- 7 hours ago
When an American squad lost its officer on D-Day, it did not slow down — it moved faster, and the reason says everything about how U.S. infantry actually fought in World War II. From Pointe du Hoc to the hedgerows near Omaha Beach, this military history story follows Leonard Lamel, Walter Ears, and the Rangers and line infantry who kept advancing after command broke down.
The video traces the cliff assault at Pointe du Hoc, the empty German gun casemates, the orchard where hidden artillery was found and destroyed, and the brutal fighting in Normandy’s hedgerow country. It also explains how replacement lieutenants, battlefield commissions, and a system built on shared purpose helped American squads keep moving even when leaders were killed.
This is a World War 2 documentary-style narration about small-unit leadership, infantry tactics, D-Day, Normandy, and the hidden mechanics of combat. It is ideal for viewers searching for WW2 stories, military history analysis, American Rangers, Omaha Beach, Pointe du Hoc, and detailed war narratives.
Created for listeners who enjoy World War II history, military storytelling, D-Day documentaries, and squad-level combat analysis. If you search for WW2 stories, military history narration, or historical war stories with strong battlefield detail, this episode delivers both the human story and the tactical explanation.
The video traces the cliff assault at Pointe du Hoc, the empty German gun casemates, the orchard where hidden artillery was found and destroyed, and the brutal fighting in Normandy’s hedgerow country. It also explains how replacement lieutenants, battlefield commissions, and a system built on shared purpose helped American squads keep moving even when leaders were killed.
This is a World War 2 documentary-style narration about small-unit leadership, infantry tactics, D-Day, Normandy, and the hidden mechanics of combat. It is ideal for viewers searching for WW2 stories, military history analysis, American Rangers, Omaha Beach, Pointe du Hoc, and detailed war narratives.
Created for listeners who enjoy World War II history, military storytelling, D-Day documentaries, and squad-level combat analysis. If you search for WW2 stories, military history narration, or historical war stories with strong battlefield detail, this episode delivers both the human story and the tactical explanation.
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LearningTranscript
00:00June 6th, 1944. Eight minutes past seven in the morning.
00:05A strip of shingle, maybe 30 feet wide, at the base of a 100-foot cliff on the Normandy coast,
00:10a place on the map called Pointe du Arc. The ramp of a British landing craft goes down into the
00:16surf.
00:17The first man off is a 24-year-old first sergeant from Toms River, New Jersey,
00:22named Leonard Lomel, and he is carrying a box of rope and a hand-projector rocket.
00:27He gets about one step. A machine gun on the clifftop finds him and puts a bullet through his
00:33right side. Through what little fat he had, is how he described it later, with the flatness of a man
00:39who had decided long ago not to make it sound dramatic. He does not fall. He does not stop.
00:46He carries the rope up the beach, because the rope is the only way anybody is leaving this beach alive.
00:53Understand what he is looking up at. A vertical cliff, wet from the night's rain,
00:59chewed by naval shellfire, with Germans at the top rolling grenades over the lip.
01:04The grapnel ropes that were fired up there are soaked through and heavy as chain.
01:09Lomel will climb one of them, hand over hand, in a wool uniform loaded with equipment,
01:15with a hole in his side.
01:16He said afterward that the hardest part was not the enemy. It was the last few feet,
01:21when his arms were finished, and there was nothing to do but keep pulling.
01:26Now here is the thing you cannot see in that picture, and it matters more than anything else
01:31in this story. Somewhere behind him out in the channel, Dog Company's commanding officer
01:37is not coming. Captain Harold Slater's landing craft had taken the sea badly on the run-in,
01:43and his men had spent the crossing bailing the channel out of the boat with their helmets.
01:48He would not reach the cliff. Which meant that when Leonard Lomel dragged himself over the top of
01:54Pointe du Hoc, bleeding, out of breath, the senior man present for his company was a sergeant.
02:02If this is the kind of history you want more of, take one second and hit like,
02:07and subscribe if you haven't. It helps the stories of the American soldiers who did this
02:12reach the people who still care about them. So let us line up the ledger on that morning,
02:17because it reads like a list of reasons to fail.
02:21The rangers were late. A navigation error by the British coxswains had sent the boats toward
02:27the wrong headland, and correcting it cost more than half an hour. Half an hour,
02:32on a beach that was supposed to be taken in minutes.
02:36The preliminary bombardment had lifted long ago, which meant the Germans on top had been given
02:4135 free minutes to come out of their holes and get ready.
02:46Radios were drowned or smashed. Companies that had trained for a year to land in specific places,
02:52on specific flanks, came ashore mixed together in one bleeding clump under the point.
02:59The battalion commander, Lt. Col. James Rutter, ended up pinned in a shell crater near the cliff edge,
03:05running what was left of a command post, and he would be wounded before the day was out.
03:11Take all of that together, and write down what you would expect.
03:15A force that lost its timetable, lost its radios, lost its unit boundaries,
03:21and in Dog Company's case, lost its commander before the first shot.
03:26That force should stall. It should go to ground at the top of the cliff,
03:31and wait for somebody with bars on his collar to tell it what happens next.
03:36That is what stalling looks like, and armies have done it in every war there has ever been.
03:42Now here is what actually happened, and I want you to hold on to the clock,
03:46because the clock is the whole argument.
03:48Roughly one hour after those wet ropes went up,
03:52small groups of rangers were not on the clifftop at all.
03:55They were a mile inland, standing on the paved coastal highway between Groncon and Vierville,
04:01the road the Germans would have to use to counterattack the beaches.
04:05By around a quarter past eight, about 35 men from Dog and Easy Companies were sitting on that road.
04:12Fifteen minutes later, a dozen more from Fox Company walked in and joined them.
04:17Nobody had ordered them there in the moment.
04:20Nobody could have.
04:21There was no working radio net, no chain of officers to pass a decision down,
04:26and in some cases, no officer within several hundred yards.
04:30They were early.
04:32Late off the boats, and early to the objective.
04:36I want to be precise about the claim I am making, because this audience deserves precision.
04:42I am not telling you these men were better than the Germans on the other side of that hedgerow.
04:47I am not telling you they were braver.
04:49However, I am telling you something much stranger, and much harder to explain.
04:55That on the morning of June 6th, an American unit that had just lost its officer moved faster than the
05:01plan said it could.
05:03And that this was not a one-time accident on one cliff in Normandy.
05:07It happened again, in a hedgerow near a village called Goville.
05:13It happened again, on a bare hill in the Hurtgen Forest, in December.
05:18It happened often enough that it stopped being luck, and started being a property of the American army.
05:25There is an easy answer available here, and I want to put it on the table now so we can
05:30take it apart later.
