It’s a common enough trope in fiction: A large military unit is hit by a successful decapitation strike, leaving the only surviving officer (and hence new commander) as someone very junior who was late to the officers’ meeting or something, who ordinarily wouldn’t be in charge of a unit anywhere near that large. Most recently, I saw this in Cursor’s Fury, by Jim Butcher (where a third subtribune ends up as captain of a legion), but I’m sure I’ve seen it elsewhere. Now, history is long and wide, so I’m sure that something like this has happened before, but how often?
And then, of course, ordinarily, if something like this happened, you’d expect the junior officer’s first priority would be to head back to base, or somewhere else where more senior leadership could be found. But as seen in fiction, of course, the typical situation is that there’s some major threat that only that unit is in position to deal with, and so the inexperienced new commander presses on with the mission, and through a combination of bravery, natural talent, and luck, leads his troops to a resounding victory against all odds. Has that ever happened, to a junior officer suddenly in command way over his experience level?
On November 13, 1942, during the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal, Japanese gunfire killed Rear Admiral Daniel J. Callaghan[3] and his staff, including Captain Cassin Young and all other officers on San Francisco 's bridge, except Lieutenant Commander McCandless, who took the conn for the rest of the battle.
There were earlier ones, I will try to find them. I pretty sure in the age of Wooden Ships and Iron Men, a new Ensign ended up in change of a warship. @Elendil_s_Heir probably knows who I mean.
When Alfred Pleasonton was made a major general in the Union army, he selected from among his aides for aggressiveness for three brigade commanders. Two already had command experience, but George Custer, a 23 year old captain, was jumped to brigadier general on aggression alone.
The answer depends on how you define “junior” and “large unit”. It’s not too uncommon for a 2LT to take command of company-sized elements. IIRC, just as one notable example, Audie Murphy did it multiple times during WW2.
Not at all. Junior officers are expected to be able to assume command authority at any time without warning. It’s a common scenario in training exercises where the reviewer will “kill” the commander at the outset of the battle, unexpectedly throwing a junior officer into a command role to evaluate whether the unit has prepared for this contingency. Loss of command is obviously not desirable, but it’s to be expected, since command posts and TOCs are among the highest priority targets for artillery and airstrikes.
As far as a jump from an extremely junior officer commanding a very large unit, I’m not really sure about that. But consider that if (for example) a decapitating strike took out the entire command and staff of a brigade-sized element, the 2LT is at the end of a long line of LTC, MAJ, and CPT who ought to take command first.
If there’s been a total loss of every brigade, battalion, and company commander, resulting in a 2LT assuming command of a brigade, then most likely the remnant is not combat-effective, and their first priority would likely be requesting medical evacuation to a facility capable of handling large numbers of radiation casualties. But that wouldn’t be solely to find a “qualified” commander, it would be because the entire unit needs to be reconstituted.
ETA: Looking at other responses, it seems this is much more common in navies, which isn’t too surprising given that the command structure of a boat can’t be as physically dispersed as land forces can be.
Chesapeake had taken taken terrible casualties in the initial exchanges of fire, and both of the ship’s regular lieutenants were down hors de combat. The US commander Captain Lawrence was then mortally wounded.
The ship’s “extra lieutenant”, William Sitgreaves Cox was the last officer on the ship. He was a personal acquaintance of Captain Lawrence and carried him belowdecks, staying with him in his final moments.
Unfortunately, that meant that the commander of the ship wasn’t at his proper post commanding.
He was court-martialed for dereliction of his duty as commander in leaving abovedecks to see to Lawrence, although the conviction is largely considered a scapegoating action by the US government to cover up one of the more notable losses of a US frigate (which generally had surprisingly good success against the Royal Navy in that conflict).
William Sitgreaves Cox was an acting lieutenant aboard the USS Chesapeake during the War of 1812. He took the wounded and dying captain below deck and was unaware that the other officers were rapidly killed, leaving him unwittingly in charge.
