that he has not written with for the past 11 minutes. He is watching something he does not have words for. Below him, across a stretch of broken ground that the Americans have taken to calling the point, a Marine rifle platoon is assaulting a Japanese blockhouse. The blockhouse is reinforced coral and concrete, perhaps 8 ft thick on its seaward face.
It has two apertures, each covering a different approach. It has been designed, Falkenberg knows, by engineers who had studied the lessons of Pacific combat since 1942, to be essentially impervious to anything short of a direct artillery strike. The platoon has no artillery. Their supporting fire has shifted. Their lieutenant is down.
Falkenberg watched the man drop 3 minutes ago, caught by a burst from the northern aperture as he tried to move his second squad around the left flank. He writes nothing because what is happening in front of him does not fit inside any sentence he knows how to form. The platoon has not stopped. It has not gone to ground to wait for a replacement officer.
It has not sent a runner back for new orders. Instead, and this is the part Falkenberg keeps watching because he does not believe what his eyes are telling him, it has reorganized without a spoken command he can detect, without a radio call, with the lieutenant lying motionless in the white coral dust, the platoon has simply continued to become something.
A corporal has pulled two men into a shell crater on the right and is pouring rifle fire into the northern aperture, not trying to penetrate it, keeping the crew inside it from turning. Three men have disappeared around the southern face of the blockhouse entirely. Two men are moving with a satchel charge. Falkenberg closes his notebook.
He turns to the Japanese captain beside him, a man named Ushio who speaks passable German and has been assigned as his interpreter and escort. He asks in German a question so plain it takes Ushio a moment to understand that it is serious. He asks, “Who is giving those men their orders?” Ushio watches the Marines for a moment.
He says he does not know. Falkenberg says, “No, I mean, who replaced the lieutenant?” Ushio says again, quietly, that he does not know, that no one appears to have. Falkenberg looks back at the hillside. The satchel charge goes into the blockhouse aperture. The concussion comes a half second later. The rifle fire from the crater shifts without a signal to the southern face as the three men who had gone around come through the smoke into the blockhouse entrance.
The whole sequence, from the lieutenant falling to the blockhouse going silent, has taken less than 4 minutes. Falkenberg writes one sentence in his notebook. He will expand it into a full report 3 weeks later, which will be forwarded to Berlin, where it will be read by perhaps a dozen officers and then filed in a cabinet that the Soviets will capture in April 1945 and the Western researchers will not locate until the 1980s.
The sentence reads, “These men do not appear to require leadership in the sense we use the term.” This report, its full version seven pages, precise and almost bewildered in its clinical tone, is the document this story turns on. Falkenberg was not the only German observer in the Pacific theater during the war.
There were others, fewer than most histories acknowledge, technical advisers, liaison officers, the occasional Abwehr intelligence man moving through Japanese-held territory under diplomatic cover. Most of what they saw they reported through channels and the reports were absorbed into the vast paper machinery of a Reich that by 1944 had considerably more urgent problems than understanding the small unit tactics of an American Marine Corps that Germany was not even formally at war with.
But Falkenberg’s report was different, not because of its conclusions, other German observers had noticed versions of the same thing in North Africa, in Italy, eventually in France, but because of who Falkenberg was and what he had been trained to look for. Before the war, Werner Falkenberg had been a battalion commander in the Grossdeutschland Division, one of the Wehrmacht’s elite formations, the units that received the best equipment, the longest-serving officers, the most thorough application of German doctrinal thinking. He had fought in France in
1940, in the opening months of Barbarossa in 1941, and in the brutal defensive fighting around Kharkov in the winter of 1942 before a lung wound sent him first to a hospital in Vienna and eventually, by the bureaucratic accident that determined so many fates in wartime, into a liaison role he had not requested and did not particularly want.
He had been trained, in other words, in the finest military tradition on Earth. He understood what good small unit soldiering looked like because he had practiced it and commanded it for 3 years in some of the most demanding combat of the century. And what he saw on that hillside on Peleliu did not look like what he had been trained to recognize as good small unit soldiering.
It looked like something else, something without a name in his professional vocabulary. That absence of a name is what this investigation is about. If you want to understand what Falkenberg was watching on Peleliu, you have to go back not to the Pacific, not even to the Marine Corps training depots at Parris Island and San Diego where the men he was watching had been forged into something.