05:32The easy answer is, sergeants were trained to step up.
05:37That is true.
05:38It is also not the explanation.
05:41And the reason it is not the explanation is that the Germans trained their men for exactly the same thing,
05:48believed in it deeply, and said so for the rest of their lives.
05:53So the question is real.
05:55Why did losing the man in charge speed this squad up?
06:01The first clue was waiting for Lomel at the top of the cliff.
06:05He crawled forward to the gun positions the entire operation had been built around.
06:09Six concrete casemates, holding six enormous French-built 155mm guns.
06:16Guns that could drop shells onto both American landing beaches.
06:21Every position was empty.
06:23The guns were gone.
06:24Six casemates.
06:26Six empty concrete rooms, with the sea wind moving through them.
06:32You need to understand what that emptiness did to the men standing in it.
06:35For months, these Rangers had trained against a rubber-and-plaster scale model of this headland,
06:41built from aerial photographs, accurate down to the individual gun positions.
06:46They had crawled over that model until they could walk the point blindfolded.
06:50Every man in the battalion could have told you which casemate held which gun and what direction it faced.
06:571,100 men in three Ranger companies and their supporting units had been committed to this cliff
07:04for one reason, and one reason only.
07:07To kill those six guns before they could put shells onto Utah Beach and Omaha Beach,
07:14where tens of thousands of Americans were coming ashore at that exact moment.
07:19And the guns were not there.
07:22In two of the positions, there were telephone poles.
07:25Wooden poles, laid where the barrels should have been, to fool the reconnaissance cameras.
07:30Now put yourself on that clifftop.
07:32You are bleeding.
07:34Two-thirds of the men you trained with are dead, wounded, or scattered across a quarter mile of shell holes.
07:40Your company commander is somewhere out in the channel.
07:43Your battalion commander is in a crater by the cliff edge with no radio net worth the name.
07:47And the entire purpose of your existence this morning has just evaporated in front of you.
07:54There is a correct answer here, according to every peacetime manual ever written.
07:59The correct answer is, consolidate, establish security, and report to higher headquarters that the objective is not present.
08:07Wait for instructions.
08:09That is not cowardice.
08:11That is procedure, and procedure exists for good reasons.
08:15An army where every sergeant invents his own war is an army that shoots itself in the back.
08:21Nobody on that clifftop did the correct thing.
08:24Instead, in ones and twos, and small mixed clots of men, they went inland.
08:29Not because someone told them to in that moment.
08:32There was no one to tell them, and nothing to tell them with.
08:35They went because every one of them had been told, weeks earlier, what the point of the whole operation was.
08:42Those guns must not fire on the beaches, and the road behind the point must be cut so the Germans
08:48cannot use it.
08:50The objective had disappeared.
08:52The purpose had not.
08:55I want you to hold on to that distinction, because it is going to come back three times before we
09:00are finished,
09:00and it is the hinge this entire story turns on.
09:04An order tells a man what to do.
09:07A purpose tells him what the doing is for.
09:10The first one dies with the man who was supposed to give it.
09:14The second one does not.
09:16By around a quarter past eight in the morning, there were roughly thirty-five rangers sitting astride the paved highway
09:22between Grand Camp and Vierville,
09:25a mile inland from the sea.
09:27Look closely at who they were.
09:29They came from Dog Company and Easy Company.
09:32Fifteen minutes later, a dozen men from Fox Company came up the same fields and joined them.
09:38Three companies.
09:39Different landing craft, different assignments, different objectives on the plan,
09:44mixed together into a roadblock that existed on no piece of paper anywhere.
09:49Nobody assembled that force.
09:51It assembled itself.
09:54Meanwhile, a mile away and completely unaware of any of it,
09:58the men who had moved those guns were doing their jobs properly.
10:02This is worth saying plainly, because the story is worthless if the enemy is a cartoon.
10:07The German artillerymen at Point Duoc were professionals.
10:11Their battery had been hammered by Allied bombers through April and May.
10:15The point had been bombed so heavily the ground looked lunar.
10:18And their response was exactly what a competent gunner does.
10:23They pulled the guns out of the casemates that everyone could see and took them inland, into cover, where no
10:29photograph would find them.
10:31They left decoys behind.
10:33And they did not abandon the weapons.
10:36They set them up in a hedged orchard, in battery, with camouflage over them and stacks of ammunition alongside,
10:44laid and ready to fire.
10:45Ready to fire in the direction of Utah Beach.
10:50Sit with that for a moment.
10:52At the hour when Lomel was hauling himself over the cliff edge,
10:56five 155mm guns were sitting a mile inland,
11:00hidden, loaded, and aimed at American soldiers waiting ashore.
11:06A single one of those guns could throw a 95-pound shell more than 11 miles.
11:12Five of them, firing onto a beach packed with landing craft and men in the open,
11:17would not have been a setback.
11:19It would have been a massacre, with a name we would all still know.
11:24The Germans had done everything right.
11:26They had beaten the intelligence, beaten the bombers, beaten the plan.
11:31The only thing they had not accounted for was who would come looking.
11:35Sometime that morning, 1st Sergeant Leonard Lomel and Staff Sergeant Jack Kuhn were standing on that coastal road.
11:42And Kuhn later put their position in one sentence that tells you everything about how far the ordinary machinery of
11:49command had broken down.
11:51At that moment, he said, the two of them, standing in the road, were the farthest rangers into enemy territory.
11:59Two sergeants.
12:01The deepest point of the American advance in that sector.
12:04No officer with them.
12:06No radio to anyone who mattered.
12:09No orders newer than the ones they had memorized in England.
12:13And in the dirt of a sunken farm lane running south off the highway, they found marks.
12:19Deep ruts, pressed into soft ground.
12:22Far too wide and far too heavy for a farm cart.
12:26Neither man had been told to follow them.
12:28They followed them anyway, down a lane with hedgerows higher than a man on both sides,
12:33where two men could be killed by one German with a rifle,
12:36and nobody would ever find out how it happened.
12:40About 250 yards in, Lomel stopped walking.
12:44He put a hand out and held Kuhn where he stood.
12:47Through the trees ahead of them was the thing 1,100 Americans had been thrown at that cliff to destroy.
12:53And Lomel was carrying almost nothing that could kill it.
12:57Five guns.
12:58In a hedged orchard, under camouflage, with piles of shells stacked beside them.
13:04Lomel's own words for that moment were not eloquent, and that is exactly why they have lasted.
13:10God, here they are, he said.
13:12They were in an orchard, camouflaged in among the trees.
13:16To Kuhn, standing behind him, he said it more plainly still.
