Leading by example

One of the great challenges in life, is knowing when to lead and when to follow.

In the Israeli army, commanders are trained to lead by example. Many attribute this concept to the battle for Latrun in 1948.

Latrun sits on a hilltop commanding the entrance to the valley leading to Jerusalem.

In 1948, when Israel was fighting its War of Independence, the British handed control of this fortress to the Jordanian Legion, and Israel faced the impossibility of taking this fortress from below.

To compound this situation, most of the Israeli men fighting in this battle were refugees fresh off the boats from the DP camps and the horrors of Europe. They were barely soldiers; when they arrived,they were asked to volunteer, taught how to hold a rifle, shoot a few bullets, and sent to the front lines.

Many could not even speak the same language as their commanders, let alone function as a cohesive unit, and soon found themselves completely overwhelmed, under the expert guns of the British-trained Jordanian Legion.

So what do you do if you are an officer charged with taking such a hilltop, commanding men who do not understand what you are saying, and have no idea of what you want from them? You lead by example. And so, somewhere beneath the fortress of Latrun, overlooking the ancient battlegrounds of Joshua and David, a single anonymous officer, overcome with emotion and frustration, no longer able to watch his new recruits being cut to pieces by the Jordanian gunners, rose and cried out: “Acharai!” “After me!

And as one, these men with no military training and no army experience whatsoever, followed their officer up that hill.

Much more important than the battle itself, this philosophy of officers leading by example, became one of the backbones of officer training in the Israeli Army. But there is a terrible price for this philosophy, and the Lebanon war is a good case in point.