Citizen soldiers and military service

Ambrose, Stephen. Citizen Soldiers: The U.S. Army from the Normandy Beaches to the Bulge to the Surrender of Germany. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998.

Stephen Ambrose's love of history found him during his sophomore year in college, and remained with him throughout his life. He went on to earn a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin in Madison, and served as a professor of history at various universities until his retirement thirty-five years later. One of the schools at which Ambrose taught was the Naval War College, and early in his professional career he was influenced by Forrest Pogue, who specialized in World War II history. This was to have a lasting effect on Ambrose's own scholarly leanings, and the World War II period became his primary focus. He was even Eisenhower's hand-selected biographer, and despite this personal selection Ambrose remained highly objective and leveled many criticisms against the World War II five0satr general and from President and Chief Commanding Officer.

In Citizen Soldiers, Ambrose's thesis is not immediately apparent. Through descriptions of the lives and actions of individual low-ranking soldiers fighting their way through Europe during the final years of the war, however, this thesis is slowly developed. Essentially, the author's thesis in Citizen Soldiers is that it was the every-day men of the American forces that displayed true heroism and led to true success in the effort to liberate Europe and defeat the German army during World War II, rather than the more often lauded actions of the generals and those in charge, Ambrose does not discount the importance of strategy, but his focus here is on the efforts of these "citizen soldiers."

Citizen Soldiers is full of examples of the seven army values at work, which should not come as a surprise given the fact that Ambrose interviewed many soldiers who had first hand experience with both these values and the fighting in the European front during World War II. The sense of loyalty is clearly shown, not only in the soldiers' following of orders and willingness to subject themselves to often increasingly-adverse conditions in order to achieve the goals that their commanding officers had set for themselves and to continue advancing the Allied lines, but also in their commitment to their fellow soldiers. This also displays the soldier's sense of duty, honor, and integrity. There is no sense in the book of soldiers flagging due to the hardships that they endured, but rather the perseverance that is born of an extreme commitment to duty. This conduct is the only type of honorable conduct for a soldier; there is no honor in allowing those around you to pick up your slack or to push for success where you gave in to failure. There is also no integrity in such a stance, and it was each individual soldier's commitment to retain their integrity as a soldier that made the collective army so powerful.