Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #258391 in Books
• Published on: 2000-03-06
• Binding: Paperback
• 576 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
"The characteristic act of men at war is not dying, it is killing". With that unsettling--yet incontrovertible--assertion, Joanna Bourke opens her investigation of how servicemen deal with the most wilfully ignored of wartime activities. Drawing on private letters and diaries of men (and a few women) from the First and Second World Wars and Vietnam, she shows not only how military men talk of their fears and anxieties--familiar enough territory--but also how they talk of joy and pleasure: the physical, sexual excitement of killing another man. In its own right, the material--lucidly and wittily handled--is fascinating enough. But across Britain, the US and Australia, across three distinct wars, the same story comes through loud and clear: the joy of man-to-man combat which, ironically, became less and less common over the course of the century. As Bourke shows, these powerful stories were influenced by combat tales in magazines, novels and films that enthralled boys across generations--despite the best efforts of the military, the experience of war in the end cannot be prepared for. Some may have reservations about Bourke's conclusions, but the huge mass of detail she brings to light in An Intimate History of Killing forces us at the very least to reconsider those easy clicheacute;s about the brutalising, traumatising effects of war. --Alan Stewart

Synopsis
It is almost universally accepted among writers on warfare that battle is a terrible experience, and that men who fight are at the very least sobered, and often deeply traumatized, by the horrors of combat. Bourke uses the letters, diaries, memoirs and reports of veterans from three conflicts - World War I, World War II and the Vietnam War - to establish a picture of the man-at-arms. What she suggests is that the structure of war encourages pleasure in killing, and that perfectly ordinary, gentle human beings can become enthusiastic killes without becoming "brutalized". Bourke forces the reader to face some disconcerting truths about society that can so easliy organize itself for war.

Customer Reviews

An engaging surprise
Several of the reviewers have suggested that this is a work of psychology rather than military history. As a psychologist I found this book fascinating. Ms Bourke inevitably leaves herself open to criticism for challenging established male myths of glory in battle; so deep-seated are these cultural fantasies that her work risks being rejected on an emotional, rather than rational, basis.

I would not agree that she adopts a Freudian perspective. In fact, in her chapter on the role of psychiatrists and psychologists in warfare she points out that many servicemen were poorly served by the Freudian therapeutic model.

Perhaps the reason this book has received so much ire from reviewers is that it is marketed as military history; a qualitative study in the experience of war would be a more accurate description.

read David Grossman, On Killing---instead of Bourke
This book is superrficial, carelessly written, and full of errors.

Superficial at best
Professor Joanna Bourke's lengthy tome is a mix of overt and covert manifestoes. She states her case quite openly on her first page: it is to put killing back at the centre of histories of warfare. She has a fair point. Histories of the two World Wars and Vietnam War have tended to be military histories, dealing with grand strategies, politics, generals, broad fronts. They have tended to obscure the fact that war is about men killing one another, 'face to face'. It is against this trend in historiography that Bourke, a historian of gender, reacts. It must be noted from the outset that Bourke works within a Freudian framework, clearly believing, as Hirschfield put it (pulling together Freud's 'Beyond the Pleasure Principle' and 'The Ego and the Id'), that 'in the depths of the human soul, eroticism, cruelty and the mad desire to destroy, are all intimately connected'. It must also be noted that it is her adherence particular approach to psychology that she does not overtly state. Without that knowledge - and the alarm bells that should sound - a reader cannot approach this text with a critical enough mind.

Bourke's central thesis, then, is the terrible truth that men actually enjoyed killing. Through a close analysis of sources, some first-hand accounts, some literary, some secondary, she attempts to prove that 20th century warfare has involved some of the most gratuitous acts of sadistic violence in history, furnishing us with conflicts that, because total, have reverted masses of men to barbaric status. Far from 'man-hating' (as the Daily Mail might have it), Bourke's approach is actually sympathetic towards her male subjects throughout her work on masculinity. 'Intimate History' is a bold attempt to explore the damage that a century of Total War had on the male psyche in America, Britain and Australia.

Too bold, in fact. Her ambition in writing this work is immense. She is trying to write the definitive guide to man's relationship to warfare over 100 years, over three different countries. It is obvious why she has chosen the three countries - all Anglophone, all involved in the two world wars, but less obvious to see why a historian of some stature has ignored the subtleties and varieties of culture and isntitutions that she knows full well exist in the different nations, located on three distinct continents. Betraying her focussed and sophisticated work on Australia, Ireland and Britain in the past, she rides roughshod over reality to impose her grim model of men glorying in war. The fact is that close studies of a single culture will provide multiple models of masculinity (something she has herself pointed out in previous work, pointing out the difference between Irish and English gender constructions), rather than the mono-model she seeks to press onto the men of three countries.

Not only that, but she attempts to do this over the span of the entire twentieth century. Rather than adopt a chronological model to track the rise of a militarised/ aggressive/ blood-thirsty masculinity, or the development of psychological problems, she attempts to show that modern warfare has revealed the true nature of man's being - and it's horrible. Sadly for her, the evidence on hand does not support her contention. For instance, when discussing the gathering of trophies as an indication of how brutalised and wicked men can become in war, she can draw upon plentiful evidence of American soldiers actively collecting severed ears, fingers, breasts and penises during the Vietnam War. However, to suggest that this is equal to the collecting of bent bayonets, helmets, and buttons during the Great War is to completely ignore the failings in her evidential base. She plods onwards, regardless, sticking unfailingly to her model.

Her work is likely to be extremely offensive to veterans of the conflicts she studies. Although there is anecdotal evidence to support many of her claims, there is also plenty to refute it - soldiers who knew they were being accused of revelling in war during conflict, and detested their detractors for such crass abuse (see Susan Kent, 'Making Peace').

It should be pointed out that there is much that is useful and good in this text. Aside from anything else, this is a shocking anthology of source material stressing the barbarism of modern war, and, despite caes of mis-using of evidence, much is presented that is of value, and she does make some very valid arguments along the way. The central problem with the book is its superficiality. Rather than a careful case-study as she presented in her study of British masculinity in the great war, 'Dismembering the Male', she has used a very broad brush to sweep over the many incongruities in her study. I get the sense she is pandering to popular desire for 'big' history, and the detail and difference get lost along the way. This had the potential to be an excellent book - but rather than charting the growth of horrors and barbarism in war throughout the century she plumped for trying to display a Nietzschean-Freudian view of human nature which simply isn't sustained by the evidence. Disappointing.