13:20Jack, here they are.
13:22We've found them.
13:23What they had between them was a submachine gun, a pistol, and a few thermite grenades.
13:29Thermite is not an explosive.
13:31It is a canister that burns at a temperature that turns steel to slag.
13:36And if you put one in the right place on a gun carriage, it welds the mechanism into a single,
13:40dead lump of metal.
13:43Kuhn took a position where he could watch the far end of the orchard and cover his sergeant.
13:47And Lomel walked into a battery of enemy artillery, alone, in daylight.
13:53He dropped a thermite grenade into the traversing mechanism of the first gun.
13:58Then the second.
13:59Then, because he had run out of grenades and still had three guns left, he took off his field jacket,
14:05wrapped it around his Thompson to muffle the noise, and went down the line, smashing the gun sights with the
14:10weapon like a club.
14:12Think about the arithmetic of that.
14:15Without a sight, a 155-millimeter gun can still fire.
14:20What it cannot do is hit anything it cannot see.
14:23In a few minutes, with a jacket and a rifle butt, one man turned five pieces of heavy artillery
14:29from a threat against two invasion beaches into five very large objects sitting in a French orchard.
14:37He was not finished.
14:39He went back toward the road to collect more thermite from the other rangers.
14:43And when he returned to the orchard, a patrol from Easy Company had already come across the same position
14:48and completed the job.
14:50Two separate groups of Americans, moving independently, without contact with each other,
14:56had converged on the same target and finished it between them.
15:00Word went back to the cliff.
15:02Eventually, it reached the fleet offshore.
15:04The guns had been found and destroyed.
15:07The battalion's report that day also asked for ammunition and reinforcements,
15:11and stated that casualties were heavy.
15:13Both halves of that message were true, and the second half was about to get much worse.
15:19But mark the time.
15:20The largest amphibious operation in human history had assigned this cliff to 1,100 men because of six guns.
15:29By the middle of the morning of D-Day, those guns were dead.
15:32And the men who killed them were a first sergeant, a staff sergeant, and a patrol from another company,
15:38operating without a single officer present, without radio contact with anyone above them,
15:43and without a written order issued that day.
15:47Now hold on to that, because the price came due within hours.
15:51The Germans in that sector were not finished, and they were good.
15:55That night and through the following day, they came at the ranger perimeter again and again,
16:00in the dark, in the hedgerows, at close range.
16:04Rudder was wounded.
16:05The perimeter fragmented in the small knots of men holding pieces of ground they could not see beyond,
16:11out of touch with each other, running low on ammunition,
16:14in some cases fighting with captured German weapons because their own were empty.
16:20Nobody was maneuvering that defense from a headquarters.
16:23It was held by whoever was alive and awake at each point on the line.
16:29225 rangers had come to Pointe du Hac.
16:32When relief finally reached them around noon on June 8th,
16:35about 90 were still able to stand and fight.
16:3860% of the force was gone in two days.
16:42And the ground was still American.
16:45So there is the story.
16:47And here is where most videos would end it,
16:50with a swell of music and a line about heroes.
16:53I am not going to do that,
16:55because you would be right to push back,
16:57and I would rather have the argument than the applause.
17:00Here is the objection,
17:01and it is a good one.
17:03These were rangers.
17:05Volunteers.
17:06Every one of them.
17:07Men who had put their hands up for extra risk
17:10and been screened out if they could not take it.
17:13They had been through commando training with the British at Ochnacary in Scotland.
17:17They had rehearsed this specific cliff against a scale model for months.
17:23Their whole reason for existing was to operate in small groups,
17:27cut off,
17:28with no support,
17:29and no supervision.
17:31If any American unit in the world was going to function without its officers,
17:36it was that one.
17:37Every word of that is true.
17:39If the story stopped at Pointe du Hac,
17:42it would prove nothing about the American army.
17:44It would prove something about 400 hand-picked men.
17:49So the honest question is not whether rangers could fight without officers.
17:53It is whether ordinary American infantry could.
17:57Drafted men.
17:58Average men.
18:00The clerks and farm boys and mechanics
18:02who filled up the rifle companies of a hundred divisions
18:05and never volunteered for anything more exotic than the United States Army.
18:10That question has an answer.
18:12It was given three days later,
18:1420-odd miles inland from the same beaches,
18:17in country the rangers never touched,
18:19the hedgerow farmland behind Omaha,
18:21where the fields were bordered by earth banks eight feet high,
18:25and a man could be killed by an enemy he never saw
18:28at a distance of 40 yards.
18:30The unit was Company L,
18:323rd Battalion, 18th Infantry Regiment,
18:351st Infantry Division,
18:37Line Infantry.
18:39No selection,
18:40no commando school,
18:41no rubber model.
18:43And the squad leader who was about to walk into that hedgerow
18:46had a private reason to be on that ground
18:48that nobody in his platoon fully understood.
18:51Because three days earlier,
18:53on the beach behind him,
18:54something had happened to his family
18:56that he had not yet been told about.
18:58Walter Ehlers was 23,
19:00from Junction City, Kansas,
19:02a farm family,
19:04and by June of 1944,
19:06he had already fought in North Africa and Sicily.
19:10He had done all of it alongside his older brother, Roland.
19:14The two of them had enlisted together,
19:16trained together,
19:18gone overseas together,
19:19and both ended up as sergeants
19:21leading rifle squads in the same regiment.
19:24Before the invasion,
19:26the army separated them into different companies
19:28so that one shell
19:30could not take both Ehlers' boys at once.
19:33On June 6th,
19:35a German shell hit Roland's landing craft
19:37as it touched the sand at Omaha.
19:40Roland was killed,
19:42and so was every man in his squad.
19:45Walter did not know.
19:47He came off the same beach that morning,
19:50took his squad up the bluff,
19:52and kept going inland with no idea
19:54that the brother he had spent three years
19:57and two continents with
19:58was already dead behind him.
20:02He would carry on for days,
20:04believing Roland was somewhere in the same fields.
20:08Now, the ground.
20:10Behind Omaha,
20:11the Normandy farmland is divided into small fields,
20:14and the boundary between fields is not a fence.
20:17It is a bank of packed earth,
20:19several feet high,
20:21grown through with roots
20:22and topped with hedge,
20:24built up over centuries
20:25until it functions as a ready-made fortification.
20:28From inside a hedgerow,
20:30a German machine gun crew
20:31can see the whole field in front of them.
20:34From out in that field,
20:36an American squad can see nothing at all.
20:39Men died in this country
20:40at ranges of 40 and 50 yards
20:42from enemies they never laid eyes on.
