Posted on 02/25/2015 3:58:51 PM PST by Kaslin
Peleliu was a damn waste, too. A MacArthur boondoggle.
I posted a great Iwo Jima documentary the other night.
My father was in the Marines but did not fight on Iwo Jima--he was in the invasion of Okinawa which began April 1, 1945. My father is no longer living but a friend of his who also fought on Okinawa is going strong at 97. Time is taking its toll--in 12 years the youngest WWII veterans will be 100 years old, so we need to appreciate the ones who are still around while we can.
A few years ago I wrote an Amazon book review for the book, “Flags of Our Fathers”. After I wrote my review giving the book the highest possible score, I read some of the other reviews. What always stayed in my mind was one that said, “This is the best book I’ve ever read, it is the best book I will ever read”.
” Peleliu was a damn waste, too. A MacArthur boondoggle.”
It got my Navy Corpsman dad 2 PH’s, and a long life with physical pain.
My late father-in-law, Gunnery Sargent John “Jack’’ Scharffenberger, 4th. Marine Division was among the wounded. But it got him the hell out of there.
That’s why it’s important to make sure the younger generation knows this history and doesn’t forget it.
Make sure you kids or grand kids don’t go to public schools. They don’t teach history anymore.
My dad was on Iwo and Okinawa with the Air Corps after he left North Africa. He went to A-20 flight school in between and flunked out. He was a supply Sgt. He never saw combat.
His friends who saw combat were very envious of him.
There’d a modern school of though by which almost every tough battle should have been bypassed.
Peleilu is one, Iwo always comes up. And basically, we hit the Philippines because MacArthur said he would return.
But often missed is the cumulative effect of these battles in making the Japanese realize they were beaten. By some theories, we should have tricked them, bypassed everything, and just sailed right into Tokyo bay.
The casualties associated with an actual invasion of Japan were expected to be enormous. Anything that would help with the invasion and reduce those casualties was worth the risk and effort. Therefore, I don’t think one should criticize the decision to invade and conquer Iwo. But I certainly am glad I wasn’t the one who had to make, and live with, that decision.
One thing I still don’t really understand is why our bombardment of Iwo Jima and Okinawa and other places was so ineffective.
I guess you have to give the Japs credit for such formidable defensive positions but even a cave with zig-zag entrance, hundreds of yards deep would seem to be susceptible to 16 inch shells. I mean couldn’t they just block the entrances?
I know they couldn’t but like I said, I don’t understand why. I think America’s military leaders also could not quite fathom how they could withstand such heavy bombing and shelling.
Hindsight is always sharper and if we had known what would happen, I am sure we would have done some things differently.
If we learned one thing in that war it was you had to hit a hardened position right on the button to render it ineffective. The technology to do that just wasn’t there.
That’s true. Most people today don’t know what REAL war is.
Half of our country wanted to run from Iraq over 5k troops lost. We would easily lose that many on a single day, by Noon on some Pacific Island no one has ever heard of during WWII.
We aren’t the same country that we were back then. What’s sad, is I believe in the coming years we are gonna need to be....
“bypassed everything, and just sailed right into Tokyo bay.”
I have always thought that the thing to do would have been to blockade the Japanese islands, i.e., nothing in and nothing out and watch every last one of them starve to death and kill each other for blades of grass to eat until absolutely every one of them was dead.
Maybe that is too harsh.
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