Closing ranks: Leadership and the mundanization of the extraordinary in military history

Abstract

Using examples from military history, this paper takes Alvesson and Sveningsson’s ‘Extraordinarizaton of the Mundane’ article and inverts it. They suggested that what counted as ‘leadership’ was not the acts of formal leaders but the interpretive work of subordinates, who rendered mundane actions by leaders – such as chatting to employees – as extraordinary. Here, I suggest that the reverse process also occurs – the mundanization of the extraordinary. In this case subaltern groups are given mundane tasks to inhibit their achievement of extraordinary tasks, or, when extraordinary tasks are achieved, those same tasks are rendered mundane by their superordinates and thus devalued. Even when successful challenges to this hierarchy of value are made the superordinate culture tends to close ranks against the upstarts and reaffirm the status quo ante, or simply deny the possibility of subaltern groups achieving something so extraordinary.

Introduction

Alvesson and Sveningsson’s (2003) work on ‘the extraordinarization of the mundane’ suggested that, despite the assumption that what leaders do is often visionary, extraordinary and sometimes heroic, much of the everyday actions of formal leaders are actually quite mundane (chatting to people, listening to people, creating a good working environment etc.,) but these acts are perceived by followers as the acts of ‘leadership’ – significant and remarkable-if leaders engage in them. Moreover, leaders talk a great deal and listen only a little, so while everyone at work listens to others, when leaders or managers (they don’t really differentiate between them) listen to their subordinates, it is endowed with great symbolic significance – the ‘extraordinarization of the mundane’ in their terms. As they say, ‘One important meaning of managers’ listening is that it conveys a feeling of inclusion, participation and social significance… the transforming of ordinary tasks into something extraordinary and significant, simply by the fact that managers perform them, makes them almost mysterious, as if managers possess some kind of magic formula of listening, unknown to those outside management…. When managers have problems exercising active control, listening becomes a favoured activity.’ (2003: 15, 18-19)

Gabriel takes a similar line in his study ‘Meeting God: When Organizational members Come Face to Face with the Supreme Leader’ which considers the fantasies that subordinates often hold about the boss, whether they represent the ‘primal mother’, the ‘uncaring leader’, the ‘omnipotent primal father’, or the ‘false messiah’. As he concludes, following Max Weber’s concerns about the way bureaucracies expose leaders, ‘Leaders must be endowed with superhuman qualities because only then can they be really perceived as real leaders.’ (1997: 337) Of course, since leaders do not have the superhuman qualities their followers attribute to them, the mundane reality needs to be obscured through a combination of the leader’s narcissistic self-belief and the followers’ infantilised needs. But, as Durkheim (1883/1973) suggested, while we may treat our leaders as gods, capable of solving all our problems, when they fail to do so – because they are not gods - we scapegoat them. But the typical response to leader failure is not to seek a different governance system that involves followers in some participatory system, but, on the contrary, to seek out another God-like leader to ensure the cycle of deception and self-deception continue ad infinitum.

Another way to frame this is to suggest that leadership, as defined by the focus on mundane activities, is the ‘god of small things’ (Roy, 1998). That is, it is the accumulation of many small actions, rather than the effect of one singular ‘heroic’ deed, that actually makes an organization function or indeed explains the success of many reform campaigns (Davis, 2023). But the myriad actions of unsung heroes rarely merit the attention of those responsible for the disbursement of rewards and promotions. For example, it would appear that women at work are required to engage in far more mundane – or ‘non-promotable’ – tasks than men, especially those not involved in revenue-generating activities, and this compounds the difficulty of achieving equality (Babcock et al., 2017). One could argue that this is but a reflection of the greater inequality that situates all domestic activities as less valuable than ‘work’ activities, so that even our language reinforces the allegedly mundane nature of ‘looking after children’ versus the extraordinary skill and effort required to ‘go out to work’.

But if the extraordinarization of the mundane is relatively common, what about its opposite: the mundanization of the extraordinary? In this inversion we see how what used to be regarded as extraordinary is somehow relegated to the mundane. This may be where subaltern or subordinated groups or individuals manage to achieve what had hitherto been the monopoly of privileged individuals or superordinates, which leads to the latter devaluing the actions of the former. For instance, we might see how the jobs that used to be reserved for men, ostensibly because of the technical difficulty involved, suddenly become devalued when women undertake them. Teaching children in the USA, for example, used to be a predominantly male occupation until the early decades of the nineteenth century. From then on men left in increasing numbers to find work in better rewarded occupations and women eventually dominated the profession by the end of that century – and were paid about a third of the rate for the men they replaced, while still being led by men in senior teaching and administrative roles (Smith, 2022). In other words, the extraordinary job of teaching children had become mundane, just as women displaced men as the majority of teachers. And this is but one example of a common phenomenon: as Weeden et al. (2018) suggest, as the percentage of women in an occupation increases, so the median wage of that occupation decreases. Harris (2020) confirms this trend and notes that between 1960 and 2010 a ten per cent increase in the proportion of women in an occupation led to a 7 per cent decrease in the wages of those same women in the same year.