20:45June 9th, 1944,
20:48near a village called Gauville,
20:50Company L, 3rd Battalion, 18th Infantry.
20:54Ehlers' squad went forward into that country
20:57and hit exactly what the country
20:58was designed to produce,
21:00a mutually supporting nest of German positions,
21:03machine guns and a mortar section
21:05dug into the banks.
21:08What Ehlers did over the next two days
21:10is in the citation,
21:11and the citation is dry,
21:12so let me give you the shape of it.
21:14He went at the positions himself.
21:17He got in among them and killed the crews.
21:20He led his squad through a system of German defenses
21:22that should have stopped a company,
21:24and he did it by moving first
21:26and letting the squad come in behind him.
21:30Then, on the second day,
21:31the situation reversed.
21:33The platoon was caught in heavy fire,
21:35and the order came to pull back.
21:37And here is the moment I want you to look at hardest.
21:41The order was to withdraw.
21:44Ehlers was a staff sergeant.
21:46What he did was send his squad out
21:49and stay behind alone,
21:51drawing the German fire onto himself
21:53so the fire would not be on them
21:55while they crossed the open.
21:57He was shot.
21:59He kept firing.
22:01Then he saw one of his riflemen down
22:03and wounded in the open,
22:05went back out for him,
22:07and carried him to cover
22:08with a bullet already in his own side.
22:11He then went back a second time,
22:13not for a man,
22:15for his rifle,
22:16which he had had to leave behind,
22:18because a squad leader in a hedgerow
22:20without a weapon
22:21is a passenger.
22:24Nobody outranking him
22:25was making those decisions.
22:27There was no lieutenant
22:28standing behind him
22:29weighing whether it was worth
22:31a sergeant's life
22:31to recover a wounded private.
22:34Ehlers weighed it himself,
22:36in about the time it takes you
22:37to read this sentence,
22:38and then executed it.
22:40Twice.
22:42That is line infantry.
22:44Drafted, average,
22:46ordinary American infantry
22:47doing in a hedgerow
22:49exactly what the hand-picked rangers
22:51had done on the cliff.
22:53Which means the ranger explanation is dead,
22:55and we need a better one.
22:58The Germans, meanwhile,
22:59had already worked out
23:00where the weak point
23:01in an enemy unit was,
23:02and they had a professional program
23:04for attacking it.
23:06German snipers were trained
23:08to shoot leaders.
23:09Not randomly,
23:11specifically.
23:12And they were taught
23:13how to find them,
23:14because in an infantry platoon,
23:16the man in charge
23:17advertises himself
23:18whether he wants to or not.
23:20He carries binoculars.
23:22He carries a map case.
23:24He has a different weapon.
23:25He is the one
23:26other men look at
23:27before they move.
23:28The one who turns and gestures.
23:30The one a runner goes to.
23:33A trained observer
23:34lying in a hedgerow
23:35300 yards away
23:37does not need to see
23:38a rank insignia
23:39to identify the leader
23:40of an American platoon.
23:42He only has to watch
23:43the platoon for 90 seconds
23:45and see which man
23:46everybody else is watching.
23:48Take out that man,
23:50the theory goes,
23:51and the unit stops.
23:53Do it consistently,
23:54and the enemy army
23:55bleeds to death
23:56from the neck up.
23:58The American answer
23:59to this was quiet,
24:01unglamorous,
24:02and tells you a great deal.
24:04Officers at the front
24:05were told to take
24:06the insignia
24:07off their collars
24:08and helmets.
24:09Men were told
24:10to stop saluting
24:11anywhere within sight
24:12of the enemy.
24:14Lieutenants gave up
24:14carbines for the same rifle
24:16everybody else carried,
24:17put the binoculars away
24:18inside a jacket,
24:20and did their best
24:21to look like
24:21one more filthy soldier
24:23in a line
24:24of filthy soldiers.
24:26It was not
24:27universally popular.
24:28There were commanders
24:29who found
24:30the whole business
24:31shameful.
24:32One of them
24:33insisted his officers
24:34wear their rank openly,
24:36on the grounds that,
24:37if they were to die,
24:38they must die
24:39as officers.
24:41And it did not work.
24:43Not nearly well enough.
24:45Here is the number,
24:46and I want you to hear
24:47both halves of it.
24:49An American
24:50or British rifleman
24:51who went into France
24:52in June of 1944
24:54faced roughly
24:55a 60% chance
24:57of being killed
24:58or wounded
24:58before the campaign ended.
25:01For the officers
25:02leading them,
25:02the figure was closer
25:04to 70.
25:057 in 10.
25:07The Germans were not
25:08wrong about the target,
25:09and they were not
25:10bad at hitting it.
25:12They killed
25:13American platoon leaders
25:14in enormous numbers,
25:15month after month,
25:17exactly as their doctrine
25:18said they should.
25:20What they got wrong
25:21was what would happen next.
25:23And to understand why,
25:25you have to look at
25:25who the American army
25:27was actually sending forward
25:28to replace
25:29those dead lieutenants
25:30by the autumn of 1944.
25:32Because very often,
25:34he was the newest man
25:35in the platoon.
25:36Before we go into the machine,
25:38close the loop we left open.
25:40Sometime after the fighting
25:41around Gauville,
25:43Walter Ehlers
25:43finally got an answer
25:44to the question
25:45he had been carrying
25:46since the beach.
25:48His brother Roland
25:49was dead,
25:50killed on June 6th,
25:52before he ever got off
25:53the landing craft,
25:54along with every man
25:55in his squad.
25:57Walter had been leading
25:58his own squad
25:59through hedgerows
26:00for three days,
26:01with a bullet hole
26:02in his side
26:02and a brother
26:03who no longer existed.
26:05He was awarded
26:06the Medal of Honor
26:07that December
26:08in Paris.
26:10Roland has a marker
26:11in the American cemetery
26:12above Omaha Beach,
26:14on the ground
26:14his brother crossed
26:16without him.
26:17Remember Walter Ehlers,
26:19because he comes back
26:20in this story
26:21in a way
26:22you will not expect.
26:23And when he does,
26:25he will not be
26:25a sergeant anymore.
26:28Now,
26:29the machine.
26:30By the summer of 1944,
26:33the American army
26:34in Europe
26:34was consuming infantry
26:35faster than anyone
26:37had planned for,
26:38and it had built a system
26:39to feed the furnace.
26:40The system was called
26:42individual replacement,
26:43and its logic
26:44was industrial.
26:46Rather than pulling
26:47a shattered unit
26:48out of the line
26:49to rebuild it,
26:50you kept the unit
26:51in the line
26:52and pushed single men
26:53into it,
26:54one at a time,
26:55to fill the holes.
