This is Jocco Podcast number 84 with Echo Charles and me, Jocco Willink. Good evening, Echo.

Good evening.

Gentlemen, your life expectancy from the day you join your battalion will be precisely

three weeks.

The florid must-stashed major who addressed us at the small reinforcement camp a few

miles from Bayou obviously had misplaced, had a misplaced sense of humor or he should

have been sacked.

On second thought, he definitely should have been sacked.

Not that any of the dozen infantry subalterns took the slightest notice of what to us

with a ramblings of an old fool. He was probably no more than 40.

The fourth battalion, the Somerset Light Infantry, was in 129 Brigade and was a pre-war territorial

army battalion with close links with Bristol and Bath.

In the United Kingdom, till late June 1944, it was a close knit unit which had almost been

decimated within a period of 48 hours.

On 5th of July, three officers and 62 other ranks were required as reinforcements.

In the 14th and 18th of July, a further 12 officers of whom I was one and 479 other

ranks arrived and even then the battalion was still below its full strength of 36 officers

and nearly 700 NCOs and men.

This will give some idea of the appalling level of infantry casualties which had to be accepted

in order to enlarge the slender and vulnerable Normandy Beachhead.

Because I had the previous experience of six-pounder anti-tank guns, the commanding officer,

Lippie, Lieutenant Colonel CG Lipscomb, posted me as second in command to the battalion's

...