S.L.A. Marshall

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S.L.A. Marshall bigraphy, stories - United States Army general and Military historian

S.L.A. Marshall : biography

July 18, 1900 – December 17, 1977

S.L.A. Marshall (full name, Samuel Lyman Atwood Marshall) (July 18, 1900 – December 17, 1977) was a chief U.S. Army combat historian during World War II and the Korean War. He authored 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.

Retirement, Vietnam tour and death

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.

Marshall died in 1977 in El Paso, Texas. The University of Texas at El Paso library has a special collection built around his books.

Marshall is used as a character in Brothers in Arms: Earned in Blood, a video game released in 2005.

Controversy after death

Certain professional soldiers have publicly cast doubt on Marshall’s research methodology.

Professor Roger J. Spiller (Deputy Director of the Combat Studies Institute, US Army Command and General Staff College) demonstrated in his 1988 article "S.L.A. Marshall and the Ratio of Fire" (RUSI Journal, Winter 1988, pages 63–71) that Marshall had not actually conducted the research upon which he based his ratio of fire theory. "The ‘systematic collection of data’ appears to have been an invention.".(Extracts are available on-line in an ) This revelation called into question the authenticity of some of Marshall’s other books, and lent academic weight to doubts about his integrity that had been raised in military circles even decades earlier.

The controversial figure Col. David Hackworth, writing in his 1989 memoir About Face, described at length his initial elation at an assignment with a man he idolized, and how that elation turned to bitter disillusionment after seeing Marshall’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," and went so far as to say "Veterans of many of the actions he ‘documented’ in his books have complained bitterly over the years of his inaccuracy or blatant bias". (See chapter 16.)

Marshall’s grandson, journalist John Douglas Marshall, has explored his grandfather’s posthumous reputation in a series of articles in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and later in a book, Reconciliation Road: A Family Odyssey of War and Honor. After a review of the general’s archives and other memorabilia, as well as interviews with many of his contemporaries and associates, the younger Marshall concludes that the body of his grandfather’s work still has value.

Korean War

Marshall was recalled from the Reserves in late 1950 for three months’ duty as a Historian/Operations Analyst for the Eighth Army during the Korean War. He collected his numerous Korean combat interviews 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.S.L.A. Marshall, Commentary on Infantry and Weapons in Korea 1950–51, 1st Report ORO-R-13 of 27 October 1951, Project Doughboy [Restricted], Operations Research Office (ORO), U.S. Army (1951)

Medals and decorations

Combat Infantryman Badge