eli5 How do military units navigate chaos and maintain direction when faced with casualties, especially if the commanding officer is killed, as depicted in the opening scene of “Saving Private Ryan”?

Question

Recently I watched “Saving Private Ryan” again, and it made me have some questions. For example, in the opening scene of soldiers rushing to the beach, most of the soldiers were almost dead before they even got out of the landing craft. If the commander was also killed, what about the remaining soldiers? Who should direct the people? How should each unit perform the tasks assigned before departure?

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Answer 1

That depends on what kind of unit you’re talking about. In many less professional militaries, including European militaries really up to at least mid-way through the First World War, the answer is basically that they would continue up to the point where they ran out of commands, or commanding officers, or supplies, or some combination of all three of these, and then stop wherever they’d made it and wait for someone senior enough to arrive and fix things up.

In modern militaries, including in the scenario you’re talking about, people have been extensively briefed on what they, their superiors, and their subordinates are expected to do. They’ll have run through the plan multiple times in training exercises, both on maps and in real-life simulations. (One of these exercises in Britain, for the people on Utah Beach — whereas Saving Private Ryan was set on Omaha Beach — ran into disaster when a German patrol boat chanced on the landing craft in the middle of the exercise.) Everyone will be expected to know how to take charge of the men under them, or replace the men over them, in the event of casualties. They’ll be expected to know whatever the relevant objectives are for their unit, and the multiple contingency plans for achieving that objective, and how to signal up the chain that they’ve either succeeded or run into serious trouble and failed.

Real life is inevitably chaotic and doesn’t go according to plan, obviously, but unless order has totally broken down, the reality was almost always *less* chaotic than portrayed in many Hollywood movies. All those strictly regimented chains of command, protocols, etc., that you see army cadets and people in boot camp sweating through are there for a reason: so that when things start to fall apart, people have something they know and can fall back on.