Cox returned to the deck i time to see the ship being boarded and took appropriate action, but the ship was taken. He was exchanged later, but in 1814 he was court-martialed for dereliction of duty.
i know of the case because Robert Heinlein speaks of it at length in Starship Troopers as an example of what can happen. However, Heinlein says that Cox’ conviction stood. It had been cleared by an action of Congress in 1952 and one by Harry Truman.
Heinlein might have known about it because of Annapolis lore, or because Theodore Roosevelt mentioned it in his book on the naval war of 1812, where he condemned Cox, saying that he acted “basely”, until members of Cox’ family complained.
Dick Winters became CO of Easy company when the original CO’s plane was shot down as the company was jumping into Normandy. As said, it depends on how you define junior officer and large unit. But he was the XO, still must have been weird to get the job that way.
Couple of questions about this. First, even if it’s literally just the officers who are killed (for instance, with a precise or lucky artillery strike on the commander’s tent during an all-officers meeting), wouldn’t the loss of essentially all of the officers still be a major liability to the unit’s combat effectiveness?
Second, does “radiation casualties” mean anything other than what it looks like it means? It looks like you’re assuming that a nuke is the only way that such a catastrophe could happen, which seems implausible to me. Remember, my question refers to all of history, not just the modern era.
Does it have to be military? How about like a kid, legally unfit for duty, bravely assuming command of the wheel and bringing the schoolbus to a safe stop when the driver loses consciousness?
Since the original question has been answered and we may now riff a bit, may I just add that I know about a draft dodger, not even a combatant, and one who clearly disrespected the military as fools or worse, was suddenly elevated to being commander-in-chief of his entire nation’s army. Does that count?
In addition, that sort of thing probably happened more often amongst paratroopers, but for a different reason than in the navy: dispersal of officers rather than concentration. You wanted paratroopers to act with faster-than-average quickness to take advantage of surprise, but their officers were likely to be even more randomly scattered and hard to find than usual due to the vagaries of the drop process. If I recall correctly, upon a jump their orders were to form ad hoc units if their units had been dispersed too far to be in contact with a coherent command structure.
It’s OK to joke a bit once an FQ thread is under weigh a bit. It’s very much not OK to try to hijack a completely unrelated thread into political potshots. This is an official Warning for politicking in FQ.
Very much this. Officers are expected to be able to assume immediate command of their parent unit in the event that the commander of their parent units is killed or incapacitated. And the level above that. And above that if and as needed. A junior officer who decides it’s his duty to either take his unit and head back to base or abandon his unit leaving it under the command of his subordinate while he goes looking for a higher-ranking officer to tell him what to do is very likely going to be finding himself facing a firing squad for desertion and/or cowardice.
Or more properly when they were dispersed. The only two Allied airdrops in the ETO that didn’t result in incredibly scattered drops were the ones conducted in daylight, Market-Garden and Varsity. The average drop error in Normandy for the US 82nd and 101st Airborne divisions was in the realms of 5 miles. Average. These are the drop zones and actual drop locations for D-Day, the ovals with letters in them are where each regiment was supposed to drop. All of the individual dots are where a ‘stick’ (planeload) actually dropped. Take note of the arrows on the edge of the maps noting how many miles off of the map some sticks were dropped.
No doubt, but as I said it’s a trained-for contingency. Every subordinate officer should be able to take over for their superior, and there should be a roughly 3:1 ratio (at least) of subordinates. And don’t forget that they still have comms, they can still send and receive orders and information. It would surely be a disruption, it’s definitely not ideal, but war-planning is all about operating in less-than-ideal conditions.
In the scenario I described, I was talking about a total loss of all commanders at the platoon, company, battalion, and brigade level. These would typically never all be found in the same place, they’d be commanding their own units, widely dispersed. Unless they had all unwisely concentrated in some big meeting, the only thing that could take them all out would be a nuke (and not a small one, either). So in that scenario, loss of command is the least of your worries, at that point the mission becomes collecting the remnants and getting to safety. Yet even in that situation, someone needs to take command, and someone will.
I would say that doesn’t count because a company is not considered a large unit and having the XO take over is pretty much just another day at the officer during combat. That’s one of the main functions of the XO and why there is always planned physical separation of those two officers so the chances of both being taken out at the same time are smaller.