You have to go back to a decision made by the United States government in 1940, when the Marine Corps was still a force of roughly 28,000 men, smaller than the New York City Police Department, and a single institutional argument was about to be settled in a way that would determine how the Pacific War was fought. The argument was about what a Marine was for.
The Marine Corps had spent the years between the wars doing something that the larger army had mostly avoided. It had looked honestly at what the next war was likely to require of it and had tried to build the institution accordingly. The specific problem it had identified was the amphibious assault, the opposed landing on a defended beach, the movement from ship to shore under fire, the seizure of a position that the enemy had had months or years to prepare.
It was, by the military analysis of the 1930s, close to the most difficult tactical operation in existence. The British experience at Gallipoli in 1915 had demonstrated what happened when it went wrong. It went wrong catastrophically at enormous cost against a defender who was not even particularly well equipped. The Marine Corps studied Gallipoli carefully.
It produced in 1934 a document called the Tentative Manual for Landing Operations that would later be adopted almost wholesale by the United States Army and the navies of the Allied powers. The manual was a remarkable piece of institutional honesty. It said, in careful professional language, that an amphibious assault was a situation in which almost everything that military doctrine depended on, communications, command authority, unit cohesion, the ability to coordinate fires, would be disrupted or destroyed in the first
minutes of the landing. It said that the men going ashore would be on their own, not as an exception, as the baseline assumption. And it asked a question that most military doctrine of the era preferred not to ask. If a man is going to be on his own, if the chain of command is going to be broken by the moment he steps off the ramp, what do you put inside him before he goes so that the chain of command doesn’t matter? The answer the Marine Corps arrived at over the following decade was not primarily a doctrinal answer. It was
a selection and training answer. And it began with a proposition that would have sounded familiar to a Prussian general staff officer in 1860, though the Marines arrived at it from a completely different direction. The proposition was this, “Every Marine is a rifleman.” Not as a slogan, as a structural principle.
Officers and enlisted, cooks and clerks, pilots when they went ashore, every man in the Corps was trained first as an infantryman capable of taking a position under fire, and only secondarily as whatever his specific military occupational specialty required him to be. The reason for this was not tradition, though the Corps had a deep attachment to tradition.
The reason was tactical. In an amphibious assault, the specialist who could not fight as an infantryman was a liability the assault could not afford to carry. The radioman who went down on the beach was not just a casualty. He was dead weight if no one around him knew what he carried and how to use it.
The corpsman who survived when his platoon sergeant did not was useless if he could not also help the platoon continue to move. Every Marine rifleman. Every Marine a potential leader of whatever fragment of a unit remained functional. This principle had been stated and restated through the 1930s. By 1941, when the United States entered the war, it was the foundation of how Marines were selected and trained.
But a principle on paper and a principle in practice are different things. What turned the Marine Corps’s institutional philosophy into the thing Falkenberg observed on Peleliu was something that happened in the training itself, something that was difficult to write down in a manual because it was less a curriculum than a culture. And here is where we have to talk about a place called Parris Island.
Parris Island, South Carolina, a spit of tidal marsh and sand in the low country, connected to the mainland by a single causeway. The Marine Corps had been training recruits there since 1915. By the early years of the Second World War, it was processing tens of thousands of men a year through a training regime that had been refined over two decades into something that bore only surface resemblance to what the army was doing at its own infantry schools.
The surface resemblance was the drilling, the physical conditioning, the weapons qualification, the classes in map reading and field sanitation, and the proper maintenance of a rifle that had to function in salt water and coral dust and equatorial heat. Underneath that surface was something different. Marine boot camp in the early 1940s was by the deliberate design of the men who ran it an exercise in the destruction and reconstruction of identity.
The recruit who arrived was, by institutional intention, stripped of every assumption he had carried through the gate. His clothes were taken. His name was replaced by a number. His civilian habits, his civilian rank, his civilian sense of himself as someone with a history and a status and a set of options, all of it was systematically removed. German Wehrmacht did it.
The Imperial Japanese Army did it, more brutally than most. What the Marine Corps did next was unusual. Having taken the recruit apart, it rebuilt him around a specific and unusual proposition. Not that he belonged to something larger than himself, every military training system taught that. Not that he owed obedience to his officers, every system taught that, too.
The specific proposition the Marine Corps built its men around was this. The unit requires you to function when there is no one left to tell you what to do. It was taught directly, explicitly, without apology. In tactical exercises, squad leaders were routinely removed mid-scenario, and the remaining men were expected to continue the mission.
