John C. McManus: Grunts: Inside the American Infantry Combat Experience, World War II Through Iraq

Forget your smart bombs, your unmanned drones, and all the rest of that snazzy tech. If you want to win a war, you need a good set of grunts.

Technological innovations as far back as the chariot and the longbow were supposed to make foot soldiers obsolete, and yet they remain on the battlefield, taking on the hardest and most dangerous jobs under the most miserable conditions. No machine, however advanced, can complete a task if it’s under-powered and under-supplied, and yet grunts somehow do, time after time, with an unrivaled ability to improvise in the stress of combat.

For McManus, wars are won on the ground – and ground wars are won by the infantry. To illustrate his point, Grunts examines the roles that foot soldiers played in several major battles over the last seventy years, from Marine riflemen on Guam during World War II to Army infantrymen in Baghdad in 2006. From then to now, McManus finds the same lesson: for all the money spent on high-tech weapons research, it’s still the grunts who decide the outcome.

John C. McManus is the author of eight books on military history, including American Courage, American Carnage: The 7th Infantry Chronicles and U.S. Military History for Dummies. He is an associate professor of U.S. Military History at the Missouri University of Science and Technology, where he teaches courses on the Civil War, World War II, Vietnam, Military History, and the American Combat Experience in the 20th Century.