Absolutely, that is a great case in point.
And that is not a knock on those older men because there is a reason war is primarily fought by young men. It takes stamina and resilience. Now that I am an older guy, I understand that better.
One of my favorite passages of script from one of my favorite movies (The Caine Mutiny) illustrates it well. The crew is celebrating their victory in court in which the charges of mutiny agains them were dropped because CDR. Queeg famously went to pieces in courtroom with his marbles in hand, and their defense attorney, LT Greenwald, drunk, walks into their victory party uninvited:
LT GREENWALD: Well, well, well. The officers of the Caine in happy celebration.
LT MARYK: You're kind of tight.
LT GREENWALD: I've got a guilty conscience. m I thought the wrong man was on | trial, so I torpedoed Queeg for you. I had to torpedo him. And I feel sick about it.
LT MARYK: Take it easy.
LT GREENWALD: When I was studying law, and Mr Keefer was writing his stories, and Willie was tearing up the playing fields of Princeton...who was standing guard | over this country of ours? Not us. We knew you couldn't make any money in the service. Who did the dirty work for us? | Queeg did, and a lot of other guys. Tough guys who didn't crack up like Queeg.
ENS KEITH: But no matter what, Queeg endangered the ship and the lives of the men. He didn't endanger any lives. You did. A fine bunch of officers.
LT MARYK: You said yourself he cracked.
LT GREENWALD: That's a very pretty point. I left out one detail in court...it wouldn't have helped our case. At one point, Queeg came to you for help, and you turned him down.
LT MARYK: Yes, we did.
LT GREENWALD: He wasn't worthy of your loyalty. So you turned on him. You made up songs about him. If you'd been loyal to Queeg, do you think all this would have come up? I'm asking you, Steve. Would it have been necessary to take over?
LT MARYK: It probably | wouldn't have been necessary. If that's true, we were guilty.
LT GREENWALD: You're learning. You don't work with the captain because of his hairstyle but because he's got the job, or you're no good. The case is over. You're all safe. It was like shooting fish in a barrel.
And the military looks out for its own, its image, and its reputation. They won't be in the least sympathetic unless your rationale for disobeying is airtight, and even then, you are more likely to suffer a severe fate than not.
In the end, that amazing novel and movie were not about a mutiny. They were about leadership.
In this example, as LT Greenwald said, while Keith was playing football at Princeton and Keefer was writing his novels in the months and years leading up to Pearl Harbor, Queeg was on a destroyer in the North Atlantic at real, undeclared war with Nazi subs, who were absolutely out to kill him. By the time he was assigned to the Caine, he was tired, and he finally cracked under the pressure as a lot of good and decent men do in war.
Even young men.
When I was younger, I didn’t like that movie, but I rewatched a few years ago and it really hit home. Yeah, you are supposed to not like the Capt from the start, but the ending really made the whole thing make sense.
The book reveals a lot the movie didn’t.
Keefer, went on to command a ship and froze just like Queeg did.
Basically, when Keefer was ‘diagnosing’ Queeg, he was really diagnosing himself. He always chickened out.
Yup, e.g. the US sub fleet was small, and the new commander of the fleet got the job in large part because he wanted to start right away attacking the Japanese freighters, to start starving their armed forces of needed supplies, rather than try to take on their naval vessels which were fast and loaded with depth charges.
The US figure for sunk tonnage was something like 8 million tons (thanks to the need for verification), while the Japanese figure was actually 11 million tons. It wasn’t all due to our silent service, but a lot was. Parshall said the overall campaign against their shipping was so effective that by 1944 it got difficult to find stuff to sink.