Or it may be that privileged individuals and superordinate groups try to ensure that subaltern or subordinated groups or individuals are restricted in the forms of jobs or practices that they may undertake. In this case we can see how enslaved people in the West Indies and North America were forbidden from learning how to read or write – since that would be a primary mechanism for encouraging resistance or achieving freedom. Or women were prohibited from entering the pre-digital printing trade on the ‘objective’ grounds that they could not lift the printing blocks, when there were always some women who could do this and some men who could not (Cockburn, 1991). That devaluation of women’s abilities is reproduced in the interwar British Post Office which excluded women from the role of postal deliverer. When answering a question to the Royal Commission on the Civil Service (Tomlin) in 1929 as to why there were no women delivering the post, the Post Office responded that it was because women could not cope with the unsocial hours and heavy loads. But why, then, persisted the questioner, were 3000 women recruited for rural deliveries? The reason, according to the Post Office was that ‘no man can be obtained to perform the work.’ (POR. 6033/1930.F.12). Perhaps more importantly, women were favoured by some on the official Post Office side because they were believed to be ‘less disposed than men to combine for the purposes of extorting higher wages’ (Quoted in Simpson, 1982). Almost 100 years later, the progress made by women and ethnic minorities in western societies is both self-evident, and yet self-evidently still constrained by the dominance of white men, yet that struggle, and the success generated by it, would not have happened without the actions of the kind of people represented in this article (Gillard and Okono-Iweala, 2021; Spiller and Watson, 2021).

In the military context represented here, that same limited progress is visible in an increasing number of women in various military organizations, though the persistence of misogynistic practices still constrains the number of women in senior leadership positions (Aktaş et al., 2023; Simon, 2018). We are, perhaps, more likely to see the gap between the extraordinary and the mundane in extreme situations, such as war, when a preference for military heroism – the extraordinary - over the mundane is driven by the political conditions of the day. As Stice’s (2023) work implies, when considering the heroic model constructed from 1WW epitaphs to dead junior British officers, there are no dead cowards, there are only heroes.

In what follows I want to explore this tension between the extraordinarization of the mundane (generated by followers) and the mundanization of the extraordinary (generated by leaders) through four examples from the military history of the Second World War. First, I consider how the actions of the French Resistance embody the dialectical tensions between extraordinary heroism and mundane acts in which it was often the latter that were more effective, even if the former garnered all the glory from the formal leaders. Then the next two cases explore how the achievement of extraordinary tasks by two subaltern aviation groups (African American pilots in the American air force and women pilots in the British Air Transport Auxiliary) were devalued into the realm of the mundane by the leadership of superordinate groups. Finally, I consider how one attempt to breach this divide by Evans Carlson (commanding officer of the US 2nd Marine Raider Battalion) to prevent this devaluation of the subaltern group’s achievements, succumbed to the overwhelming influence of the senior military leadership in the re-establishment of the status quo ante.

Given the historical context of the cases, I am not suggesting that the leadership of contemporary western organizations, military or civilian, are as misogynistic or racist now as some of them were 80 years ago, though some are. Indeed, this journal in particular has played a significant role in bringing to our attention contemporary leadership outside the realms of the USA or Europe, but that is not my focus here (see for example Eyong, 2017; Forster et al., 2016; Henry and Wolfgramm, 2018). Nor is my aim to reduce leadership to the acts of individual leaders because what follows is rooted in prevailing cultures, not individuals. Rather, my aim is to highlight the mechanisms and cultures by which superordinate groups maintain their leadership over subordinate groups, to consider the role of followers in resisting that leadership, and to reflect on the social construction of the heroic and the mundane.

Occupied France

If we are to believe the self-appointed leader of the ‘Free French’, Charles de Gaulle, it was the men of the French Resistance, and the Free French Forces originally stationed in Britain, that liberated the country, not the Allies. Of the 1038 people subsequently recognized as worthy of being designated a Resistance Hero and awarded the Companion of the Liberation Medal, only six were women. Yet, Douzou (2019) estimates that between 12–25% of all Resistance members were women and 6700 of them were deported from occupied France, the majority of whom for activities within the Resistance. Juliette Plissonnier, a regional commander in the communist resistance recalled the shock of a man discovering her position: “What! A woman here?” to which his comrade responded: “She’s not a woman, she’s the boss” (Quoted in Jackson, 2003, p. 491). So, what enabled de Gaulle to maintain that the Resistance was almost wholly a task undertaken by heroic men?

At the top end of the resistance hierarchy, women occupied a variety of roles, but the closer to the bottom of the hierarchy, the more likely it became that women were used in more mundane activities, such as couriers, oftentimes because they attracted less suspicion than men who were increasingly under surveillance once the transfer of able-bodied men to work in Germany occurred. Sometimes the activities of women were easily overlooked precisely because of their mundane nature. As a woman in Toulouse recalled of her parents’ activities in the Resistance:

My father was a resister and a Communist… so he received a lot of men and women in the house. People might say that my mother was not a resister. But who got up in the morning to look after the resister who had to depart before dawn? Who mended socks and washed the clothes of the resister while he was asleep? Who prepared the food he took away with him? Who received the police when there was an alert. I think therefore that my mother resisted quite as much as my father. (Quoted in Jackson, 2003, pp. 492-3)

Despite women’s willingness to fight, it was the male resistance fighters who kept women out of combat. In late 1943 one resistance leadership group issued an order that using women should be avoided, and if they must be used, then it was preferable to use older women who were “less likely to be a source of temptation to colleagues…. Sentimental complications are always to be feared” (Quoted in Jackson, 2003, p. 494). Other women in occupied France and Belgium worked for the Resistance through much more mundane tasks than engaging in combat, for example, by secreting information into their knitting as they travelled by bus or car along the Normandy coast. Thus, an apparently mundane error such as a dropped stitch might mark out a gun emplacement, followed by ten ordinary stitches to mark the distance to the next point of interest — a pearl stitch for an ammunition dump etc. (Zarrelli, 2022). But note that acquiring and sending information about gun emplacements on the coast was probably far more important to the war effort than killing an individual German, especially when the retribution of the occupiers to the latter was often ferocious.