Officers would be designated as casualties in the first minutes of a training assault, and the NCOs would be told to handle it. NCOs would be designated as casualties, and the privates would be told to handle it. The point was not to teach every man to be a commander. The point was to prevent any man from using the absence of a commander as a reason to stop.
There is a distinction there that sounds minor and is not. The German Wehrmacht had a doctrine, Auftragstaktik, mission tactics, that explicitly instructed German officers to exercise initiative when orders no longer fit the situation. The doctrine was real, it was serious, it had been refined over more than a century, and at its peak, France in 1940, the early campaigns in Russia, it had produced tactical flexibility that no other army on Earth could match.
But Auftragstaktik was an officer’s doctrine. It was a doctrine about what captains and majors and senior NCOs were supposed to do when the situation changed. Its assumption, the invisible assumption embedded in the very structure of the doctrine, was that someone with rank and training and authority was still present.
The doctrine for what happened when everyone was gone, when the private in the foxhole was the most senior man alive in his immediate vicinity, was considerably less developed. The Marine Corps had built its entire institutional architecture around that specific scenario. Not because Marine Corps theorists were smarter than German General Staff officers.
The German General Staff was, by the professional consensus of military historians, probably the finest institutional military thinking organization that has ever existed. But because the Marine Corps’s mission, the amphibious assault on defended shores, made that scenario not a contingency, but a near certainty. The Germans could afford to think of leaderless privates as an edge case.
The Marine Corps could not. On a Pacific beach in 1942 or 1943 or 1944, the leaderless private was not an edge case. He was a Tuesday. And so the Marine Corps had spent a decade preparing for Tuesday in a way the Wehrmacht, for all its doctrinal sophistication, had never needed to. The specific Marines Falkenberg was watching on Peleliu were the product of something that had been tested and refined across three years of Pacific combat before they ever set foot on that particular island.
They had come through Guadalcanal, which began in August 1942 and lasted six months and was the kind of campaign that either broke institutions or rebuilt them stronger, depending on what the institutions were made of. They had come through Tarawa in November 1943, where the 1st and 2nd Marine Divisions suffered roughly 3,000 casualties in 76 hours taking an island approximately half the size of Central Park, and where the post-battle analysis was so unflinching in its assessment of what had gone wrong that it read less like an
official report than like an act of institutional self-examination. They had come through Cape Gloucester and Saipan. By the time they landed on Peleliu on the 15th of September 1944, the 1st Marine Division, the unit carrying the main assault, was perhaps the most combat-experienced amphibious assault division in the history of warfare.
But combat experience alone does not explain what Falkenberg saw. Plenty of experienced divisions, German divisions, Japanese divisions, became less tactically flexible as casualties removed their best men and institutional exhaustion set in. The 1st Marine Division had lost officers and NCOs at rates that would have degraded most formations.
What it had not lost was the structural principle that made officer and NCO presence less essential than it was in other armies. To understand why, we need to talk about the specific men who were in those squads on Peleliu. Not the institution, the men. The Marine Corps drew from the same country as the army.
The same draft, the same induction centers, the same pool of young Americans who had been raised through the Depression and were now in their late teens and early 20s being asked to fight a war on the other side of the world. But the Marine Corps, unlike the army, was still small enough in the early war years to be selective. It was not draft-free.
By 1943, it was receiving draftees, but it had maintained, even under the pressure of wartime expansion, a higher floor on who it took and how it trained them. More importantly, the Marine Corps had a reputation that functioned as a self-selection mechanism. The young man who specifically requested the Marines, and many did, was, on average, self-selecting for something.
Not for intelligence, necessarily, not for physical size, but for a particular orientation toward difficulty. The men who wanted to be Marines in 1942 and 1943 had generally heard what the Marines did and wanted to do it. That self-selection was not a guarantee of quality, but it was a systematic bias toward a certain kind of temperament.
The kind of temperament that does not wait to be told. There is a name that needs to be in this story. His name was Corporal Lewis Bausell. He was 20 years old, from Washington, D.C., the son of a postal worker. He had enlisted in the Marines in 1942, gone through Parris Island, and by September 1944 was serving with the 1st Marines on Peleliu as an automatic rifleman, the man who carries and operates the Browning automatic rifle, a weapon that weighs nearly 20 lb loaded, and that in 1944 Pacific combat was often the tactical center of a Marine
rifle squad. On the 15th of September, during the assault on a Japanese-held ridgeline that the official battle maps would later label Hill 60, Bausell’s platoon was held up by a Japanese position that was throwing grenades down onto the Marines below. A grenade landed among three of the men in Bausell’s section.
