Posted on 06/11/2015 6:12:28 AM PDT by Kaslin
Seventy-one years ago, the British, Canadians and Americans landed on the Normandy beaches to open a second ground front against Nazi Germany.
Operation Overlord -- the Allied invasion of Western Europe -- proved the largest amphibious operation in military history, dwarfing even Xerxes' Persian invasion of Greece in 480 B.C.
Brilliant planning, overwhelming naval support, air superiority and high morale ensured the successful landing of 160,000 troops on the first day -- at a cost of about 4,000 dead.
Three weeks after the June 6 landings, nearly a million Allied soldiers were ashore, heading eastward through France. Hitler's once-formidable Third Reich seemed on the verge of collapse. On the Eastern Front, the German army was imploding under the weight of 5 million advancing infantrymen of Russia's Red Army. At the same time, Allied four-engine bombers, with superb long-range fighter escorts, at last were beginning to destroy German transportation and fuel infrastructure.
(Excerpt) Read more at townhall.com ...
He sure is
My pleasure
What does Selma have to do with WWII? *rme*
I ordered Killing Patton several month ago from Amazon and finally read it a month or so ago. Bill O’Reilly has another Killing book coming out in September, titled, “Killing Reagan” I am going to order that when it comes available
you know there are “Progressives” who believe that.
“Hardly. The Marines alone lost 7,000 men taking Iwo Jima.”
And the allies lost over 12,000 dead taking Okinawa.
I think it was the fault of the Amish
Only the last small chapter dealt with his mysterious death. In my opinion, he was clearly murdered.
What causes a person to be so despised ... both by their friends as well as their enemies?
I don’t read as much as I used to when I was younger and it always takes me a while to start reading a book
There are a few uncomfortable truths about Patton's wild run through France that we armchair generals tend to miss with the disadvantage of perfect hindsight. First, that even with a Channel port safely in hand and no other demands, that would have stretched the logistics train to the very limit. Patton used air assets to cover his flank for a reason: everyone else was running pedal-to-the-metal forward and even finding, much less keeping up with, the point of that spear was beyond anything but the most meticulous planning, which, since nobody (Patton included) expected that sort of astonishing success, we didn't and couldn't do. We had similar problems in Iraq in the second Gulf War, where we did have the luxury of planning but the troops simply exceeded even that. Second, and perhaps more important, Hitler simply was still in firm control and quite unwilling to even consider an armistice, much less a surrender, in the autumn of '44. Here was a fellow fully willing to allow entire armies to be cut off, surrounded, and die on the vine, rather than cede a single foot of ground, a policy he continued until the very end to the shock and dismay of such defensive experts as Manstein and Heinrici, who were quite capable of doing more with less but not everything with nothing.
In the end, Germany had to be crushed, not simply outmaneuvered, a prediction that Pershing had made in 1919. Hitler had to be killed, not defeated. The Nazis had to be hung, not offered an easy out. And sadly, people had to die to do that.
True, but the other comment specified the “south Pacific.”
Iwo Jima is 24.5 degrees north of the equator.
Or the third of five (so far) since WWII enabled the Cold War which spawned the War on Terror.
Great presentation, thank you, Oatka
Agreed but that was not what ricmc2175 was doing.
involved mainly U.S. troops and Navies (with some commendable help from the Australians),
The Chinese suffered 4-6 million military deaths in WW II tie-ing up a considerable portion of the Japanese army. The British and other allied troops had over 1 million men in Burmah and India. Slim's Fourteenth army wiped out the Japanese 15th army and reduced the Japanese 28th Army by half.
My father fought in that war and had little respect for the political general class.
As did my father who had little respect for any of the regular army generals. He believed that the people who won the war were the officers who enlisted early, rapidly made Colonel and did most of the detailed planning.
MacArthur, OTOH, not only learned from is mistakes but became a capable postwar administrator and a hero to the people he conquered.
I'm afraid you and I must differ on MacArthur. He handled the Japanese with kid gloves after the war such that to this day they do not acknowledge their role in starting the war and the manner in which they conducted it. Hirohito should have been hanged as a war criminal. An uncle spent a number of years in a Japanese POW camp. They were every bit as barbaric, if not more so than the German National Socialists. My main beef with Truman is that he didn't have another five A-bombs ( preferably one dropped on the Imperial palace in Tokyo) to really emphasize how upset we were.
True. However on a percentage basis I think you will find that the Marines lost a greater percentage.
Between who gains power and who gets bitter and angry most wars lay the seeds for the next war. It’s not like there was some grand period of peace before Napoleon showed up. If you want to start looking at the daisy chain of wars begetting wars you can probably track WWII all the way back to stuff in the Old Testament pretty quickly.
You need to remember that the “percentage” is misleading, the “percentage” removes all of the non-combat jobs that the Navy does for it’s Marines, while the Army includes both of those counts, rather than separating them.
Besides, why did percentages come up anyway? The Army lost men fighting in the Pacific alone, equal to the total WWII losses of the Navy and Marines combined, that is the history that people don’t know.
In another “brilliant” move, Ike would not let Patton take Berlin and gave it to Stalin. I know that it saved American lives by allowing the Soviets to take Berlin. However, the Germans would have not have put up as brutal a fight and would have surrendered much easier to the Americans than the Soviets. This also helped to ensure Soviet dominance in East Germany for the 40+ years.
Today, we have a strong and loyal ally in Asia which votes with us more often than even Canada does in the United Nations and other international forums. Japan is a check on China expansionism, a positive force for keeping stability on the Korean peninsula and the largest and most consistent contributor to U.S. military operations save only the U.S. taxpayer.
Burma and China were both sideshows to the main war in the Pacific which, while they tied up a lot of men and material, did not turn around until the Pacific War was won.
Unlike the Germans, the Japanese did not elect the military leadership which led their country to disaster. They took over in a coup. So yet another apology from a people who had little control over the situation would be empty and meaningless.
Finally, had your bloodthirsty "solution" been implemented, Japan would've been little more than a vassal state much more receptive to Russian or China's dominant interests than to ours.
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