Moreover, it is significant that when considering ‘the Resistance,’ not everyone agreed that every act of non-compliance counted as ‘resistance.’ Thus, the relatively mundane tasks of hiding Jews or downed aircrew, or protesting, or printing leaflets against the Nazi occupation of Europe, were seldom considered — by those wielding guns and explosives (the primarily male leaders of the Resistance) — as acts of resistance. But this ultra-violent definition of legitimate resistance ignores the point that the occupiers regarded all these acts as acts of resistance, and all were punishable, some by death. As Stoltzfus et al. (2021, p. 6) suggest,

Scholars have developed an expansive vocabulary for militarised resistance but none that applies to women’s networks of defiance. A primarily militarised vision of resistance obstructs a view of the range of resistance actions as well as the range of regime responses…. Not having access to bombs and guns, women were more likely to resort to collective public actions, such as protest.

Nelson (2021, pp. 136-7), in her work on resistance during the Second World War, suggests that what counts as resistance has been distorted to omit many acts and actors: first, through the ‘narrow focus on military and paramilitary operations’, and second through the literary conventions at the time, which represented women as the romantic foil to their male — and far more heroic — partners.

We might also consider food protests as political resistance in ways that bear little relationship to the normal assumptions of resistance as armed conflict. As Schwartz (2021) suggests, food protests by French women under the occupation were not just about demanding enough food to eat but directly attacking the German rationing and distribution system. Some of the protests were small, with just a few women involved, but others were very large and often organized by the French Communist Party (PCF). In all of the above cases it is the formal leadership of the Resistance and the Free French Forces that labels activities as worthy of celebration and medals; in effect, it is not the acts in and of themselves that makes the acts heroic or mundane, but the way they are configured by the (primarily male) leadership.

African American aviators

If food protests rank as the most mundane of anti-Nazi activities, then the most heroic — and least mundane — icon of the Second World War it would surely be the fighter pilot, complete with a legendary scarf made from white parachute silk and worn both by Errol Flynn in Dawn Patrol (1938) about WW1 fighter pilots, and by Cary Grant in Only Angels have Wings (1939) about interwar aviators in South America. Indeed, when interviewed, several African American pilots spoke of these romantic images as being important in their quest to fly in the U.S. Air Force.

Black aviators in the US struggled with the most mundane task: securing access to the American air force. There were African American military pilots in the 1WW, but they were forced to fly for the French Air Force because the leadership of the American military refused to accept them, especially after President Woodrow Wilson had ordered the segregation of Black and White army troops (Caver et al., 2011; Haulman, 2018). That racial line persisted until the outbreak of the Second World War in Europe generated an increased demand for pilots in the USA. It also coincided with the approach of the November 1940 Presidential election, which forced President Roosevelt (pushed on by his wife Eleanor) to authorise the training of Black aviators with federal funds to secure the Black vote. Against extraordinary resistance from White racist leaders in the military and civilian establishments, the persistence of the Black ‘Tuskegee Airmen’ eventually led to a single African-American fighter squadron – the 99^th Fighter Squadron (99thFS) being deployed on 1 April 1943 – almost 18 months after the attack on Pearl Harbour.

The demand for equality was not restricted to African American aviators. On 31 January 1942, the Pittsburgh Courier, a campaigning newspaper for the African American community at the time, published a letter from James G. Thompson, a 26 year-old defence worker from Wichita, entitled ‘Should I Sacrifice to live “Half American?”’ Thompson had had his request to work on the factory floor of the aircraft factory where he was employed, refused. He was told to stay in the café serving the White workers. Thompson contrasted the ‘V for Victory’ posters around the country – which demanded an end to the tyranny, slavery and aggression demonstrated by Germany, Italy, and Japan – with what African Americans faced at home and called for a ‘double V for Victory sign’. The first V was for victory against outside enemies; the second for victory against the internal enemies who limited the freedom of African Americans. A week later the newspaper published the double V sign and it was an instant success amongst that community (Nielsen, 2020). When the 99th left New York, under the command of Lt. Col. Davis, it was the first time that White troops were commanded by a Black officer, but the deck of the ship, the Mariposa, had a rope across it, segregating the Black aviators from the 3000 White soldiers (Holway, 2011: 58).