26:56Those men came forward
26:58through a chain
26:59of holding camps
27:00the soldiers called
27:01REPL DEPLs,
27:02replacement depots.
27:04And what happened
27:05to a man inside
27:06that chain was,
27:08to put it bluntly,
27:09the destruction
27:09of everything
27:10that makes a soldier
27:11useful,
27:12except his body.
27:14He was moved
27:15as a number.
27:16He was separated
27:18from everyone
27:18he had trained with.
27:20He spent weeks
27:21or months
27:22as a transient
27:23in tents and warehouses
27:24doing fatigue details,
27:26with his training
27:27decaying by the day.
27:29The depots
27:30cut instruction
27:30to move men faster,
27:32and men sometimes
27:33arrived at the front
27:34without weapons.
27:35Then,
27:36one night,
27:36his serial number
27:37was called,
27:38and he was put
27:39on a truck
27:39and delivered in the dark
27:40to a rifle company
27:41he had never heard of,
27:43full of men
27:44who had never heard of him,
27:45and told
27:46to get in a hole.
27:48He knew nobody.
27:50Nobody knew him.
27:52Nobody had any reason yet
27:54to risk anything for him,
27:55and he was often
27:56in combat
27:57within hours.
27:58Now do that
27:59to an officer.
28:01The lieutenants
28:02came through
28:02their own version
28:03of the same pipeline.
28:05Officer Candidate School
28:06turned a qualified
28:07enlisted man
28:08or a college graduate
28:09into a second lieutenant
28:10in roughly 90 days,
28:12which is where
28:13the nickname came from,
28:1590-day wonders.
28:17It was not affectionate.
28:19The complaint
28:20from the sergeants
28:21was consistent,
28:21and it was not
28:22about courage.
28:24The new lieutenants
28:25arrived without
28:25the tactical competence
28:26to lead men in a fight,
28:28because 90 days
28:29is 90 days.
28:31So picture the arithmetic
28:33inside one American
28:34rifle platoon
28:35in the autumn of 1944.
28:38The platoon sergeant
28:39has been in combat
28:39since Normandy.
28:41The squad leaders
28:41have been fighting
28:42through hedgerow country
28:43for three months
28:44and have learned things
28:45that are not in any manual.
28:46How a German machine gun
28:48sounds when it is firing
28:49on a fixed line.
28:51Which way to go
28:51through a hedge.
28:53How long you have
28:54after the first
28:54mortar round lands.
28:56And the man
28:57appointed to command
28:58all of that
28:58walked in from a truck
29:00nine days ago
29:01and has never been shelled.
29:03By Okinawa,
29:05the situation had reached
29:06its logical end point.
29:08Replacement lieutenants
29:09were arriving
29:09and being killed
29:10with such regularity
29:12that the men in the line
29:13rarely learned anything
29:14about them beyond a name
29:15and often saw
29:16a given officer
29:17on his feet
29:18only once or twice
29:19before he was gone.
29:21Some soldiers concluded
29:22that the job itself
29:23had been made obsolete
29:24by modern war.
29:25That a second lieutenant
29:27in a rifle company
29:28was simply a man
29:28with a very short life
29:30and no time to matter.
29:31I want to stop here
29:32and be extremely careful
29:34because this is the part
29:36where a lazy version
29:37of this story
29:37turns into an insult
29:39and the men involved
29:40do not deserve it.
29:42Those lieutenants
29:43were not the problem.
29:45Read that casualty number again.
29:47Seven in ten.
29:49That number exists
29:50precisely because of
29:52what those young officers did
29:53with the impossible position
29:55they were handed.
29:56A new lieutenant arrives
29:58at a platoon of strangers
29:59who have every reason
30:01to doubt him.
30:01He cannot borrow authority
30:04he has not earned.
30:05There is exactly one currency
30:07available to him
30:08and it is bought
30:09in one place.
30:11He goes first.
30:13He is the one
30:14out in front of the hedge,
30:15the one standing up to see,
30:17the one walking down the road
30:19to find out
30:20what is around the corner.
30:21That is why the German snipers
30:23found him so easily.
30:25He was doing the only thing
30:26that could make his men
30:27follow him.
30:28And it was the same thing
30:30that got him killed.
30:32They were 22 years old,
30:33most of them.
30:34They died by incredibility
30:36they never got to spend.
30:38But now hold the mechanism
30:40up to the light
30:40because it explains
30:41something ugly and true.
30:43In a platoon like that,
30:45the officer was very often
30:46not the most competent
30:47tactician present.
30:49He was the newest man
30:50in the room.
30:51And when he went down,
30:52the platoon did not lose
30:54its brain.
30:54It lost a layer.
30:56And the men who actually
30:57knew that ground
30:58took over inside of seconds.
31:01Because they had been
31:01carrying the real weight
31:03all along.
31:04That is a piece of our answer.
31:06It is not the answer.
31:08And I want to tell you
31:09exactly why not.
31:10Because this is where
31:11most explanations
31:12of the American army
31:13go wrong.
31:14An army that fights better
31:16when its leaders die
31:17is not an army.
31:18It is a coincidence.
31:20And if green officers
31:21were the whole story,
31:23American infantry performance
31:24should have gotten
31:25steadily worse
31:26through 1944 and 45
31:28as the veterans were used up
31:30and the pipeline got thinner.
31:32It did not get worse.
31:33It got harder to fight.
31:35So something else
31:36was running underneath.
31:37And the strangest evidence
31:39for what it was
31:40does not come from
31:41an American source at all.
31:4235 years after the war ended,
31:44two German generals
31:45sat down in a room
31:47with American officers
31:48and explained in detail
31:50what they believed
31:51had made the German soldier
31:52the best in the world.
31:53They described
31:55almost exactly the thing
31:56you have been watching
31:57Americans do
31:58for the last 30 minutes.
31:59They believed it was theirs.
32:01The year was 1979.
32:04In a room with
32:05American officers,
32:06among them a fighter pilot
32:07and theorist
32:08named John Boyd,
32:09sat two old men
32:11who had commanded
32:12German formations
32:13in the Second World War,
32:15Hermann Balk
32:16and Friedrich von Melenten.
32:18They were asked
32:19what had made the German army
32:21fight the way it fought.
32:22Their answer was not equipment.
32:24It was not tactics.
32:26What they identified
32:28as the key to German performance
32:29was the individuality
32:31of the German fighting man,
32:33his freedom to take initiative,
32:35and the system
32:37that produced that freedom.
32:39Sit with that for a second
32:41because it should bother you.
