I wouldn’t expect soldiers to be “smack dab in the middle of normal for the size and weight of people”, because the lower extreme is automatically excluded, either by self selection or military standards. I’m sure the height of the average American soldier today is considerably greater than the height of the average American today, even when adjusting for age, gender, race, etc.
Perhaps a more interesting comparison would be between British soldiers from 1815 and 1915. John Keegan’s introduction to his book, The Second World War, deals with the First World War (which of course set up the conditions that bred the Second). The chapter is called “Every Man a Soldier,” and he makes the case that sweeping changes to health care, hygiene, nutrition, food production, transportation, communication, government record-keeping (to allow conscription) and social mores led Europe to produce an extraordinarily large class of relatively fit young men, stronger, healthier, and more socially accustomed to membership in organizations than past generations of miserable, sick peasants too slow to escape the press-gangs. The contrast was marked.
So I’d say that the WWI era may have been the peak of physical readiness for war in the world’s population – we were sicklier and scrawnier before then, and we’re fatter and lazier now, not to mention more cynical and less inclined to die for some social superorganism’s remorseless self-interest.
I took a tour of some of the Spanish castles in San Juan, Puerto Rico and a park ranger mentioned that teen recruits from Spain would arrive in PR and their first assignment was getting used to the tropical climate. They didn’t expect them to jump into the daily grind of base life immediately. Also, we went into an underground tunnel that was used for intelligence purposes and the guide mentioned that the ceiling was so low because of the short stature of the soldiers, though I’m not sure to what extent they were short because of nutrition and health reasons versus primarily being kids. This would have been in the 1700’s to 1800’s.
Perhaps Shirer had spent a lot more time looking at German and English soldiers versus American, because he had been posted in Europe a long time. American soldiers were raised on better nutrition than European ones on average because WW1 and the Depression didn’t hit American food prosperity as hard.
This is fascinating. It does throw a loop into the current idea of the social reformists being the forerunners of the liberal reform movement today.
Not really. It just highlights the US military as a socialist reformer. Something it has always been to some degree.
I think you’re not reading Donnerwetter correctly.
The social reformers were trying to correct the conditions that required young men to work the 12-14 hours a day with poor food and hygiene and care pre-military. That is precisely the ancestor of the liberal reform movement today.
Yes, exactly. But this wasn’t just about young men working too many hours.
Prussia passed a law in 1839 which made it illegal for children younger than 9 years to work in factories. Children 9 to 16 years of age shouldn’t work longer than 10 hours/day and not on Sundays and during the night. You can imagine how conditions were before that.
The Prussian military screened all men of military age and noticed that many had suffered irreversible developmental damage in their childhood. Many also didn’t attend school regularly because they had to work all day, this meant they often couldn’t read and write when they joined the army.
Anyone who has ever been in a fight knows there is nothing more demanding on the body. I have seen guys in very good shape at the verge of collapse in 2 or 3 min of fighting.
Something that really impressed me was that I used to hire mexican day laborers for concrete breaking and all types of work. I have seen guys who were scrawny, skinny, fat and all looking far out of shape swing a sledge at a good pace hour after hour after hour. This is the right kind of toughness for war type fighting. I imagine this kind of toughness was not so unusual 100 years ago.
I think the implication is different: It’s: The military wants healthy cogs for its machine, so make sure those kids aren’t worked to death in the mills; Not: Won’t someone PLEASE think of the children!
This is wrong. There were millions of poor but armies were small in almost all western nations. Between Napoleon and WWI, Europe was almost entirely at peace at home (the Franco-Prussian War being an exception). Standing armies were small, and mostly needed for colonial supremacy. Some did institute universal military service, but except for Russia, terms were short and service not greatly onerous. Prussia was a tiny country in 1839 and stayed small until the unification of Germany.
In short, the military didn’t need to change the entire social structure of their countries to create cogs in the military machine. There wasn’t a military machine in the 19th century.
Prussia seems like a bad example for that argument. Didn’t some contemporaneous French dude call it “an Army with a state”?
In WWII, General Joseph Stilwell marched 114 soldiers, medical personnel, and civilians out of Burma after the Japanese took it. He got them all to India, but he was unimpressed with the fitness of his young soldiers, and even less impressed with the younger officers. Stilwell, though 60 years old, outwalked men 30 and 40 years younger than he; I have heard this attributed to the forced marches of his early Army training (which were no longer done by WWII) and his lifelong habit of taking long walks.
They lost, didn’t they?
The stats for U.S. Civil War soldiers are interesting when you consider two facts;
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At the time, Americans were measurably and visibly larger and healthier than Europeans.
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The U.S. Civil War raised enormous armies, armed forces of a size with few precedents in military history, so they were NOT overly picky in their choice of recruits.
I don’t think there’s a smidgen of doubt today’s soldiers, at least in the West, are vastly superior physical specimens. It’s not even a close call. People today are bigger, stronger, better fed, and better taken care of medically, usually from before their own birth - better prenatual health means stronger kids. WE’ve got more pudgy types now but they don’t join the Army, or if they do they get whipped into shape.
The other thing to bear in mind is that the concept of an army doing physical training is a new one. Soldiers in the U.S. Civil War didn’t do “PT.” They just learned basic field drill.
I don’t have anything useful to add to the original post except, a small hijack please?
It’s an interesting topic and being a reader I know a few of you have mentioned reading, “so and so’s book on this…”, can anyone recommend a good book either on the original post or just how health and nutrition have changed throughout the years in the military? I’m a nerd. 
I’m guessing that the Roman Legionary would probably be the toughest of the bunch, being more accustomed to craptastic conditions than the rest, including draconian punishments like decimation (well not first hand, obviously). Plus, they marched all day with their stuff and built a camp once they were done marching. I can’t help but think it was an extremely physically demanding profession.
However, the modern-day guy would probably be larger, stronger, faster and possibly healthier, having probably exercised deliberately and having eaten a more well rounded and nutritious diet- deficiency diseases are pretty rare in the US and UK these days.
In an athletic competition, I’d think that they’d probably finish most recent to oldest, but in terms of general toughness, it would go the other way.
Based on my observations at the National Army Museum in London, there was a HUGE jump in soldier size sometime in the mid-1800s based on the sizes of the uniforms on display. Prior to say… the Crimean War, the uniforms looked like child uniforms, but starting at about the Crimean War, they were relatively normal sized. Maybe not huge, but normal size- like a men’s small or medium.
That being said, a lot of the uniforms on display in the WWI museum in Kansas City are rather small by today’s standards, and my great-grandfather’s uniform wouldn’t fit me when I was 14 (arms too long, chest too broad), so people have probably become bigger since then.
Why was this?
Even in colonial times you could see this difference. The US, for the most part, has always had an abundance of food. Better nutrition and health allows for a larger average stature.
What’s interesting is now we’re starting to see the average European height get taller that the US’.
I think that is being caused by the large influx of poor Latin Americans into the US over the last few decades, rather than any nutrition gap between the US & Europe. Checking Wikipedia’s rather large chart, younger white and black males in the US average 1.78 m to 1.789 m in height, while the average height recorded for younger men in Germany, France, Italy, the UK, Spain, and must not forget, Poland, ranged from 1.77 m to 1.81 m. Hispanic males in the US averaged 1.706 m, for comparison.
I wonder if anyone has done any height studies of second(or more, so that the parents have access to WIC & food stamps if they are poor) generation Hispanic individual’s heights in the US, compared to the heights of similar age/gender people in their parent’s home country, to tease out how much of their shortness is due to poor nutrition in the old country, and how much is genetics.