American Samurai: Myth and Imagination in the Conduct of Battle in the First Marine Division 1941-1951

by Craig M. Cameron

Events on the battlefields of the Pacific War were not only outgrowths of technology and tactics, but also products of cultural myth and imagination. American Samurai offers a bold and innovative approach to military history by linking combat activity to cultural images. Marines projected ideas and assumptions about themselves and their enemy onto people and events throughout the war--giving life to formerly abstract myths and ideas and molding their behavior to expectations. This fascinating book concludes by considering what happened to the myths and images and how they have been preserved in American society to the present.

Genres: World War II

316 pages, Paperback

First published January 28, 1994

Reviews

[Chris · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found it hard to believe that I’d not heard of this book. I can see why now as it’s a mixed bag. It’s off putting and slow moving. It’s filled with “intellectual-ese” language. Not many Marines will want to hear such a critical analysis of their ethos. But it’s fascinating and goes down so many interesting avenues: racism, misogyny, group theory, cohesion, training, personnel management, memory and remembrance, Interservice rivalry, and technological fanaticism-who knew there was such a term?

The author makes an outrageous comment (IMHO) calling Guadalcanal one sided as if there was no doubt the Marines would prevail. Easily said in hindsight. The Japanese would remedy their tactical incompetence on Guadalcanal at Peleliu and it would be the Marines under Rupertus that would show their ineptitude with frontal assaults that decimated the Division.

Lots of irony as the Marines became de facto samurai while fighting the descendants of actual samurai while calling them beasts and animals- dehumanizing the enemy. In North China the Division would actively work with the Japanese Army to maintain order.

It took me three months to get through this. I’m glad I read it. It’s too bad the author is deceased as I’d love to have heard his thoughts on Operation Iraqi Freedom.

[Joseph Stieb · Rating 3 out of 5]

Insightful in many ways but also flawed. This is a study of the culture and operations of the Marine Corps First Division from the First World War through to Korea, although the focus is on. Cameron makes a few big points. The Marines worked extra hard to build a culture of warrior distinctiveness and elitism compared to the rest of the military and US society. They were always fighting for survival in the US defense establishment and had to work hard to cultivate their public image and mythology. Up until the middle of WWII, they were more selective than the other services, which gave them more leeway to cultivate a warrior ethos. They developed the specialization of amphibious warfare in Latin America, which made them highly suitable for combat in the Pacific (while also giving them a distinct function from the other services).

In World War II, the combination of this warrior identity and racist pre-imagery of the Japanese, as Cameron argues, combined to create a particularly brutal form of warfare, involving the killing of prisoners, taking of gold teeth and other trophies from Japanese bodies, dehumanizing language, and eventually methods like strategic bombing that wiped out Japanese cities. Cameron profiles how Guadalcanal became a mythic representation of the Marine warrior image, Peleliu reinforced their distinctiveness from the Army, and Okinawa represented their homogenization within the US military as draftee replacements took over for worn-out or deceased old-timers and a more technocratic form of warfare became the norm.

Some criticisms: the writing is turgid and overly academic, and there are a lot of rather silly over-intellectualizations of rather normal behavior. In other words, it's not a terribly long book but it is very dense to read. In addition, the book feels a bit like a rehash of a lot of John Dower's more well-known War without Mercy, which is a better and more readable book.

The larger weakness of the book relates to the claims about race and the brutality of the Pacific War. Cameron sees racism as the essential cause of US brutality in this war. But there are several big problems with this argument, as other historians have pointed out. First, this ignores that much US behavior in this war was exceedingly similar to its behavior against the Germans, especially when it comes to indiscriminate bombing campaigns. After all, the atomic bomb was built for use primarily against Germany; the fact that white Americans saw Germans as more culturally similar to them was basically irrelevant here.

Second, I would argue that Japan set the tone for this brutal war with its fanatical way of war: the betrayal of Pearl Harbor, the abuse and execution of prisoners, torture, shooting medics, suicide tactics (including pretending to be dead or wounded and then killing Americans who tried to help them), and a general death cult that defined Japanese operations in this war. Americans may have fought this war in a brutal way without any of this behavior, but what they did was probably a pretty natural reaction in warfare to violations of basic norms and laws. Shooting a prisoner who might be booby trapped with a suicide vest or be carrying a grenade is honestly pretty logical behavior in this context. Americans often understood Japanese misbehavior in racial terms, but that doesn't make racism the primary cause of the descent of the Pacific War into a dirty war of hatred and near-extermination. If Germans had fought against the US in the same way, then the US would have probably escalated its violence too. This is not to deny that racism existed and was in fact pervasive but to argue that it's explanatory power for the nature of this conflict is strongly overstated by historians like Dower, Takaki, and Cameron.

Anyways, I'm sure I'll draw on this for future teaching, but I don't strongly recommend it, and I think it's argument about race in the Pacific War is overblown.

[T. Fowler · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this book to be a very unusual and fascinating study of how the US Marines created an image of themselves as an elite fighting force and how this affected the brutality of combat in the Pacific War. The author shows that the Marines needed to create an image of themselves at the start of the 20th century to ensure their survival as a separate force within the US military. The book then focuses in particular on the experience of the 1st Marine Division in the Pacific War and how the imagery inculcated in the troops affected their attitude towards the Japanese and even towards the US army. The author shows how warfare evolved over the Pacific War and briefly examines changes up to the Vietnam war, showing how the Marines in his opinion have struggled to maintain a unique image of their role as an elite force. Trhoughout this narrative, Cameron analyzes a number of topics about Marines in combat from a rare unbiased, unadorned, but knowledgeable point of view that many will find offensive - such as how the spirit of the Marines could be compared to the Waffen SS, how combat is a sexual exprience, and how neuropsychiatric breakdown of Marines from the intensity of combat on Pelelieu and Okinawa was not acknwledged as acceptable by some. At the end of the book, he shows how the imagery of the Marines was presented to the public in war films and books and how this continued to evolve post-1945. The book was published in 1994; it would be fascinating to see how the experiences of Iraq and Afghanistan have affected the Marines and changed their image today.

[T. Fowler]

Wrong author