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?
In: Other
Generally troops going into an operation or a mission will have a briefing beforehand. There they will go over relevant details and what specifically your unit is supposed to accomplish. For Saving Private Ryan their mission was get off the beach, secure the bunkers and areas up on the cliffsides to prevent them from hampering further landings.
Militaries have a “chain of command” through their ranks. Rank systems are different per branch of the US military, and different between militaries, so I won’t go into them here. But if you’re in a squad of 10 guys and your Sergeant gets killed, the next rank below him takes over until he’s given further orders from up the chain. Everyone knows where they stand in the hierarchy so it’s fairly easy to fill in the gaps as people are injured/killed. As another example: In “Band of Brothers”, Easy Company’s captain is killed during the landings into France. So Lieutenant Winters becomes “acting commander” of Easy Company until it’s formalized with his battlefield promotion to Captain later in the series.
Good example of a unit briefing, also in a good war movie, is the briefing scenes in Black Hawk Down, where each specific unit is told who is doing what and what to do in the event of a problem. That way everyone knows what they’re doing and to a certain extent what other guys are doing during the mission.
Latest Answers