Bausell, without orders, without instruction, without a command from anyone above him, fell on it. He was awarded the Medal of Honor posthumously. The citation describes his action in the precise formal language that military citations use, which tends to make acts of radical self-sacrifice sound measured and deliberate.
They are not measured and deliberate. They are, in the most literal sense, instinctive. The instinct Bausell acted on, that the men around him mattered more than his own survival, was not placed there by Parris Island, though Parris Island had sharpened it. It was something he had brought with him.
The question that matters for this story is where it came from. And the answer to that question is the same answer, from a different angle, that explains the leaderless squads. It is not a military answer. It is a cultural one. The young American men who became Marines in the early 1940s came from a country that had spent a century and a half building a specific kind of character without entirely meaning to.
They came from small towns where the volunteer fire department was the social institution that mattered most in a crisis, run by men who had no formal authority and no salary and showed up anyway because someone had to. They came from farms where the teenage boy was the most capable person available for a job that would not wait for a more qualified adult.
They came from Depression-era households where the plan had failed and the family had improvised, and the man who figured out what to do next was the man who looked at the situation and acted, not the man who waited for permission. They came, many of them, from a tradition of physical labor that was essentially improvisational, construction work, agricultural work, mechanical work, in which the problem in front of you was yours to solve because there was no one else to solve it, and the consequences of not solving it were immediate and concrete. None of this was
unique to Marines. The army drew from the same country. The difference was that the Marine Corps’s training system had been built specifically to take this cultural raw material and weaponize it for the amphibious assault scenario, while the army’s training system had been built, at least initially, around a more conventional model of hierarchical command.
But the cultural raw material was there in both. It was there in the privates at Omaha Beach. It was there in the tank crews in the Normandy hedgerows. It was there on Peleliu. What the Marine Corps had done was recognize that it was there and build a training system that would make it tactically available under the worst possible conditions, conditions in which every formal structure of command had been stripped away, and the private with the rifle was the entire chain of command compressed into one man.
This is what Falkenberg was watching through his notebook on the hillside. He was watching the cultural raw material of 150 years of American improvisation organized and sharpened by three years of Pacific combat doing the thing it had been doing all along. Looking at the situation, identifying what needed to happen and doing it without asking anyone.
Not because no one was available to ask, but because the asking had been made unnecessary by everything that had come before the moment. The German observer’s confusion, registered in that flat seven-page report, was not confusion about the individual Marines. He was a professional. He could recognize courage and physical skill and tactical awareness.
He had seen all of those things in his own men and in the Red Army soldiers who had been killing Germans on the Eastern Front since 1941. What he could not categorize was the structural phenomenon. The fact that when the officer went down, the unit continued to function. Not degraded, not disoriented, not at reduced capacity waiting for new leadership, but adapted, differently organized perhaps, smaller in its immediate ambitions, but functioning coherently with apparent shared understanding of what it was trying to
accomplish. In the Wehrmacht’s operational vocabulary, a unit whose officer had been killed was a unit in transition. It was between commands. It was in the brief, dangerous interval between the death of one authority and the assumption of authority by another. During that interval, experienced German NCOs would maintain discipline and hold position.
But the unit’s capacity to make new tactical decisions was sharply reduced until someone with rank reasserted command. The German doctrine, Auftragstaktik, was theoretically designed to minimize this interval. A German sergeant who understood his officer’s intent was supposed to be able to continue the mission.
In practice, as Falkenberg knew from his own service on the Eastern Front, this worked reliably only at the level it had been designed for, company commanders and platoon leaders. The sergeant was expected to maintain, to hold, to defend. He was less reliably expected to adapt, to improvise, to make the kind of lateral move that the squad below him was now making on the hillside.
What he was watching was a unit that appeared to have no transition interval at all. The officer fell and the unit simply continued to evolve in response to the situation. Not because someone had assumed command, because command, in the sense the Germans used the term, appeared to be distributed across all 12 men simultaneously. Falkenberg would spend three weeks on Peleliu before his liaison assignment ended and he was evacuated on a Japanese submarine.