The 99th began operational duty flying P-40 fighters from Tunisia to attack German forces stationed on the Italian island of Pantelleria, and were immediately censured for abandoning their bomber escort duties and attacking German fighters. In the next 6 months the Luftwaffe quickly retreated and the 99th, which was then confined to escort and dive-bombing missions, never came across any enemy aircraft. That did not stop them being censured again for failing to chalk up a similar number of aerial ‘kills’ to their White colleagues who were given free rein to seek out and attack Luftwaffe fighters. An official report on the 99th (and its wider Black aviator group, the 332nd Fighter Group) concluded that Black pilots, like Black soldiers, were not up to the task and concluded that the 99th ‘was not of the fighting calibre of any squadron in the group… They have failed to display the aggressiveness and daring for combat that are necessary for a first class fighting organization. It may be expected that we will get less work and less operational time out of the 99th FS than any squadron in this group.’ (Quoted in Bucholtz, 2013: 25)

Only in March 1944 was the 332nd FG reassigned to bomber escort duties flying from Italy to Germany, Poland and France as D-day approached, and the 8th US Air Force (stationed in the UK) was redirected from bombing runs in central Europe to attacking German defences in Normandy and the Calais region. Using the new P-47 and then long range Mustang P-51 fighters, the 332nd FG along with all the other six (White) escorting Fighter Groups, was explicitly warned by the commanding officer of the 15^th Air Force, Major Gen. Nathan Twining, that their duty was to protect the bombers, not to chase after German fighter aircraft, no matter how tempting it might be to go ‘happy hunting’ and increase their ‘kill’ rate. The newly promoted Col. Davis reinforced that message and warned his 332nd FG pilots: ‘Don’t come back if you lose a bomber’ (Quoted in Moye, 2010: 112). No other (White) FG commander seemed as keen to enforce this as Davis, who even quoted Twining to his pilots: ‘we don’t want aces. I don’t care if you never shoot down another airplane…. Don’t chase them.’ (Quoted in Holway, 2011: 146) Many of Davis’s fighter pilots were unhappy about this. Charles Bussey said, ‘We were damn unhappy, because the name of the game was ‘shoot down airplanes. This took some glamour out of being a fighter pilot, because the movies create this glamour with the white scarves and all that.’ (Quoted in Holway, 2011: 147)

Woodrow Crockett recalled the impact that one raid had on this policy, ‘a White [fighter] group shot down eight or nine enemy fighters but lost 17 bombers on the same mission. Each B-17 cost a half million dollars and carried a crew of ten men, or about 170 to 180 men in all. So that was not a very good trade off.’ (Quoted in Holway, 2011: 147) Despite this, the 15th Air Force kept records of how many enemy fighters each pilot shot down, but not how many bombers each group lost. Yet, as Holway (2011: 207) concludes: there was a ‘clear trade off: the more enemy fighters killed, the more bombers lost and vice versa.’ Thus, of the 285 bombers lost in the 15th Air Force, the average loss for each fighter group was 46, but the 332nd only lost 9. In effect ‘the other fighter groups lost five times more bombers, on average, than did the 332nd.’ (Quoted in Holway, 2011: 207) By the end of the war in Europe the 332nd FG had flown over 1500 missions, 15,533 individual sorties, including 311 bomber escorts and, in that effort, had shot down between 100 and 136 enemy aircraft, destroyed 150 on the ground, eliminated 57 locomotives and 600 goods wagons. 450 pilots had gone into combat and 66 did not survive: more than one in seven. 32 were shot down and became POWs (Holway, 2011: 309; Moye, 2010: 121). Despite all this activity the important point here is to note how the heroic image of the fighter pilot – which is one reason why many joined the air force - was not what General Twining actually wanted: he wanted the fighter pilots to conduct the much more mundane activity of protecting the bombers because it was the latter that would destroy the capacity of the Nazi war machine to continue the conflict. But, at the level of operational commanders (the leadership level that awarded honours and promotions), and in the eyes of many pilots, the real task was shooting down enemy fighters – even at the cost of losing bombers. In short, the mundane task was ostensibly more important and it was that which the 332nd excelled at, but the honour, the glory – and the promotions - went to those White fighter pilots who ignored official policy and concentrated on what they wanted to do: become aviator heroes.

Air transport auxiliary (ATA)

Another intriguing example of the subordination of subaltern groups seeking to achieve equality with superordinate groups, occurred during the same war when a shortage of male pilots forced the British Royal Air Force (RAF) to seek support from first older men and then subsequently women in the Air Transport Auxiliary (ATA), a civilian organization that ferried RAF aircraft from factories and repair bases to training and front line RAF stations. Initially the first women were taken on in January 1940 but restricted to flying Tiger Moths and similar unarmed and very slow training aircraft, but by September 1940 ¼ of the original 1000 RAF (male) pilots had been lost over France or in the Battle of Britain or in training. At this time the ATA still used over 100 RAF pilots to ferry aircraft but the shortages coerced the government – and the RAF – into acquiescing to the demands of experienced women pilots to be allowed to help. By the end of 1940, 26 women flew for the ATA, though they were not allowed into the officers’ mess at RAF stations (Curtis, 1985: 59) As demand for the services of the ATA increased, so did the demand for women pilots, and a second tranche was recruited in the Autumn of 1941 so that by the end of the war 168 women flew all kinds of aircraft, including Spitfires, Hurricanes, Mosquitoes, and the Halifax and Lancaster bombers. The latter aircraft perfectly captures the way the shift from mundane to heroic – and back to mundane – occurred. It took considerable effort to persuade the RAF that women could – never mind should – be allowed to fly fighter aircraft, but the thought of women flying bombers was beyond the pale for many RAF officers (all of whom were men at this time). When Mary Ellis landed a two-engined Wellington bomber, the male ground crew were so convinced that a woman could not have flown it that they went on board to see where the ‘real’ pilot was hiding. As she recalled, ‘Everybody was flabbergasted that a little girl like me could fly these big aeroplanes all by oneself.’ (Quoted in Fisher, 2022: 120) Lettuce Curtis was the first woman to train for and fly a four-engined Halifax in September 1942, and on one of those Halifax landings the Group Captain commanding the station was visiting the Control Tower along with his guest, an army general. When the chief instructor explained to the visitors that the pilot was a woman the Group Captain said:

‘It’s a WHAT?’ and persuaded the general to follow him onto the balcony to watch, but realised the aircraft was approaching the near runway, about thirty yards from the control tower and returned inside. ‘Which way will the Halifax swing when it lands?’ he asked the controller… ‘Away from the Control Tower, sir’, which enabled the Group Captain to return outside… It landed perfectly. ‘It didn’t swing! It didn’t even bounce! And my lads have always kidded me how difficult Halifaxes are. Why damn it, they must be easy if a little girl can fly them like that! (Quoted in Whittell, 2021: 203)

As ever, misogynists did not alter their opinion when proved wrong, they simply changed the criteria for success: what had taken the heroic courage and brute strength that only men could apparently muster had suddenly turned into little more than a mundane activity that anyone could do, courtesy of the RAF leadership. Even then the goal posts shifted: Curtis was required to demonstrate ten safe landings on the Halifax before gaining authority to fly it solo, when the number for male pilots had always been seven. When Rosemary Rees, who flew the B-17 Flying Fortress, was told that at 5 foot two inches and weighing just 7 stone she was too small to fly the Avro York bomber (a derivative of the Lancaster), she ‘pointed out that I was not proposing to attempt to carry it after all, but on the contrary to make it carry me.’ (Quoted in Whittell, 2021: 201). Despite all their ‘heroic/mundane’ efforts, as soon as the war was over, women found it desperately difficult to secure jobs as pilots or even receive due recognition for their efforts. At the Victory parade through London on 8 June 1946, twelve men and twelve women were asked to join the parade as representatives of the ATA, not with the RAF, and not even just behind the RAF, but with the other transport workers; perhaps not surprisingly, the ATA had difficulty finding 24 volunteers (Curtis, 1985: 284). Jackie Sorour soon hankered after one of the many post-war flying jobs that were advertised. The responses were ‘monotonously identical in content: “Dear Madam, We regret to inform you that, owing to passenger psychology, it is not out policy to employ women pilots.”’ (Moggridge, 2014: 147)

So far we have considered three wartime theatres where the formal leadership closed ranks, either to prevent subaltern groups from undertaking what the leadership regarded as heroic activities, or, where the subalterns were permitted to engage in them, to relegate the same actions to the level of the mundane. Each case ensured the continuation of social inequality in the short run, even if they laid the foundations for subsequent change, but were there cases where the formal leadership did try to engage their subordinates in heroic actions and recognised them for doing it?

Responding to the threat of the extraordinarization of the mundane from below: The 2nd Marine Raider Battalion

The racist closing of ranks in the US air force, and the misogynist closing of ranks that excluded many women from the post-war aviation industry as pilots, is also visible in the last case, the 2nd Marine Raider Battalion, only in this case it was not women that were excluded but the raider’s maverick leader, Evans Carlson. Carlson wanted to perpetuate his radical ideas of a flattened military hierarchy and the promotion of mundane activities, like encouraging constructive dissent from subordinates, to develop an extraordinarily effective combat unit against the Japanese in the Pacific. But the traditional Marine Corps leadership had other ideas and Carlson’s breaching experiment was soon quashed.

Carlson was not a typical military recruit. He joined and left the American army several times, once serving with ‘Black Jack’ Pershing in operations against the Mexicans in 1916 before training for the 1WW. He had an unusual empathy for the poorest members of society and used that to try and support his own troops in an environment where such ideas were frowned on, at best. He was posted to work closely with both President Hoover and Roosevelt, and spent much of the interwar period in the Marine Corps in China, guarding the International Settlement in what was then Shanghai, before returning there in 1937 where he regularly – and secretly - corresponded with President Roosevelt. As the Chinese Civil War erupted, and the Japanese invaded, Carlson observed the Chinese Communists in their 8th Route Army and witnessed a radically different method of leading troops, wherein leaders sought out the mundane criticism of subordinates, rather than tried to suppress it, and operated in a much more egalitarian form than Carlson had hitherto experienced in the US military. ‘Working Together’ – or Gung Ho – was the Chinese expression that Carlson thought encapsulated this alternative military philosophy. Furthermore, Carlson was impressed by the importance allocated to explaining the purpose of the mission to the regular soldiers – they endured the unendurable because they understood the reasoning behind it – unlike ordinary American soldiers or Marines who were just expected to comply with orders. To Carlson, such ideas were little more than the Christianity that many of his colleagues professed to believe in, but to the Marine establishment such radical ideas were both heresy and little more than communist propaganda, likely to subvert the appropriate – and allegedly essential - hierarchical authority.

