ABSTRACT
Soldiers move together in time, sometimes to the sound of music: attacking in unison at the bugle’s call to charge; stepping smartly forward to the four-square rhythmic cadence of a march. A masculine musical genre emerging alongside combat innovations in sixteenth-century Europe, the march coordinated the movement of armies and gave a musical identity to the armed forces of nation-states. In Hollywood war movies and television series about World War II made before about 1980, pre-existing and newly composed marches accompanied stories about soldiers and gave the combat genre a musical signature. Film scores for movies about the Marines almost invariably used the “Marines’ Hymn”—a smart, universally known march—as primary musical material. David Lean’s epic film The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) turned the “Colonel Bogey March,” defiantly whistled by Allied prisoners, into a pop music hit. 1 On television, the assertive, aggressive march theme for the long-running series Combat! (ABC, 1962–1967) included sound effects of explosions detonating on the beat during its opening titles. Such marches imparted a jaunty confidence and masculine bravado to the men who fought and won World War II.