In those three weeks, he would write four more reports, each one circling back to the same observation from a slightly different angle. In his final report, written aboard the submarine heading north toward Japan, he used a phrase that would stick in the minds of the handful of German intelligence officers who read it before the file was captured and eventually translated.
He wrote that the Marines appeared to operate as if the knowledge of what to do next had been distributed into the men themselves, rather than held at any particular point in the chain of command. He wrote that this was, in his professional assessment, the most efficient tactical arrangement he had ever observed.
And then, in a sentence that the German intelligence officer reading it underlined twice, he wrote that he did not believe it could be taught. He meant it as an observation. It turned out to be very nearly the whole of the answer. To understand what Falkenberg meant when he wrote that the Marines’ tactical instinct could not be taught, you have to understand what the Japanese had tried.
Because the Japanese had tried, the Imperial Japanese Army, by 1944, had been fighting the United States Marine Corps for nearly three years. It had begun that fight with a set of assumptions about American soldiers, assumptions shared, as it happened, with the Wehrmacht, that had been systematically dismantled engagement by engagement, island by island, at enormous cost to both sides.
The Japanese military had watched the Americans on Guadalcanal. They had watched them on New Georgia and Bougainville. They had watched them on Tarawa, where the Marines had suffered casualties that, by Japanese calculation, should have broken the assault in the first hour and had instead produced a battle that lasted 76 hours and ended with the island in American hands.
By the time the Japanese garrison commander on Peleliu, Colonel Kunio Nakagawa, was planning his defense in the summer of 1944, he was not operating on the old assumptions. He had read the after-action reports. He had studied the patterns. He understood, at least in the abstract, that American small units had a capacity for continued functioning after officer casualties that Japanese small units did not reliably possess and that Japanese defensive planning had to account for this. His solution was architectural.
He abandoned the traditional Japanese tactic of the beachline defense, meeting the Americans at the waterline with massed infantry, in favor of a defense built into the island’s interior coral ridges. A network of caves, bunkers, reinforced positions, each one mutually supporting, each one designed to be held by a small garrison that could operate semi-independently when communications were cut.
He built, in other words, a defensive system that tried to replicate the distributed resilience he had observed in American offensive units. It was a serious and professional response. It cost the First Marine Division more than 6,000 casualties in a campaign that was supposed to last four days and lasted more than two months.
It is today studied in military schools as one of the most effective defensive preparations of the Pacific War. And it failed. It failed because the architectural response to distributed human resilience is not itself distributed human resilience. Nakagawa had built positions that could function after communications were cut.
He had not built men who could function after their understanding of purpose was cut. When a Japanese garrison in a cave complex was isolated, when the Marines had severed its connection to adjacent positions and the garrison commander was dead, the men inside the position defended it to the last man, as their training and their code required, but they did not adapt.
They did not look at the changed situation and reorganize themselves into something the Americans had not anticipated. They fought to the end of their orders. The Marines fought past the end of theirs. This is the distinction that Falkenberg had watched on the hillside and had struggled to put into words in his notebook.
It is not a distinction about courage. The Japanese soldier’s courage on Peleliu was, by every account of every Marine who fought there, of an order that defies ordinary description. It is a distinction about something more structural than courage and more difficult to manufacture than bravery.
It is a distinction about what a man does when the plan has ended and the situation has not. The Marines who were doing this, who were, in Falkenberg’s phrase, carrying the knowledge of what to do next inside themselves rather than at any fixed point in the chain of command, had not arrived at Peleliu knowing they would be tested in this particular way.
Most of them had not arrived thinking about doctrine at all. Most of them had arrived thinking about the heat, which on Peleliu in September was among the most severe any American force would encounter in the entire Pacific theater. The island sits just north of the equator. The coral reflects sunlight upward as well as receiving it from above.
The temperature on the ground during the assault phase routinely exceeded 115° F in direct sun. Heat casualties in the first week numbered in the hundreds before a single bullet had done its work. And yet, the assault continued. Not because the men had been ordered to ignore the heat, because the situation required them to continue and they had been built, by training and by culture and by the specific institutional philosophy of the Marine Corps, to let the requirements of the situation override everything else, including their own bodies’ protests. There is a
name for the place on Peleliu where this was most visibly true. The Marines called it the Umurbrogol Pocket. The Japanese called it by the name of the ridge system that formed it. Military historians now call it one of the most brutal pieces of real estate in the Pacific War. The Umurbrogol was a roughly square mile of coral ridges, sinkholes, and cliffs in the northern part of Peleliu that the Japanese had spent years turning into what their engineers called a killing ground.