When Carlson was disciplined for alerting the west to the links between the Japanese military and American business, he resigned, only to sign back up just after the Pearl Harbour attack. Within a month Carlson contacted Jimmy Roosevelt (the president’s son) and together they drew up plans for a marine unit that would look similar to the British Commandos but be run along the participative principles of the Chinese communist guerrillas. It would have ‘a closer relationship between leaders and fighters than is customary in orthodox military organizations… Leaders must be men of recognized ability who lead by virtue of merit and who share without reservation all material conditions to which the group may be subjected, arrogating to themselves no privileges or perquisites.’ (Quoted in Wukovits, 2009: 30) The Commandant of the Marines, General Holcombe, read the paper that Carlson and Jimmy Roosevelt penned and bristled at many of the principles: it was to have ‘ethical indoctrination, no class distinctions, no military titles, and full sharing of information between “leaders and fighters”’ (Quoted in Schultz, 2014: 33). But despite Holcombe’s reluctance, the president was desperate for a propaganda victory over the Japanese and authorised the raising of two Marine Raider Battalions, the second of which would be based in San Diego, with Carlson as the commanding officer and Jimmy Roosevelt as second in command.

Carlson’s emphasis on recruiting marines with the right attitude meant that every one of the 600 was hand selected and the training regime was extremely tough: they would, for example, hike 50 miles without food or rest. This approach to training and the changes in culture it embodied, were derived from Carlson’s experience with the Chinese Eighth Route Army in 1937 fighting the Japanese when, on one occasion, they marched 58 miles in 24 hours across the roughest terrain he had ever seen and often wearing, at best, sandals. Not one soldier had dropped out en route and Carlson had asked the Chinese soldier next to him whether he was tired? The soldier responded, ‘If a man has only legs, he gets tired.’ (Quoted in Blankfort, 1947: 24) Carlson concluded that the Chinese Eighth Route Army ‘was the most self-restrained, self-disciplined army in the world. What I have seen is a revelation, an experience that I shall never forget.’ (Quoted in Wukovits, 2009: 13)

Since the plan was to use the Raiders as a hit and run unit for attacking behind Japanese lines, and living independently for as long as possible, the training mimicked the putative reality, and the unit was provided with a surfeit of automatic weapons, rather than the standard issue rifles beloved of the traditional Marine leadership. And after each training event the entire group assembled in what became known as Gung Ho meetings.

You can say what you think about everyone (said Carlson) – officers and yours truly included - and about the way we’re doing things. Just so that you’re honest about it – and it’s something that’ll benefit the rest of us… In a democratic country, like America it was contradictory to have an undemocratic armed force. That did not mean there would be no discipline, but it wouldn’t be Prussian in style but based on knowledge and reason – and not blind obedience. It’s yours to reason why. In a democracy, men must think like human beings, not puppets.’ (Quoted in Blankfort, 1947: 20-21).

Carlson also insisted on what he called ‘ethical indoctrination’, to instil in the Raiders the purpose of their action. As he said,

We used to hold discussions. We would tell these men the implications of the war. We would show the connections between the war in Europe and the war in the Pacific. Then we would ask for questions. It was surprising how those privates could point things out that hadn’t occurred to me, and I had studied global war for a long time. I learned as much from them as they did from me… I think they knew what they were fighting for. (Quoted in Schultz, 2014: 48)

Despite all this, their first mission, the Makin (Island) Raid in August 1942, designed to divert attention from the Guadalcanal invasion by the rest of the Marine Corps, was almost a catastrophe for the 215 Raiders involved. The disembarkation did not go to plan, the weather disrupted the night landing, their intelligence about the number of Japanese defenders was flawed, the communications with the submarines failed, and 30 raiders were killed, as were 300 Japanese defenders. But it was the first land-based victory against the Japanese, and it propelled Carlson and the 2nd Raider Battalion into the newspapers and radio stations. Much to the annoyance of the Marine Corps’ establishment.

Two months later, in late October 1942 Carlson’s Raiders undertook their second and most famous operation, the Long Patrol on Guadalcanal. Although the US had prised most of the Japanese off Guadalcanal, they had returned and were threatening the building of Henderson Field, an airfield critical to the American strategy of taking island by island in the Pacific War. The first 300 raiders (followed by 300 more a few weeks later) then spent 31 days behind Japanese lines with the help of indigenous guides, disrupting 1500 Japanese soldiers, and with little support from the outside world. They carried 80 lbs packs of guns and ammunition and almost all had diarrhoea and malaria by the end of the patrol. But so tough was the training, and so dedicated were the raiders, that although 16 were killed and 18 wounded, when the patrol was over – and only when it was over - fully 225 reported ill. In that time, they had destroyed the artillery that was bombarding Henderson Field, and killed around 700 Japanese soldiers in three major battles and 20 skirmishes. In addition, they had destroyed 45,000 rounds of enemy ammunition and 318 weapons. At the roll call on 5 December only 20% of the Raiders were still standing and still able to fight. The ‘kill ratio’ was 29:1 and only one raider was removed with ‘combat fatigue.’ On 31 December the Japanese withdrew their remaining 25,000 troops from Guadalcanal, leaving 30,000 dead.

