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To: silverleaf
"What a terrible intel failure"

Not an "intel" failure!
It is the usual "fog of war"...

There are many hundreds of American sailors sleeping at the bottom of Iron Bottom Sound or were injured as a result of "friendly" fire resulting from the American Navy's night-battle incompetence...

There many other POW transports attacked or sunk by friendly fire...
One, off the coast of Portugal. was attacked by an American bomber AFTER a German U-boat captain had negotiated a truce to allow the allies to save the allied survivors...
The Italians (Germany's principal ally) lost about 2000 POWs when a German sub sank a transport ship off the coast of Africa...

Throughout the war in the South Pacific, intel had many major victories, while friendly fire (unrelated to intel) on both land and sea was common and cost thousands of American, Australian, Indian, Chinese, and British lives...

18 posted on 04/22/2023 12:23:27 PM PDT by SuperLuminal (Where is the next Sam Adams when we so desperately need him)
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To: SuperLuminal

If the Australians/allies had no human or signals intel and info sharing with the allies on the disposition of over 1,000 POWs ….along with civilian authorities and captured merchant seamen from their captured outpost…then it was a failure. That was a lot of people to lose track of. Just not a priority.

Did the Japanese attempt to conceal this large human transport of 1100 Australians on a merchant ship? They also paid the price.


21 posted on 04/22/2023 12:39:02 PM PDT by silverleaf (It’s not propaganda just because you disagree with it. )
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To: SuperLuminal

The losses on the Eastern Front dwarf anything else during WWII. The 1943 Battle of Kursk was horrendous. I have a Soviet book, a compilation of Soviet historians and generals descriptions of the battle that involved more than four million troops on both sides, over 69,000 field guns and mortars, 13,200 tanks and self-propelled artillery, and upwards of 11,000 aircraft.

The Germans lost about half a million officers and men, 1,500 tanks , 3,500 field guns and 3,700 aircraft according to the Soviets. Other estimates place German losses about a third of that. Soviet losses were estimated three times the Germans.

It is difficult to comprehend the scale of the battle. Kursk is in Russia not far from the Ukrainian border.


28 posted on 04/22/2023 1:25:44 PM PDT by kabar
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