The ridges were not high by any conventional measure. The tallest was perhaps 300 ft, but they were honeycombed with interconnected caves. Each one blasted deeper and reinforced with steel and concrete. Each one positioned to bring fire down on any approach. The Americans gave the individual ridges names. Bloody Nose Ridge, the Five Sisters, the Five Brothers, Walt Ridge.
Each name represented weeks of fighting and hundreds of casualties. The First Marines, the regiment that bore the heaviest part of the initial assault, was so badly damaged after the first week in the Umurbrogol that it had to be pulled from the line. Colonel Lewis Chesty Puller, the regiment’s commander and already a figure of almost mythological status in the Corps, sent a message to the division commander that has been quoted in Marine Corps histories ever since, though its exact wording varies by source. The message
said, in substance, that his regiment had done what it could and that there was nothing left of it to do more with. Puller was not a man given to understatement. The First Marines had taken nearly 1,600 casualties in five days. That was more than 50% of the regiment’s effective strength. What is relevant to Falkenberg’s observation, what connects the regimental-level destruction to the squad-level phenomenon had watched on the hillside is what the surviving Marines did in those five days, not the senior officers, the privates and the corporals
and the sergeants who were left. They did not stop, not because they had been ordered not to stop. In some sectors, they had no one left to give them orders, not because they had a clear plan. The Umurbrogol was, by the admission of the officers who planned the assault, a terrain that defeated planning almost immediately on contact.
The specific positions, the specific cave systems, the specific angles of fire, none of them corresponded to the pre-assault intelligence with enough accuracy to make a detailed plan survivable past the first hour. What the surviving Marines had was something the plan could not give them. A sufficiently clear understanding of what the situation required that they could generate their own next action without reference to any authority above them.
This is where Faulkenberg’s report becomes most precise and most useful. He had interviewed, through Ushiro’s translation, several Japanese officers who had observed the fighting in the Umurbrogol from positions inside the cave system. He asked them the same question he had asked himself on the hillside. When the Marine officers were killed, what happened to the Marines below them? The Japanese officers gave him variations of the same answer.
They said the Marines continued. One Japanese captain, whose name appears in Faulkenberg’s report as Tanaka, said something that Faulkenberg quoted at length because he found it remarkable. Tanaka said that he had expected, based on his training and his understanding of Western armies, that killing the Marine officers would reduce the effectiveness of the assault.
He said that this had not been his experience. He said that when a Marine officer was killed, the men around the officer appeared to absorb the officer’s function and distribute it among themselves. He used a Japanese word that Ushiro translated as scatter and reform. The way water around a stone in a stream divides and rejoins downstream without losing its direction.
Faulkenberg wrote, “This is the correct description. The unit does not stop at the stone, finds a way around it and continues in the same direction. The stone is the loss of leadership. The direction is the objective. The water is the men.” For a German officer writing a field report in 1944, it is a remarkably poetic sentence.
It is also militarily exactly accurate. The question Faulkenberg could not answer, the question his report asked without resolving, was where the direction came from. If the officers were dead and the chain of command had been severed, where was the shared understanding of the objective coming from? What was holding the water in its course? The answer was in the training, but not in the way that word is usually used.
It was not in the specific tactical training, the weapons drills, the movement techniques, the assault procedures. Those mattered, but they were not the source of the directional coherence Faulkenberg was observing. It was in something that had happened before any of that. Something that happened in the early weeks at Parris Island, in exercises that did not look like combat training and were not officially described as leadership development because calling them leadership development would have missed the point. The point was not to develop
leaders. The point was to develop men who did not need to be led. There is a distinction there that sounds like a paradox and is not. Leading and not needing to be led are different things. The first is about hierarchy, who is at the top of the chain of command. The second is about purpose, whether every man in the unit understands the purpose clearly enough to act on it without reference to the hierarchy.