The American press feted the Carlson’s Rangers as heroes – an extraordinary achievement rooted in the mundane acts of treating subordinating soldiers as equals, as ‘brothers in arms’, training them appropriately, and providing more fire-power than any other military unit. Carlson was their hero. Writing in the New York Picture News, on 2 January 1944, Wesley Price said

Lt. Col. Evans Fordyce Carlson writes books, kills Japs, plays the harmonica and speaks Chinese. He can deliver polished lectures on Asiatic problems, swim an ice-flocked river naked and exist on half a sock of rice a day. He wears five rows of campaign ribbons and decorations, including three navy Crosses. He is a fighter, a philosopher, a man of action and an intellectual.’ (Quoted in Wukovits, 2009: 258)

Carlson was convinced he had made a major advance in military tactics and wrote to Jimmy Roosevelt:

Gung Ho is here to stay – proved in the crucibles of protracted jungle fighting. Even Vandegrift [Commandant of the Marines] is unstinting in his praise and vows he will have his whole division trained this way. The campaign proved conclusively the superiority of our method of discipline based on knowledge, reason, and individual volition. Even our own doubting officers are convinced. (Quoted in Wukovits, 2009: 260)

Carlson was wrong: as far as the Marines’ establishment was concerned the Raiders success had demoralised the rest of the Marine Corps, all of whom regarded themselves as elite warriors, not just the Raiders. Even more threatening was the apparent abandonment of Marine culture: egalitarianism was more of a threat than the Japanese. In fact, Roosevelt wanted more Raider Battalions, but the Marines’ establishment did not. Worse, Carlson’s battalion then seemed to be the only one unable to secure resupplies or better equipment, no matter how many requisitions were sent in or how often Carlson badgered his superiors. Indeed, the new recruits sent to replace those injured and sick appeared to be the rejects from other Marine battalions, so when Captain Peatross checked the records of the 29 replacements he had been sent, everyone had previously been court martialled for some offence or other. Carlson refused to point the finger of blame for the accumulating problems on Marine HQ and just promised his troops that he would be able to sort things out – including better radios and outboard motors that other units had already received - but he could not. As a result, the Raiders began to question whether Gung Ho and all the indoctrination was just a ruse to exploit them more effectively. It went from worse to a catastrophe: on 15 March 1943 Carlson was informed that all four Raider Battalions would be merged into one larger Raider Regiment, under the command of the much more traditional Col. Liversedge, while Carlson would be his Executive Officer, and the 2nd battalion would be run by a traditional Marine martinet, Lt. Col. Shapley. Carlson’s Raiders were on exercise without him when the news was announced, and many were deeply unhappy and condemned the move as the jealous action of others in the marines who had none of their elan, none of their combat experience, none of their publicity, and none of their Gung Ho.

The war correspondent Jim Lucas remembered how upset many of the Raiders were when they heard the news, ‘I sat in their tents and heard them cry like babies.’ (Quoted in Wukovits, 2009: 266) They were right to be upset, Shapley immediately did away with the fire-teams and went back to the traditional ‘under-armed’ squads, and he also re-established the need for Raiders to salute their superiors at all times. Finally, Shapley told them that their tents were not in straight enough lines and that they would have to be moved: ‘I want this camp to look like a Marine camp!’ he barked at them. As one Raider whispered in response: ‘Gung Ho is dead.’ It was. (Blankfort, 1947: 310-15)

The Chief of Staff of the First Marine Division captured the real problem of Carlson’s removal from a front line command position: ‘If this Byzantine manoeuvre was conducted to relieve Carlson of command, it gives a momentary glimpse of the dark side of the upper levels of the Marine Corps showing its inflexibility of thought and a compulsive suspicion of all things new and untried. Evans Carlson was worthy of more generous treatment than he received.’ (Quoted in Wukovits, 2009: 267) Gilbert (2006: 4) suggests, ‘The Raider battalions were nits that the Marine Corps never wanted.’ They were happy with the amphibious element because that had always been in their portfolio, as had being an elite infantry unit, but not the guerrilla element – that was beyond anything their history had covered, and worse, it was tainted by the association between left wing military auxiliaries and guerrilla warfare. Peatross captured the response of Carlson’s Raiders: ‘The initial reaction was sheer disbelief, then came indignant resentment at what was felt to be a betrayal, and finally bitter resignation… the ultimate humiliation would be the downgrading of Carlson’s Raiders to a muscle-bound, comparatively immobile, weapons company with lumbering 75 mm self-propelled guns and 37 mm antitank guns – towed where there were roads.’ (Quoted in Wukovits, 2009: 269)

Carlson was forbidden from taking a combat lead in the invasions of Tarawa (November 1943) and Saipan (June 1944) but took an observer’s role, and he was injured in the latter campaign, and it took months to recover. Carlson was also distraught when President Roosevelt died in April 1945, and he had to return to hospital again for more surgery to his arm. In December 1945, he spoke to 22,000 people in Madison Square Gardens on Atomic Energy and Foreign Policy, and the meeting began with most of the audience on their feet shouting, ‘Gung Ho!’ at him before he spoke of the need to build a world organization that could harmonize human relations. He then lectured at several other venues in support of the Chinese people and even spoke with the cartoonist Bill Mauldin who insisted that of all the military ‘brass’ only Eisenhower and Carlson held the respect of GIs. On 27 May 1946 Carlson was awarded the Legion of Merit for his action in Saipan, but his name was omitted from the recipients of that honour in the official Marine history of the 4th Division. By the summer of 1946 it was clear that his military career was over, and he was retired for wounds and disability in the summer of 1946 with the rank of Brigadier General – an automatic retirement ‘tombstone promotion’ - for those with several battle honours (Schultz, 2014: 228).

