The Need for Organisational Resilience - Chapter 1

While I was removing a bayonet and scabbard from a dead Japanese, I noticed a

Marine near me. He wasn’t in our mortar section but had happened by and wanted to

get in on the spoils. He came up to me dragging what I assumed to be a corpse. But the

Japanese wasn’t dead. He had been wounded severely in the back and couldn’t move

his arms; otherwise he would have resisted to his last breath.

The Japanese’s mouth glowed with huge gold-crowned teeth, and his captor wanted

them. He put the point of his kabar on the base of a tooth and hit the handle with the

palm of his hand. Because the Japanese was kicking his feet and thrashing about, the

knife point glanced off the tooth and sank deeply into the victim’s mouth. The Marine

cursed him and with a slash cut his cheeks open to each ear. He put his foot on the

sufferer’s lower jaw and tried again. Blood poured out of the soldier’s mouth. He made a

gurgling noise and thrashed wildly. I shouted “Put the man out of his misery.” All I got for

an answer was a cussing out. Another Marine ran up, put a bullet in the enemy’s

soldier’s brain, and ended his agony. The scavenger grumbled and continued extracting

his prizes undisturbed. (Sledge 2011, 119)

The end of the world scenario – Armageddon – is described in the book of Revelations

and refers to the final war between human governments and God. Worldwide conflagrations

with such loss of life invite such language. We can learn from what happens during war, a

conflict by land, sea, or air, carried on by force of arms between nations or between parties

within a nation. This book creates a discourse about what was ‘done’ without neglecting the

contextual conditions that ‘made’ both parties ‘do’ what they did. It seeks to investigate what

happened from a managerial perspective of organisational resilience – looking objectively

and straightforwardly at what led to one of the strangest military defeats in history. In other

words:

But if the Allies in May 1940 were, in the most respects, militarily superior, were not

badly led and did not suffer from demoralization (not yet, at least), what then accounts

for Germany’s six-week triumph? (May 2009, 7)

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