The Marine Corps had built its training around a specific question that most military training systems of the era did not ask. The question was, “If every man in this unit above the rank of private is dead, can the privates complete the mission?” The answer the Marine Corps wanted was yes, not because it expected every private to demonstrate tactical genius, but because the alternative, privates who stopped functioning when their chain of command was severed, was operationally unacceptable in an amphibious assault where severing the chain of command was
among the first things an effective defense would attempt. To get to yes, the training had to do something that went beyond teaching tactics. It had to produce in every man a sufficiently clear internalization of the mission’s purpose that the man could generate his own tactical decisions in the absence of orders, and those decisions would be roughly consistent with what the man above him would have decided.
This is a very high bar. It requires not just teaching the what, the objective, the route, the phase line, but the why. Why this objective? Why at this time? What the taking of this position contributes to the battle that the taking of that position does not? Why the mission matters beyond the immediate tactical picture? The Marine Corps taught why, systematically, at every level.
Not just to the officers who received it in formal instruction at Quantico, but to the NCOs and, crucially, to the enlisted men in the kind of informal constant discussion of purpose that characterized the best Marine units and that was actively encouraged by the Corps’s institutional culture. A Marine private going ashore on Peleliu did not necessarily know the strategic rationale for seizing the island, the airfield, the flank security for the Philippines operation, the calculations of the Pacific Command that had decided this
island was worth the cost. But he knew his platoon’s immediate objective. He knew why that objective mattered to his company’s position. He knew what the company’s position contributed to the battalion’s mission. He knew because his sergeant had told him, and his sergeant knew because his lieutenant had told him, and the telling had been deliberate and systematic and had begun in training and continued through every briefing and every conversation in the days before the landing.
When the lieutenant fell on the hillside, the knowledge the lieutenant had carried did not die with him. It had already been distributed. It was already inside the corporal and the private and the automatic rifleman and the two men with the satchel charge. Not as an explicit plan, the plan was already obsolete, but as a clear enough understanding of the purpose that each man could generate his own version of the next step toward it.
The water knew which way was downhill. Faulkenberg understood this intellectually by the time he wrote his final report. He was a professional, and professionals who pay attention understand things even when those things are uncomfortable. What made his report remarkable, what made the intelligence officer who read it underline that final sentence twice, was that he also understood the implication.
The implication was this, the thing the Marine Corps had produced was not primarily a product of the Marine Corps. The Marine Corps had recognized it, selected for it, sharpened it, and organized it for tactical use. But the raw material, the orientation toward action in the absence of authority, the comfort with making decisions that had not been sanctioned by anyone above you, the instinct for the situation rather than the instinct for the order, that had come from somewhere else.
It had come from the same place the Army’s improvising sergeants had come from, and the tank crews in Normandy, and Carlton Barrett dragging wounded men out of the surf at Omaha. It had come from the country, and this is where Faulkenberg’s report diverges from anything the Wehrmacht’s own doctrine discussions had produced, because Faulkenberg was willing to follow the implication to its conclusion.
He wrote, in the sixth page of a seven-page field report that was supposed to be about small unit tactics on a Pacific coral island, a paragraph that has no military content whatsoever. It is a cultural observation. It reads, in the translation that was produced after the war, “The American soldier is not trained to act without orders.
He is trained to fight, and fighting without orders is something he appears to have been doing in some form since before he entered uniform. The society from which he comes appears to produce, as a routine output, men who are accustomed to the absence of authority and who have learned to treat that absence not as a problem to be endured, but as a condition to be used.
” He followed this with the sentence that the intelligence officer underlined. “I do not believe this can be taught because I do not believe it is learned. It appears to be assumed.” What Faulkenberg meant by assumed, what he was reaching for in the German, was something like absorbed without instruction, taken in without being taught, present in a man before any formal process has had a chance to place it there.
He was describing, in the precise clinical language of a professional military observer, the thing that the German generals at Trent Park had been trying to describe in their secret conversations. The thing one of them had called free free and then admitted he had been turning the word over in his head for a long time without finding a better one.
The Germans at Trent Park had watched it from the outside, across the battle lines, through interrogation reports and prisoner conversations. Faulkenberg had watched it close enough to smell the coral dust, close enough to hear the satchel charge go into the blockhouse aperture and see the smoke come out the other side, and he had reached the same conclusion.
The Americans were not doing something their training had given them. They were doing something their country had given them, and their training had made tactically available. There is a man who belongs in this part of the story. His name was Sergeant John Basilone. He had been born in Buffalo, New York, in 1916, the sixth of 10 children of Italian immigrants, and had grown up in Raritan, New Jersey, where his father was a tailor.