32:43Everything you have watched
32:45in this story so far,
32:46the sergeant who went inland
32:48without orders,
32:49the squad leader
32:50who decided alone
32:51that a wounded man
32:52was worth going back for,
32:53the German generals
32:55were claiming
32:56as the German secret.
32:58And they were not lying.
32:59And they were not deluded.
33:02German training genuinely did
33:04push independent decision-making
33:06down to the individual soldier.
33:08It is one of the few things
33:09almost every serious historian
33:11of that army agrees on.
33:13So the comfortable version
33:15of this story is now dead.
33:17You cannot say
33:18the Americans were flexible
33:19and the Germans were robots.
33:21Both armies told their men
33:23to act without orders.
33:24Both meant it.
33:26Which means the question
33:28has to change.
33:29And the new version
33:30is much more interesting.
33:32The question is not
33:33which army believed
33:35in initiative.
33:36Both did.
33:37The question is
33:38when the man in charge
33:40went down,
33:41what physically happened
33:43to the 10 or 12 men
33:44standing around him?
33:46Not what they were told to do,
33:48what they were mechanically
33:50able to do.
33:52And there,
33:53the two armies
33:54are not the same at all.
33:56Look at how
33:57a German infantry squad
33:58was built.
33:59It was not a group of riflemen
34:01with a machine gun attached.
34:02It was a machine gun
34:04with riflemen attached.
34:05The MG42
34:06was the squad.
34:08A belt-fed weapon
34:09firing something
34:10on the order of 1,200 rounds a minute.
34:12A rate so fast
34:14that Americans
34:14could not hear
34:15individual shots.
34:16Only a tearing noise.
34:19Everything the squad did
34:20was in service of that gun.
34:22The riflemen carried
34:24its ammunition,
34:25protected its flanks,
34:26and moved to positions
34:27where it could be brought
34:28into action.
34:30And in the German column,
34:31the squad leader
34:32walked at the front,
34:33with the gun
34:34right behind him.
34:35The most valuable weapon
34:37and the decision-maker
34:38in the same few square yards
34:40of ground.
34:41That concentration
34:43was not stupidity.
34:44It was a deliberate,
34:45effective design
34:46that killed
34:47a very large number
34:48of Allied soldiers.
34:50But look at what it does
34:52to the mathematics of loss.
34:54When you concentrate output
34:55into two or three men,
34:57you have also concentrated
34:58your vulnerability
34:59into two or three men.
35:01The squad can still fight
35:03if the leader falls.
35:04German soldiers were trained
35:06for exactly that,
35:07and they did it.
35:08What it cannot do
35:09is replace its own firepower,
35:11because eight riflemen
35:13with bolt-action Mausers
35:14do not add up
35:16to an MG42,
35:17and no amount of initiative
35:19changes that.
35:21And in 1944,
35:22the trend went further,
35:24not back.
35:25As the new Volksgrenadier
35:27formations were raised
35:28to replace divisions
35:29destroyed in the East
35:30and in France,
35:32the assault squads
35:33were built even tighter.
35:34An NCO and seven men
35:37carrying assault rifles,
35:38with the machine gun
35:39element separate.
35:41More firepower per man
35:43in fewer men,
35:44held by specialists,
35:46in a shrinking army
35:47that was running short
35:48of the experienced people
35:50to be those specialists.
35:52The American rifle squad
35:54was the opposite shape,
35:5512 men.
35:56And here is the part
35:58that matters,
35:59which has nothing to do
36:00with courage or doctrine.
36:02Eleven of those 12
36:04carried the same weapon,
36:05and it was semi-automatic.
36:08Not a support weapon
36:09operated by a trained crew.
36:12The same rifle
36:13in the hands of the sergeant,
36:15the veteran,
36:16the man who arrived
36:17on a truck last Tuesday.
36:18Which brings us back
36:19to the orchard.
36:20Go back to that hedged field
36:22a mile inland
36:23from Pointe du Hoc,
36:24and look at what
36:25Lomel and Kuhn actually did.
36:28One man moved
36:29into the gun position
36:30and worked.
36:32The other took a position
36:33where he could see
36:34and covered him.
36:36Then,
36:37when they needed
36:38more thermite,
36:39they walked back
36:40and other rangers
36:41took the job forward.
36:43Now ask the question
36:44that reveals
36:45the whole design.
36:47Which of those two men
36:48had to be Lomel?
36:51Neither.
36:52Kuhn could have gone
36:53into the guns
36:54and Lomel could have covered.
36:56Either man
36:57could do either job
36:58because they carried
36:59the same weapon
37:00and had been taught
37:01the same trade.
37:03There was no
37:04irreplaceable specialist
37:05in that orchard.
37:07There was no piece
37:08of equipment
37:08that only one of them
37:10knew how to run.
37:11That is why
37:12the loss of a captain
37:13in the channel
37:14did not slow
37:15that company down.
37:17In a unit built
37:18out of interchangeable parts,
37:20removing one part
37:21does not stop the machine.
37:23It just makes it
37:24slightly smaller.
37:26That is half the answer.
37:28Here is the other half,
37:29and it is the half
37:30almost nobody talks about
37:32because it involves
37:34no gunfire at all.
37:35The problem with a sergeant
37:37learning something
37:37in a hedgerow
37:38is that the knowledge
37:40dies with him.
37:41Every army in history
37:42has lost its best lessons
37:44that way.
37:45A corporal figures out
37:46how to beat
37:47a particular German position,
37:48and two weeks later
37:50he is dead
37:50and the next corporal
37:51has to figure it out
37:52from scratch
37:53and pays the same price
37:54to learn it.
37:55The United States
37:56War Department
37:57decided to industrialize
37:58the fix.
37:59Starting in 1944,
38:01it published a series
38:02of pamphlets
38:03with a title
38:04that tells you
38:04the whole philosophy.
38:06Combat lessons.
38:07Rank and file in combat.
38:09What they're doing.
38:10How they do it.
38:11Not doctrine
38:12written by staff officers.
38:14Accounts collected
38:15from men at the front.
38:17How they cleared a bunker.
38:18What they did wrong
38:19the first time.
38:20What to teach a replacement
38:21in his first three days.
38:23Printed, bound,
38:25and pushed down the chain
38:26to company level,
38:27addition after addition,
38:29through at least
38:29nine issues.
38:31One sergeant's
38:32hard-won lesson
38:33in Normandy
38:34became something
38:34a sergeant
38:35in another division
38:36could read
38:36before he ever
38:37made the same mistake.
38:39And once the army
38:40had accepted
38:40that the useful knowledge
38:42was living down there,
38:43with the sergeants,
38:44there was one more step
38:45it had to take.
