough that he functioned as a perfect component of the killing machine.

The anti-hero emerges

In this, a particularly modern antihero emerged. Soldiers themselves recognized that the decorated hero had become something monstrous. The men who won medals, who performed the spectacular acts of violence that civilians celebrated, were increasingly regarded by their fellow soldiers as unreliable, inhuman, and perhaps even dangerous.

The link between savagery and heroism was commented upon frequently by men in the field. The qualities that made someone effective at killing—the willingness to commit extreme violence, the lack of hesitation, and the apparent absence of normal human empathy—were precisely those that made them poor comrades. As one Korean War veteran observed, "The hero exposed others to unnecessary risk, thought of himself (if anyone) first and his buddies second, and forgot that buddies must fight together or not at all."

Worse still was the Vietnam War veteran who exclaimed, “I became a fucking animal. I started fucking putting fucking heads on poles. Leaving fucking notes for the motherfuckers. Digging up fucking graves… They wanted a fucking hero, so I gave it to them. They wanted a fucking body count, so I gave them a body count.”

This recognition produced the anti-hero: the soldier who explicitly rejected the mantle of martial glory. Vietnam veteran poet Chet Pedersen captured it perfectly: "They would nevermore consign me to a status board or pin a medal on my chest for services at best abhorred."

Furthermore, the status of ‘hero’ no longer carried the once positive attributions it did in this new military ecology. As one veteran bluntly stated, "I did not volunteer for France to win a V.C." Only one-third of men entitled to medals at the end of the Second World War actually bothered to claim them. Most who didn't collect them said they couldn't be bothered (forty-one percent) or that the medals were a waste of money or of no value (twenty and seventeen percent, respectively).

Here, soldiers had applied civilian moral frameworks to combat and found heroism wanting. Efficient killing, many quietly believed, deserved condemnation rather than celebration. The shift in what merited decoration made this brutally explicit. By the First World War, medals had migrated away from acts of rescue or mercy toward acts of slaughter. The Canadian War Records Office, in its 1918 report on the Victoria Cross, articulated the new logic with remarkable candor: valor must produce "material rather than sentimental results," and the duty inspiring heroic action must be "military rather than humane." Translation: we reward killing, not saving. The hero had become the butcher, and the institution was honest enough to say so.

The inversion was complete. Traditional heroic virtues of courage, sacrifice, and protecting others had become not merely irrelevant but liabilities. The new hero was defined solely by killing efficiency. And soldiers recognized this figure as fundamentally inhuman.

It was widely rumored, as Bourke documents, that "it was not always the best men who volunteered for the more spectacular forms of soldiery," and concern was expressed about the legitimacy of encouraging "fanatical fighting men... imbued with some ruthless and impelling political or religious idea." One commander of the 14th Army in 1945 noted that the actions for which men won medals were often reprehensible. Heroes were regarded as "unreliable."

The pathologization of heroism

Heroism, as traditionally understood, simply could not survive the industrialized horror of twentieth-century warfare. More precisely, it couldn't survive its own pathologization. By reducing combat to diagnostic criteria and by transforming the intimate act of killing into a set of psychological metrics, military psychology had inadvertently destroyed the very quality it sought to cultivate.

The traditional heroic virtues of individual courage, autonomous judgment, and willingness to sacrifice oneself for others had become inverted. Those who acted heroically in the old sense were now seen as destabilizing the unit, introducing unnecessary risk, and failing to subsume their will into collective violence. Fantasies of heroism became psychologically crippling rather than motivating.

Brian Sullivan, nominated for a Silver Star, expressed his own ambivalence as a hero in a letter to his wife on 2 March 1969: "You know I'm lying if I say I'm not pleased. I am, and"You I'm proud, but only of the worst part of me. My better part is just so unhappy that this whole business started." Another veteran acknowledged, "Yeah, some goddamn glory-happy officer wants another medal, I guess, and the guys get shot up for it. The officer gets the medal and goes back to the States, and he's a big hero. Hero, my ass; getting troops slaughtered isn't being a hero."

In their own perverted honesty, these anti-heroes understood what military institutions and civilian populations alike refused to acknowledge: that the project of manufacturing warriors had succeeded only in destroying warriorhood itself. The pseudoscientific theories, the racist selection criteria, and the desperate attempts to locate natural killers—all this was theater masking a simpler reality. What made men effective at industrial killing was precisely what made them unsuitable for everything else.

The decorated soldier, ultimately, wasn't the culmination of martial virtue but its negation, a man so thoroughly conditioned that he could commit acts of savage efficiency without the complications of judgment, empathy, or hesitation. Military psychology had promised to identify and cultivate heroes. What it delivered instead, to our dismay, were components of human machinery optimized for a single function, celebrated by those who would never have to stand beside them but still mourned by those who did.

Sources

Bourke, Joanna. An Intimate History of Killing: Face-to-Face Killing in Twentieth-Century Warfare. London: Granta Books, 1999. Chapter 4: "Anatomy of a Hero," pp. 103-138.