The stories of commitment and courage amid the chaos and terror of D-Day seem at least as relevant today as they were in 1944. Of course that comes as no surprise. War, in all of its horror, is a powerful laboratory. Whether we ever learn any of the resultant lessons remains an open question.
During my years at the Center I have spent moments now and then thinking about the fundamental difference between life as a soldier and life as a civilian. I have concluded that there is only one. Television and newspaper stories over past weeks describing landings on and behind the Normandy beaches clearly describe that difference. Soldiers are expected to die if necessary to accomplish the task at hand. Civilian commitment to the organizational mission is, appropriately, less complete.
It is remarkable given the trends toward individualism and self-satisfaction our society has taken over the past fifty years that concepts of basically idealistic, selfless service have survived. It is a tribute to something in our deeper culture that is not easily describable. I was reminded of this a couple weeks ago in a conversation with a colleague whose family does not have a tradition of service in the military. One of his sons serves in the Navy, and his shipboard duty station is below deck—well below the water line. He was describing to his father his duties in case the ship were hit by a mine or missile in his aft compartment. He said, “My job then is to quickly seal this compartment by closing the watertight hatch between us and the rest of the ship. I’d be inside and would have to go down with the ship.” Then his Dad said, “Well how do you feel about that!” And his twenty-year-old, a product of our materialistic and self-serving culture, replied, “That’s okay. It’s my job to save the ship.”
So, back to June 1944. It seems that there was a B-24 bomber named UMBRIAGO by its ten-man crew. The name was painted proudly on the nose, each crewman having chipped in five dollars to get the handiwork done right by some entrepreneur at an airbase in England. Our Greensboro, North Carolina, newspaper recently carried a story of the fiftieth reunion of this crew, which had flown fifty missions together under some perilous circumstances. All eight surviving members got together. Two interesting incidents of their days together in 1944 were included in the story. These stories were rich with leadership and commitment. In particular, they told of the leadership role of Jim, the host of the reunion, now wheelchair-bound. He was the waist gunner and assistant engineer. Returning from a mission, the pilot and commander (an old man of twenty years) announced that given the damage to the plane the crew had the option of jumping or staying. Jim said, “What are you going to do?” The pilot had replied, “I’m going to try and land this thing.” And Jim said, speaking for the crew—at least three of whom were senior to him in rank—“Then we’ll all ride it down with you.” On a later flight over Germany a senior commander had evidently given orders that on this particular mission the bombers could turn back if they saw enemy fighters. When one of the UMBRIAGO’s crew said he thought he saw enemy fighters and perhaps was thinking about making a case for turning back before reaching their target, the moral leader once again came up on the intercom: “He said if we saw German fighters we could turn back: He didn’t say if we thought we saw German fighters we could. We can’t turn back just because somebody thinks they see them!” And they didn’t turn back. Pure leadership, I say, does not rely on positional authority. However, most leadership taking place in organizations is entwined with the authority derived from organizational position. The optimal situation—which is what I suspect existed within this crew—is that both sources of authority, moral and positional, come into play in just the right mix.
During the first twelve hours on the beaches of Normandy on 6 June 1944 our Army took more casualties than it did in any twelve months of the Vietnam War. We have seen more clearly this year than we did fifty years ago how weather, human error, and German fortitude combined to turn Omaha Beach into a horrible killing zone. But what happened in the face of this was truly a decentralized, empowered event. There were instances of generals and colonels taking a heroic initiative here and there. For the most part, however, the beach assault was an unorganized mass of intermixed units with little or no functioning chain of command. Something took charge. Individuals moved forward, took initiative, took risks, and displayed awesome courage. Ad hoc teams formed on the beaches, and in fields and woods inland, where paratroopers had been scattered over the landscape miles away from their planned drop zones. A friend of mine, then a captain, landed way off course. He collected a dozen soldiers who had parachuted into the same area. This newly formed team had been without sleep for more than forty-eight hours, and during that time they were subjected to extreme physical and mental stress. In single file alongside a road, they heard a large formation of German infantry approaching in the twilight. The captain signaled to lie down and take cover, hoping to avoid detection. Thinking they might have to fight right there if discovered, he pulled the safety pin from a grenade and held the grenade in his hand, his arm cocked to throw, as he lay down. Many minutes later, he woke—with the grenade still clutched in his hand with the pin out! He and every member of his team were so exhausted that they fell instantly to sleep when they hit the dirt! Awakening, they resumed their mission and were among those causing terror and confusion to the enemy until linkup with the troops that had come ashore across the beaches.
Here we see initiative, persistence, commitment—from a group of people, ninety percent of whom had been relatively carefree civilians just two and three years before. The catalyst for such a remarkable performance must have been the shared value of a mission that was seen as worthy of sacrifice. Leaders must have been instrumental in building that commitment. The “building” phase of leading might have been even more critical to tactical success than was the leadership in the crucial “operating” period.
Business is not war. I object to military terminology being used in the corporate context. It trivializes the military vocabulary and debases the conduct of business. That said, obviously there remain lessons from the battlefield that are useful in leadership within the nonmilitary world. It is tempting to say that behaviors of prompt decision-making or stern admonishment or overwhelming charisma are the key lessons. But we know it is more sophisticated. Building essential informed commitment to the organization, a commitment that can sustain creative independent action, is the secret ingredient and the true legacy of great leaders.
[Originally published in Issues & Observations, Vol. 14, No. 2, 1994]