38:47It was a step
38:48that cut against
38:48everything a peacetime
38:50officer corps
38:50believes about itself.
38:52And by the end of the war,
38:53the army had taken it
38:54roughly 25,000 times.
38:5725,500.
39:00That is the approximate
39:01number of American
39:02enlisted men
39:03who were given
39:04battlefield commissions
39:05during the Second World War.
39:07Sergeants and corporals
39:08handed an officer's bars
39:10in the field,
39:11not because of a school
39:12or a degree
39:13or a board back home,
39:15but because somebody
39:16watching them fight
39:17had concluded
39:18they were already
39:19doing the job.
39:20At the end of the war,
39:22a board of officers
39:23reporting to the
39:24commanding general
39:25in Europe
39:25put the principle
39:26into one sentence,
39:27and I would ask you
39:29to read it twice,
39:30because it quietly
39:31demolishes a couple
39:32of centuries
39:33of how armies
39:34had chosen leaders.
39:36The one sure method
39:37of determining
39:38whether any individual
39:39has qualities
39:40which make him
39:41a successful leader
39:42in combat
39:43is to observe
39:44that man in combat.
39:46Now put the whole
39:47machine together
39:48and look at what it does.
39:50The Germans hunt
39:51American officers.
39:53They hunt them expertly,
39:55and they hunt them
39:56successfully.
39:57Seven in ten.
39:58Every lieutenant
39:59they kill
40:00opens a vacancy
40:01at the head
40:01of an American platoon,
40:03and the American army
40:04fills that vacancy
40:05again and again,
40:07not with another
40:0890-day graduate
40:08off a truck,
40:09but with the sergeant
40:11who has been fighting
40:11that ground
40:12since Normandy
40:13and has just spent
40:14the last hour
40:15proving he can run
40:16the platoon
40:16without anybody's help.
40:19Do you see it?
40:20The most effective thing
40:21the German army did
40:22to American small units,
40:24killing the men in charge,
40:26was also the mechanism
40:27that replaced
40:28green officers
40:29with experienced ones.
40:31Every successful shot
40:32accelerated the process.
40:35The Germans were not
40:36decapitating
40:36the American army.
40:38They were pruning it.
40:40That is the answer
40:41to the question
40:41this whole story
40:42has been building toward.
40:44An American squad
40:45that lost its officer
40:46did not slow down
40:47because the firepower
40:48was distributed
40:49across every man in it,
40:51because the purpose
40:52had been given
40:53to all of them
40:54and not just to him,
40:55because the knowledge
40:56lived at the bottom
40:57and got printed
40:59and passed sideways
41:00to everyone else,
41:01and because the man
41:02who stepped into the gap
41:04was, very often,
41:05better at the job
41:06than the man
41:07who had just fallen out of it.
41:09It cost 70%
41:11of the officers
41:12to build that.
41:13Nobody designed it
41:14on purpose.
41:15It came out
41:15of the meat grinder.
41:17Leonard Lamel
41:18got the distinguished
41:18service cross
41:19for what he did
41:20at Pointe du Hoc.
41:21He also got
41:22a battlefield commission.
41:23So did Walter Ehlers,
41:25the farm boy
41:26from Junction City,
41:27who ended the war
41:28as a lieutenant
41:29in the same army
41:30that had drafted him
41:31as a private.
41:32Which is how the story
41:34arrives at its final
41:35piece of ground.
41:36December 7th, 1944.
41:39Bergstein
41:40in the Hürtgen Forest
41:41on the German border.
41:42Six months after the cliff,
41:44and the 2nd Ranger Battalion
41:45is being asked
41:46to do it again.
41:48This time,
41:49against a bare,
41:50steep hill,
41:51numbered 400
41:52on the maps.
41:53The height that dominates
41:55the whole area,
41:56held by the German
41:58272nd Volksgrenadier Division.
42:01At half past seven
42:02in the morning,
42:0365 Rangers
42:04from Dog and Fox
42:06Companies
42:06crossed the start line
42:08and went up
42:09an open slope
42:10in daylight.
42:11Sergeant Bill Petty
42:13and a private
42:13first class
42:14named Cloyce Manning
42:16were among the first men
42:17from Fox Company
42:18to reach the top.
42:19And then the hill
42:21did what that hill
42:22was famous for.
42:23The Germans had
42:25every gun in the sector
42:26registered on that summit,
42:27and they brought
42:28all of it down at once,
42:30onto men in shallow scrapes
42:32in frozen ground,
42:33hour after hour.
42:36Somewhere on that summit
42:37was Lieutenant Leonard Lomel,
42:39the same man
42:41who had gone up a rope
42:41at Pointe du Hoc
42:42with a bullet in his side.
42:44He had an index finger
42:46nearly severed.
42:47He was bleeding
42:48from both ears
42:49from the concussion
42:49of the shelling.
42:51And he was the last officer
42:52left standing
42:53on Hill 400.
42:55Read that again
42:56and think about
42:57where this story started.
42:59At Pointe du Hoc,
43:01the officer never arrived
43:02and a first sergeant
43:03ran the company.
43:04On Hill 400,
43:06the first sergeant
43:07was the officer
43:08and now he was
43:10the one going down
43:11and the men
43:12who had to hold
43:13the hill
43:13were sergeants again.
43:16Petty took command
43:17of what was left
43:17of Fox Company
43:18until a lieutenant
43:19named Richard Wintz
43:21came up the slope
43:22with a working radio
43:22and took it from him.
43:24Petty himself
43:25was wounded
43:26and evacuated that night.
43:28By noon,
43:29the two ranger companies
43:30that had started
43:31that morning
43:32with 65 men
43:33could muster 32.
43:35They held the hill.
43:37I want to be very clear
43:39about what that is evidence of
43:41because it is the whole argument
43:42in one frozen acre.
43:45That position was not held
43:46by a plan.
43:48The plan was in pieces
43:49by the middle of the morning.
43:50It was not held
43:51by a chain of command
43:52because the chain of command
43:54had been shot to pieces
43:55twice over in a single day.
43:57It was held
43:58because at every point
43:59on that hill
44:00when the man in charge
44:01was hit,
44:02the next man
44:03had the same weapon,
44:04the same training,
44:05the same understanding
44:07of what the hill
44:07was for
44:08and no need
44:09to ask permission
44:10to keep doing it.
44:12That is not heroism
44:13as a personality trait.
44:15That is heroism
44:16engineered into a system
44:18by an army
44:19that had learned
44:19at appalling cost
44:21to put its intelligence
44:22at the bottom
44:23instead of the top.
44:25And there is one more
44:26thing to say
44:27about Leonard Lamel.
