Drugging Soldiers: Bennies and Battle

When the horrors of war have got you down, and you just don't feel like brandishing that assault rifle, lift your spirits by popping a few pills.  Nothing perks a soldier up like some amphetamines!

Richard Holmes, in Acts of War: The Behaviour of Men in Battle (1985), examines the factors effecting behaviour in combat: how soldiers steel themselves against fear, the discipline that coerces them to brandish a weapon and advance to certain death, and the various levels of group bonding which help them cope.  One method for motivating soldiers, Holmes addresses is drugging them.

Vendel Era Bronze Plate

Blood-crazed Viking beserkers apparently ate dried fly agaric (the hallucinogenic mushroom Amanita muscaria) to inspire their savage attacks.  It seems reasonable that drugging a medieval warrior and inciting him to behave like a bear would improve his will to fight, but one has to wonder about the effects on hand-eye coordination.

Holmes writes that in the Second World War, benzedrine was commonly administered to soldiers of various nations, noting ten percent of American soldiers used amphetamines in WWII.  The Yankees were following the German's lead in the prescription of pills which heightened awareness and warded off fatigue.

As Adam Tooze notes in his excellent Wages of Destruction, the intense operational tempo during the fall of France led to the need for stimulating expedients.  With the call for German armoured forces to push constantly for three days and nights, armoured crews needed a little pick-me-up to continue operating.  As Tooze writes, "to ensure that the drivers could go without sleep, the quartermasters of the advanced units stocked up with tens of thousands of doses of Pervitin, the original formulation of the amphetamine now know as 'speed', but more familiar in the 1940s as 'tank chocolate' (Panzerschokolade)."

Remixed Propaganda by Micah Wright

The practice of popping amphetamines like candy was continued in Vietnam, where soldiers were administered Dexedrine before action.  More recently, lawyers for two American pilots who bombed Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan, argued that the errant airmen's judgment may have been impaired by amphetamines.

It appears that drugs have a long and stimulating relationship with the military.  Anti-depressants, and painkillers are also widely prescribed and one need not look too far to find accusations regarding the negative effects of this narco-love-affair.  

Harold Innis drops a footnote

 When Harold A. Innis wants to cite some evidence on the power relationships between late nineteenth capitalists, he does so with authority.  His 1923 work, A History of the Canadian Pacific Railway, is a dense economic history which argues that the company brought civilization to the Canadian West at the cost of Westerners.  Note that not only does the single footnote on American railway interests run for three pages, the sentence which it provides evidence for, has a further two footnotes!

Four pages Professor Innis?! Your passion for the politico-economic background to the Pacific Scandal has no bounds!

Jacky Fisher's Visage

Nicholas Lambert's Sir John Fisher's Naval Revolution (1999), revises the historical consensus on Sir John Fisher's reorganization of the British Navy in the years leading up to the Great War. In contrast to the historiography, Fisher is portrayed as favouring flotilla defense for the home waters made up of submarines and torpedo boats, championing submarines and battlecruisers as opposed to battleships, and still hoping to maintain imperial defence. Radical Jack is shown to champion the battleship in order to leverage the technological misunderstandings of the cabinet and public to lobby for increased naval spending, and not due to his preference for the battleship itself. The dreadnought revolution is portrayed as a product of financial concerns instead of the German naval threat. Technology in the form of the torpedo, submarine, and side-armoured cruisers were hoped to allow the navy to do more with less.

Lambert noted that Jan Morris' investigation of Fisher's reputation elicited a wide range of descriptors.  Morris wrote, "Fisher, it seemed, was a Great Englishman, a disgrace to his uniform, a manipulator, a hobgoblin, a damned Socialist, a crook, a paragon of kindness, a parvenu, a cad, a genius, a fraud, a delight. Only one thing all were agreed upon: he had a marvellous face."

Admiral John Fisher, Handsome Chap.