This is Jockel Podcast number 283 with Echo Charles and me, Jockel Willink. Good evening, echo.

Good evening.

Jumping into combat lessons. We've done some combat lessons before. We've done volumes one, two, and three on this podcast.

I'm skipping ahead a little bit to volume seven. There's a section here that I kind of got, kind of got into.

These combat lessons were written during World War II with the explicit intention of disseminating lessons learned rapidly back to the troops to keep more guys alive and kill more enemy.

And you might think, and I started thinking, like, why am I reviewing this? Now, why am I reviewing number four? Why am I doing that? I'll tell you why.

Because I've never heard these lessons before. Think about that. I was in the military for 20 years, and I never heard these lessons before. There's something wrong with that.

There's something wrong with that. These guys, these are lessons written in blood in the hardest combat imaginable.

And they're not getting passed on. So I want to make sure I pass on these lessons. And you know what? Obviously, they're not just for combat.

You're going to see the translation to every situation that a human being in a leadership position can be in.

So combat lessons. The volumes are getting better. So the first one was kind of like a little bit. I'm not going to say it was haphazardly put together.

But now you got the full cover picture, you know, they're, if you're looking at this on YouTube, you got the cover picture up there. Combat lessons.

Combat lessons number seven, rank and file and combat. What they do, what they are doing and how they do it. The, the intro to this thing to this book comes from.

I'll just read it. Our armies in Europe have won their victory. So this is late in the war. Victory in Europe already. So now we're just fighting in the Pacific theater. Veterans of the campaigns of North Africa and Europe are now joining forces with the veterans of the Pacific for the final assault against Japan.

Can you imagine having that on the horizon?

You're, you're, you're thinking, okay, we're going final assault on Japan on the Japanese Empire. We're going to kill all of them because they fight to the death. That's what's about to happen.

They don't, they don't know anything about the atomic bomb yet. That's not even an option.

They've seen the Japanese fight to the death on island after island and now they're going to go and assault the Japanese island itself, the island of Japan. Back to the book, they are coming to grips with a foe quite different from the German soldier different as an individual fighting man and different in the tactics employed.

Even the most experienced soldier of the European battlefields will have much to learn humility. You imagine you get done with Normandy, D-Day, the Battle of the Bulge and you show up in the Pacific theater, you got a lot to learn kid.

Dang. We must now bring to bear against the Japanese all the experience we have gained in every theater. The suggestions made in combat lessons are drawn from such expert experience.

Since to be effective, they must reach the soldier promptly. Publication is not delayed to ensure that they always represent the thoroughly digested views of the war department.

The great combat lesson learned from every operation is the importance of leadership.

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