44:28But it is not
44:29a military thing.
44:30Decades later,
44:31long after the war,
44:32when historians
44:33finally came to him
44:34and asked him
44:35to explain
44:36what he had done
44:36in that orchard
44:37in Normandy,
44:38the guns,
44:39the thermite,
44:40the two sergeants
44:41alone at the deepest point
44:43of the American advance
44:44on the most consequential
44:45morning of the 20th century,
44:47he gave an answer
44:49that took the entire story
44:50and refused it.
44:52Nine words.
44:53And they explained
44:55the American army
44:56better than anything
44:57a general ever wrote.
44:58This was not
44:59inherent heroism,
45:00Leonard Lamel said.
45:02This was just
45:02plain common sense
45:04and good rangering.
45:05Nine words
45:07in that second sentence
45:08and the important one
45:09is the last.
45:11Rangering.
45:12Not courage,
45:13not destiny,
45:15not greatness.
45:16A trade.
45:17Something you are taught,
45:19something you practice
45:20until it is boring,
45:21something you can still
45:23do correctly
45:23while bleeding
45:24in a strange country
45:26with nobody left
45:27to tell you
45:28what to do next.
45:29That is the whole thing.
45:31The American army
45:33did not produce men
45:34who were braver
45:35than the men
45:35opposite them.
45:36It produced units
45:37where the trade
45:38was held
45:39by everyone in them.
45:41Go back to the cliff
45:42one last time.
45:43It is still there,
45:45largely as they left it.
45:46The French have never
45:48rebuilt the ground
45:48at Pointe du Hoc.
45:49The craters are still craters,
45:51softened by grass,
45:52and you can walk
45:53down into them.
45:54The concrete casemates
45:56still stand
45:57with their empty gun rooms
45:58open to the sea.
45:59The observation post
46:00at the tip of the point,
46:01where Rudder set up
46:02his command post
46:03with a hole in his leg,
46:05still looks out
46:06over the channel
46:06that brought them.
46:08You can stand
46:09at the cliff edge
46:09where a 24-year-old
46:11first sergeant
46:12pulled himself
46:13over the lip
46:13with a bullet
46:14through his side
46:15and looked down
46:16a hundred feet
46:17at a beach
46:17the width of a driveway.
46:20Two hundred and twenty-five
46:21rangers landed
46:22under that cliff.
46:24About ninety were still
46:25on their feet
46:25when relief arrived
46:26on June 8th.
46:28Leonard Lomel went home
46:29to Toms River, New Jersey.
46:31He went to law school
46:32on the G.I. Bill,
46:34practiced law in that town
46:35for the rest
46:35of his working life,
46:37married,
46:38raised three daughters,
46:39and served
46:40on the local hospital board
46:41and the college board
46:42and every other
46:43unglamorous thing
46:44a small city asks
46:46of a decent man.
46:47He almost never
46:49brought it up.
46:50When the historian
46:51Stephen Ambrose
46:53later called him
46:54one of the most
46:54consequential Americans
46:56of D-Day,
46:57second only
46:57to Eisenhower himself,
46:59Lomel was
47:00mildly embarrassed
47:01by it.
47:02He died in 2011,
47:05aged 91.
47:07Jack Kuhn,
47:08the man who stood
47:09in the orchard
47:10and covered him,
47:11and who could
47:11just as easily
47:12have been the one
47:13walking into the guns,
47:15went home to Pennsylvania
47:16and became a policeman.
47:19He worked his way
47:20up through the department
47:21and finished
47:22as a chief of police.
47:23He and Lomel
47:24stayed close
47:25for the rest
47:26of their lives.
47:27Walter Ehlers
47:28settled in California
47:30and spent more
47:31than three decades
47:32working for the
47:33Veterans Administration,
47:34looking after
47:35other men's wars.
47:37He talked
47:38to schoolchildren.
47:39He was asked
47:40about the Medal of Honor
47:41for 70 years
47:42and spent most
47:43of that time
47:44steering the conversation
47:45toward the men
47:46who did not come back,
47:47toward his brother Roland,
47:49above all,
47:50who was buried
47:50in the American Cemetery
47:52on the bluff
47:52above Omaha Beach
47:54in the eighth row
47:55of a plot
47:56under a white marble cross
47:57on ground
47:58his younger brother crossed
48:00on the morning he died.
48:02Bill Petty
48:03was carried down
48:03off Hill 400
48:05that December night,
48:06one more sergeant
48:07who had commanded
48:08a company
48:08without ever being
48:09given one.
48:11And the answer
48:12to the question
48:12we started with
48:13is smaller and stranger
48:15than most people expect.
48:16An American squad
48:18did not slow down
48:19when it lost
48:19the man in charge
48:20because the man in charge
48:22was never the only place
48:24the fight was kept.
48:25The rifle was the same
48:27in every pair of hands.
48:28The purpose
48:29had been explained
48:30to all twelve of them,
48:32not just to him.
48:33What one sergeant learned
48:35in a hedgerow
48:35was printed and mailed
48:37to a hundred thousand
48:38other sergeants.
48:39And when the vacancy opened,
48:41the army had learned
48:42to fill it from below
48:43with someone
48:44who had already proven
48:45he could do the job.
48:46Which meant
48:47the harder the enemy
48:48hunted the leaders,
48:49the more experienced
48:51the leadership became.
48:53They built an army
48:54that could lose its head
48:55and keep walking.
48:56It cost them terribly
48:58to learn it
48:58and they never quite
49:00said it out loud.
49:01And most of them
49:01went home
49:02and sold insurance
49:03and practiced law
49:04and never mentioned
49:05any of it
49:06at the dinner table.
49:07But it was there
49:08in an orchard
49:09in Normandy
49:10at nine o'clock
49:11in the morning
49:11on the 6th of June
49:12when two American sergeants
49:15who were not supposed
49:16to be there
49:16found five guns
49:18aimed at their own countrymen
49:19and did not wait
49:21to be told.
49:23Thank you for staying
49:24with this one to the end.
49:25If it was worth your time,
49:27a like genuinely helps.
49:29It is the main reason
49:30a story like this
49:31reaches the people
49:32who still want to hear it
49:33instead of disappearing.
49:34Subscribe and turn on the bell
49:36if you would like more of these
49:37because there are hundreds of them
49:39and most have never been told properly.
49:41And tell me in the comments
49:43where you are watching from.
49:44If your father, grandfather,
49:46or uncle served
49:48in the Second World War
49:49in any of the Allied armies,
49:51I would like to know his name
49:52and his unit.
49:53Put it below.
49:54Those names deserve
49:55to be written down somewhere
49:56and this is as good a place as any.