He had enlisted in the Army in 1934 at the age of 17, served three years in the Philippines, come home, worked briefly as a truck driver, and then re-enlisted in the Marine Corps in 1940. On the night of the 24th and 25th of October, 1942, on Guadalcanal, Basilone was a sergeant commanding a section of heavy machine guns, the water-cooled .
30 caliber Browning, a weapon that weighed more than 100 lb with its tripod and water jacket, and that in the right hands could sustain fire through an entire night. The Japanese assault that came at his position that night was a regimental strength attack. Several thousand men moving through jungle darkness against a thin Marine line.
In the course of the fighting, Basilone’s unit was reduced to two functional machine guns. The ammunition supply was exhausted. Communication with the rear was cut. What Basilone did next is described in his Medal of Honor citation, which is one of the longer ones in the record because there was a great deal to describe.
He carried ammunition through the Japanese lines himself. He repaired a jammed gun under fire. He held his section of the line with two weapons and a handful of men for the better part of a night against attacks that, by the official count, his unit could not reasonably have repelled. The citation says he fought with conspicuous gallantry.
That is the language citations use. What it means in practice is that for approximately 9 hours, John Basilone made a continuous series of decisions. Tactical decisions, mechanical decisions, decisions about where to be and what to do next without any instruction from anyone above him because there was no one above him, and the decisions were correct often enough that in the morning the line was still there. Nobody had told him what to do.
There was no manual that covered the specific sequence of events his section had experienced. There was no doctrine that addressed his particular combination of casualties and ammunition shortfalls and communication failure. There was just the situation and a man who had grown up in a household of 10 children and driven trucks and worked with his hands and spent 3 years in the Philippines learning that problems did not wait for solutions to be authorized, and who therefore looked at the situation and did the thing. He was
offered a commission after Guadalcanal. He declined it. He was offered a rear area assignment, war bond tours, which he performed, but he came back. He reentered combat and was killed on the beach at Iwo Jima on the 19th of February, 1945, in the first hour of the assault. He was 28 years old. The question Falkenborg would have asked about John Basilone, the question that runs through every page of his report, is the same question the German generals at Trent Park were asking about the men they had interrogated. Where did this
come from? What in the formation of this man produced the functional response to a situation that the formation had not specifically prepared him for? The answer is the same answer every time. Came from before. It came from a country that had spent a century and a half building men who assumed, not learned, assumed that the problem in front of them was theirs to solve.
By the time Falkenborg’s submarine reached Japan and his report was forwarded to Berlin, the outcome of the war in the Pacific was no longer in serious question at the level of German military intelligence. Germany had its own catastrophic problems. The collapse of the Eastern Front, the Allied advance from the west, the shortages of men and fuel and time that were compressing the Reich toward its final months.
His report was read by perhaps a dozen people. It generated two brief responses, both of which noted its observations as interesting and neither of which proposed any operational response to what it described. There was no operational response available. You cannot, in the middle of a losing war, rebuild the cultural foundations of your enlisted men.
You cannot, in the sixth year of a conflict that has consumed 3 million casualties on the Eastern Front alone, produce the kind of experienced, trusted, initiative-saturated NCO core that Auftragstaktik required and that the Wehrmacht had spent those years destroying. The doctrine still existed. The manual still said the same things it had said in 1933.
But the men the doctrine required, the sergeants and the corporals and even the privates who had been trusted enough and long enough that the trust had become reflex. Those men were in the ground from Moscow to Tunis to Normandy. What was left by the autumn of 1944 was the doctrine and the wreckage of the institution that had once made it real.
This is the symmetry that runs through the whole story. As the Wehrmacht’s capacity for distributed initiative was declining, consumed by casualties, by Hitler’s micromanagement, by the institutional damage of 5 years of total war, the Marine Corps’s capacity for the same thing was rising.
Each campaign had refined it. Each island had stripped away another layer of the formal hierarchy’s necessity and demonstrated again that the structure worked, that the water knew which way was downhill, that the private with the rifle could, in the absence of everyone above him, look at the situation and do the thing. By Peleliu, the refinement was nearly complete.
What Falkenborg watched on the hillside was the product of 3 years of institutional learning applied to a cultural raw material that the institution had not created but had learned to use. He could see the product. He could describe it with remarkable precision. What he could not do, as he admitted in that underlying sentence, was explain how to replicate it because replication would have required starting over.
Not with the training, with the country.