He was asked by Jimmy Roosevelt, amongst others, to stand as the Democratic candidate for the 1946 primaries but he was reluctant to engage in the messy compromises that marked out a political life, and suggested that what the country needed was a different kind of political party that was not run by the self-serving racketeers that – in his opinion - then controlled American politics. The solution was a strongly progressive party run with the support of the labour movement – but not the labour bosses. He also began supporting the Committee for a Democratic Far Eastern Policy which was intent on supporting the new China – much to the annoyance of the political right in the USA which configured his support as evidence that he was, indeed, a communist – something which Carlson and Jimmy Roosevelt vehemently denied. Indeed, in October 1946 Carlson wrote to Time Magazine and said,

I am not a member of the Communist Party, nor am I an apostle for Communist causes. I am a free American citizen who has spent over 30 years in the armed services, fighting in defense of American citizens to enjoy life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and the four freedoms… and I am exercising the right, common to all citizens, of expressing my opinions and working for those objectives which I am convinced are beneficial to my countrymen and humanity… I choose now to work for peace. (Quoted in Schultz, 2014: 229)

Nevertheless, a ‘Stop Carlson’ movement developed in California, but his opponents need not have bothered: Carlson was so debilitated that he was moved to a nursing home in Oregon and suffered the last of several heart attacks on 27 May 1947 in Emmanuel Hospital in Portland. At the age of 51 Carlson died and was – eventually – buried in Arlington National Cemetery (Blankfort, 1947: 332–360). Even in death Carlson grabbed the headlines after Jimmy Roosevelt discovered that the Marine Corps refused to pay the $812 for the transfer of Carlson’s body to Arlington. Jimmy Roosevelt sorted the funds for the transfer and for his wife, Peggy Carlson, to travel to Arlington, and eventually Carlson was buried there on 4 June 1947. Few senior Marine leaders turned up, and the funeral received no advanced publicity, though Vandergrift, now the Commandant of the Marine Corps, did at least attend.

Carlson’s wife told a reporter that he had ‘died a disillusioned man.’ (Quoted in Schultz, 2014: 231). As the reporter Helen Snow suggested after the funeral, ‘Evans lived a theatrical life, and he was aware of it. He did things with style, and he had a flair for the dramatic… he knew how handsome and commanding he looked in his blue eyes on parade. He loved it when the movie ‘Gung Ho’ was made in 1943 with Randolph Scott taking his part.’ (Quoted in Wukovits, 2009: 271). As the small group of mourners left the funeral, Major General William Worton, a friend from Carlson’s China days, overheard General Vandergrift say, ‘Thank God, he’s gone.’ (Quoted in Schultz, 2014: 232)

Review and conclusion

The mundane work that makes organizations function, and is often attributed by followers to acts of ‘leadership’ when undertaking by formal leaders, seldom seems to be rewarded by those at the top of the organizational hierarchy when undertaken by followers. Indeed, as the case studies have demonstrated, it is not uncommon for work activities to be downgraded from heroic to mundane just as subordinate groups begin to demonstrate that they too can successfully practice ‘heroics.’ Thus, the extraordinary heroism of the French resistance against the Nazi occupiers is often divided by those in leadership positions as between the heroic men who engaged in violent action – and were rewarded with public acknowledgements and medals – and women whose actions in looking after downed Allied air crew or secreting information about German defences into their knitting (both of which incurred the death penalty if discovered). Similarly, the Black aviators had a double V campaign to consider: they had to face down the US air force’s racism to fly against the Luftwaffe in Europe, and when they got there they were given tasks designed to prevent them from undertaking the extraordinary tasks that would secure the status of heroes. Even when that changed in the last year of the war their professional commitment to their main task – protecting bombers – not shooting down enemy fighters, worked against them and devalued their heroism to the level of the mundane in the eyes of most of the White leadership. A similar process happened with the women aviators of the ATA: each time they took on a task that had hitherto been restricted to ‘heroic’ men – flying fighters, then progressively heavier bombers, the task was devalued to the level of the mundane by the male leadership. In contrast, when Carlson tried to engineer the opposite process with the 2nd Marine Raiders and constructed an extraordinary fighting force on the basis of a radically egalitarian military philosophy, the achievements were devalued by his formal leaders, the battalion was reintegrated into the traditional hierarchical culture of the Marine Corps, and his career was terminated. In each case the subaltern groups were shut out by the closing of ranks above them.

Self-evidently, the restriction of examples and illustrations to the military restricts the utility of this approach, but it would be surprising if contemporary civilian cases proved to be radically different, given the similarity of processes and prejudices involved. Indeed, the failure to recognize the actions of subordinates in ensuring organizational success appears to be a common theme, is often resented by followers, and reproduced through the lens of an uncaring leader (Cowsill and Grint, 2008; Gabriel, 2015).

This does not imply that efforts to undermine or overturn the deleterious consequences of being in subaltern groups are pointless because the establishment always wins in the end. On the contrary, the advances made by these same groups since the 2WW are testament to the ground-breaking work of all those that came before them and struggled against the same prejudices deployed by similar superordinate leadership cadres and cultures. And it also means that recognizing how ‘leadership’ is socially constructed and constrained by the actions of subordinates implies that we are looking at a dialectical process not a binary process. As Collinson (2005) suggested, a dialectical approach to leadership avoids the trap of assuming that progress or resistance must be configured along an either/or duality and instead constructs a more subtle array of possibilities that can shift across space and time. In short, the movement towards equality is not some linear arc of history but rather more like two steps forward, one step back stutter, that is just as likely to be one step forward and two steps back in the absence of effective resistance. Just as the mundane can appear extraordinary to followers, and the extraordinary appear mundane to leaders, exposing the processes by which this happens is the first step to a different reality.